WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has a story like no other and a new play about his extraordinary life is the centrepiece of the Malthouse Theatre’s 2025 season.
The activist returned to Australia in June after spending five years in a British prison and it’s hoped he might even make it to the Melbourne theatre to see the production.
“I don’t quite know exactly what Julian’s response will be, but I would love it if he came and saw the play,” Malthouse artistic director Matthew Lutton said.
The Patricia Cornelius work titled Truth follows Assange from his teenage years in Melbourne, to his time with WikiLeaks followed by his imprisonment and release.
“It’s an examination of the idea of truth, and how whistleblowers who take massive risks are punished by governments for speaking those truths,” Lutton said.
Across the 2025 season of seven shows, Melbourne’s Malthouse has decided to reduce its ticket prices significantly – because one truth that’s close to home is that theatre fans are seeing fewer shows than in the past.
The initiative isn’t the result of any big cuts to production costs, rather detailed scrutiny across its budgets.
While the theatre generally aims to keep tickets under $100, in 2025 standard tickets will range from $55-85 and concessions to $20-55, with early bird tickets 25 per cent cheaper.
The season includes the first mainstage commission for genre-busting independent collective Pony Cam.
The performance is based on the Anton Chekhov classic The Cherry Orchard – with its two-and-a-half hour run time cut to 15 minutes, before the audience is asked how the play should be updated to make it relevant today.
It’s another off-the-wall show by the collective, whose recent show Burnout Paradise (which has performers complete a crazy list of challenges while collectively running 20km on treadmills) is opening in New York in November.
There’s Echo by Iranian playwright Nassim Soleimanpour, which has a different actor each night performing from a script they have never seen before.
“It’s very moving, because the actor is discovering the same story at the same time as the audience, so they’re taken aback as they’re reading it,” Lutton said.
A binaural production of The Birds features too, as a one-woman-show starring Paula Arundell.
There’s also a return season of Nightime Travesty by Melbourne theatre collective A Daylight Connection, which played at the Yirramboi first nations arts festival in 2024.
Like other theatres, Malthouse is contending with an increasingly tense cultural environment.
In 2024 an evening with writer and activist Clementine Ford was programmed for the same night as a production of the Yiddish play Yentl, and a new venue was found for Ford’s event to separate the two audiences.
“There was concern that some of Clementine’s pro-Palestinian politics would be make it a very confronting event for the Jewish community coming to Yentl,” Lutton said.
The theatre tries to deal with such issues by working from a core principle of creative freedom, he explained.
“We are always arguing that art and art institutions should be places that can hold complexity, that can hold differing views.”
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