In her third year as artistic director of the Melbourne Theatre Company, Anne-Louise Sarks is taking on an adaptation of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca.
"I'm really excited to lay something down myself ... I'm so often collaborating with brilliant playwrights, this feels like a chance to let my own instincts out," she told AAP.
Rebecca is part of the company's 2025 slate of 13 plays, of which eight are premieres of Australian works, most of them products of the Next Stage writing program.
It's taken since 2021 for the company to line up the permissions to adapt the text - due in part to Hitchcock's 1940 film of the gothic classic, the rights are owned by many different parties.
Actor Bert LaBonté (also the director of Topdog/Underdog, currently playing an extended run at the Lawler Theatre) returns to the stage as wealthy widower Max de Winter in Rebecca, alongside Pamela Rabe and Nikki Shiels.
"It'll be nice to be back on the boards at MTC, it feels like home for me," he said on Wednesday.
It perhaps should go without saying that a state theatre company should be premiering new Australian plays, but the sheer number of new works defines the MTC's 2025 season.
While there will always be an audience for the classics, the response to recent works developed through the MTC's Next Stage has been incredible, said Sarks, with 37 (a play about racism in AFL co-produced with Queensland Theatre) such a success it's returning to kick off the 2025 season in January.
So far, the numbers have borne out the hope that new plays would attract new audiences - in 2024, a quarter of ticket buyers had never purchased Melbourne Theatre Company tickets.
"There's something very authentic and relevant about those stories - I think behaviours and habits and interests have shifted, and we're really excited to be pursuing that," said Sarks.
Other plays out of Next Stage in 2025 include Destiny, set in South Africa during the apartheid era, written by and starring Kirsty Marillier, and sci-fi comedy The Robot Dog.
There's also Benjamin Law's adaptation of Cory Taylor's 2017 book Dying: A Memoir, and The Black Woman of Gippsland by Andrea James, staged in May as part of the Yirramboi Festival.
"I'm trying more and more to trust what excites me and what excites the artistic team," Sarks said of the 2025 program.
"Some of it has to be about what's in the zeitgeist, and some of it has to be about what the best place of writing is."
As she took in news coverage of the latest violent deaths of women in Australia, Sarks decided to stage a fresh production of David Williamson's classic The Removalists - which first shocked theatregoers in 1971 with its examination of domestic violence.
Fans of the hit play Counting and Cracking, which played at Melbourne's 2024 Rising Festival and began its run in New York on Friday, will be keen to see playwright S.Shakthidharan's new work The Wrong Gods in a co-production with Belvoir St Theatre.
From Broadway comes five-time Tony-winning musical Kimberly Akimbo, in a co-production with the State Theatre Company of South Australia starring Casey Donovan, Marina Prior, and Christie Whelan Browne.
And direct from its world premiere run the UK, Mother Play: A Play in Five Evictions has its Australian premiere starring Sigrid Thornton, and there's also comedy Never Have I Ever by Deborah Frances-White of The Guilty Feminist podcast.
The season wraps with Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, staged by the MTC for the first time in 30 years, starring Fayssal Bazzi and Alison Bell.
"This show is funny and it's romantic, I think it's the best rom-com of all the Shakespeares," said Sarks.
