Where to see Sydney’s city skyline

There are plays about families that are designed to envelop you with the sinking feeling of upper-middle-class malaise. There are plays about families that want to shock you with hidden secrets. There are plays about families disintegrating, reconnecting, struggling and striving. Some of Australia’s best plays take the family unit and explore it with tenderness and honesty but without compromise, and while they’re at it, they reflect something about the truth of ourselves as a community and as a country. City of Gold, the debut play by actor Meyne Wyatt, is one of those plays.  Breythe (Wyatt) is an actor about to walk off the set of an Australia Day lamb commercial. The ad, for all its message of unity, is plainly white-centred and racist, and just as Breythe is telling his white co-worker in full Captain Cook garb that he should speak up about it too, he gets a sign in the form of a willie wagtail and a phone call from home. His father (Maitland Schnaars) has died.  So Breythe leaves Sydney and heads back to Kalgoorlie, where his family – sister Carina (Shari Sebbens), brother Mateo (Mathew Cooper) and cousin Cliffhanger (Jeremy Ambrum) are trying in their own ways to hold themselves together. But in a town where peaceful protests by the Indigenous community leads to police attacks in riot gear and white residents both threatening and enacting racial violence (which really could be any community in Australia), just being able to grieve – and pursue a wrongful death case f

Brace yourself: fearless firebrand director Adena Jacobs is coming to Bell Shakespeare, and she’s taking on one of Shakespeare’s goriest tales. Astonishingly, the company, which celebrates its 30th anniversary next year, has never programmed the gruesome revenge tragedy, which was one of Shakespeare’s earliest smash hits. Packed full of corruption, rape, cannibalism, mutilation and murder, it’s generally considered to be Shakespeare’s most violent play and tells the tale of two families locked in a cycle of bloodthirsty vengeance during the Roman Empire. “Titus Andronicus is a nightmare – a grotesque examination of reciprocal violence and histories doomed to repeat themselves,” says Jacobs, who will direct Jane Montgomery Griffiths (MTC’s Macbeth) in the title role, alongside Catherine Văn-Davies, Melita Jurisic, Tariro Mavondo, Jayna Patel, Josh Price, Tony Ray Ray, Daniel Schlusser and Grace Truman. Given that Jacobs isn’t afraid to be a little confrontational, this should be a match made in Shakespearean heaven.