Observatory Theatre has announced their 2025 season, including two mainstage productions and two new works in development through their Telescope New Writing program, which commissions up-and-coming playwrights to make their big, bold and ambitious concepts a reality on stage.
Disney Off Ice
28 Feb – 9 March
Studio1, Yeerongpilly
After decades frozen in the cryonic tank of urban legend, Walt Disney is feeling refreshed and ready to make his mark in the new world. But times have changed. The theme parks are gone. And it’s not such a small world after all. Now, he finds himself the property of a media conglomerate and at the heel of a strict publicist determined to set him straight. Welcome to the future, Disney!
Oliver Gough’s Disney Off Ice returns, a terrifically absurd lampoon of the man, myth and legend.
Octopolis
May 14 – 24
PIP Theatre, Milton
Meet George: professor, octopus expert and…professional hermit? Her most intimate relationship these days is with the clever Frances, an octopus she obsessively studies. Never leaving her cloistered university accommodation, George is content with sunrise yoga and not checking her inbox.
Enter Harry: an anthropologist with big theories and even bigger ambitions. He’s French and a Doctor, so he’s a pretty big deal. His latest idea? A groundbreaking new theory about Frances that could change George’s world forever…
Sparks fly, tanks bubble, and somewhere between the academic rivalry and tangled tentacles, the two of them might just uncover something new about themselves, Frances, and humankind itself.
Telescope New Writing
The Telescope New Writing program gives life to new plays that are experimental, inventive and imaginative in their style, form, themes and topics. We throw all ideas on the table and make that happen on stage. The program supports writers to create work that they may not be able to anywhere else.
In Development in 2024:
The Princesses In the Tower (working title) by Sophie Wickes
Commissioned through the Telescope New Writing Program.
What would teenage princesses do if their uncle had their parents murdered to reclaim the crown, opened the gates for Nazi domination across Europe, and locked them in a tower? They would seek violent revenge. Duh. The Princesses in the Tower is a darkly comedic, feminist revenge tragedy set in an alternate 1944 Britain, where King Edward VIII rules as a Nazi puppet and the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret are held captive in the Tower of London, unaware of their uncle’s role in their parents’ deaths. The play is a sharp tale of sisterhood, vengeance, and the brutal cost of survival under fascism.
The play was first developed in 2021 as part of Sophie’s Honours project. Her research explored the masculine legacy of the revenge tragedy in contemporary theatre and argued there is space for female voices to re-vision the genre with nuance and power. Sophie is excited by the prospect of re-developing this play with freedom to explore its scope without limits. She is also very interested in expanding upon themes that feel disturbingly relevant in our current political climate.
Ouroboros (working title) by Jules Broun
Commissioned through the Telescope New Writing Program.
Ouroboros (pronounced oo-ruh-bo-ruhs) centres around the matriarchal noble class in a neighbouring galaxy not-too-far away from ours in a not-too-distant future. Heightened, dramatic, comedic and uncomfortable, relationships and power dynamics are explored and challenged in this misandristic – utopia?
Ouroboros is inspired by current conversations about feminism/equality and the manosphere, and the global trends of democratic backsliding and rises in totalitarianism and autocracy. Following her recent work Famished Future Feeders, Jules returns with sharp banter, eccentric characters, and visually … striking (gruesome!) staging as she outlandishly toys with futurism while tackling topics only too relevant today. Taking inspiration from popular media, Jules has been brain-rotting on A Song of Ice and Fire fanfiction for the past three years and wrote part of a scene directly after rewatching the pilot episode of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.
To read more about the 2024 season, and to book tickets, visit the Observatory Theatre website
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