Arts Centre Melbourne

We on the affirmative team contend that taking a high school debating tournament, making feminism the topic of discussion and turning it all into a play is a recipe for a fascinating night of theatre.  This will be the fourth year in a row that Trophy Boys has played to local audiences, following sold-out seasons at La Mama in 2022, fortyfivedownstairs in 2023 and Arts Centre Melbourne in 2024. This time around, the dark drag extravaganza is playing once again at Arts Centre Melbourne’s Fairfax Studio from August 12-24. Tickets range from $30-60 and you can get yours here. Read on for Time Out Sydney's five-star take on the 2024 Sydney run of Trophy Boys. *** If you had asked me what I thought the next canonical Australian text would be before I watched Trophy Boys, I certainly wouldn’t have pegged a play that features a sign boldly emblazoned with the words “Feminism has failed women” set against a backdrop of portraits of “powerful women leaders”. (Jacinda Ardern, Rosa Parks, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Malala Youzafi and Grace Tame are accounted for, to name a few.) And yet, with this hilariously profound production, Trophy Boys proves that a provocative and unexpected approach can pay off handsomely.  We are introduced to a gang of four private school boys from the fictional Saint Imperium College as they strut into a classroom with the kind of boisterous raucousness that can only come from teenage boys. However, these aren’t your average young men – this queer black comedy...

Celebrated Australian playwright Joanna Murray-Smith understands better than most that thrilling author Patricia Highsmith was a complicated woman.  An unwanted child, life at home was a battlefield for Highsmith. Especially with her mother, with whom she continued to tussle as an adult, lobbing venomous letters back and forth. Of course, the author of the Hitchcock-favoured thriller Strangers on a Train was also queer in a time with little patience for such realities, penning lesbian romance The Price of Salt, otherwise known as Carol, under the pseudonym Claire Morgan.  Mostly, she preferred the company of cats, eviscerating any fools who approached her unwittingly, as Murray-Smith memorably documented in her smash hit play, Switzerland. “I have long been invested in The Talented Ms Highsmith and her wildly strange and brilliant mind,” Murray-Smith says. Highsmith’s prickliness might go some way towards explaining the creation of the slinkiest of cunning murderers: Tom Ripley.  Published in 1955, Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley introduced the world to the scammer scrambling along on small-time con jobs in New York until shipping magnate Herbert Greenleaf rocks up. Convincing the richer man he’s closer to his son Dickie than he is, Ripley scores the plum gig of pursuing the errant scion to the Italian Riviera, supposedly to bring him home. Only Ripley gets an insatiable taste for the finer side of life, equal parts doting on and despising his rich new frenemy. The...