😮‍💨 238 Shows in 366 Days

Hey mates! 2024 has just finished and I've been racing against time to finish this theatrical Wrapped of sorts—a breakdown of all the theatre I saw in 2024, how I watched it, where I watched it, and how much I watched it. Plus, at the end I've got a little reflection on my top 10 shows of the year.

In April I made a Wrapped of my experience at Melbourne International Comedy Festival where I saw 10% of the entire festival. That was very fun little project and I thought that 2024 as a whole needed it's own (even bigger) wrapped. So here we are. The year in which I've seen the most performance in my life has just finished and so too has my analysis of it. Let's go 🏃💨

🗓️ A Year's Worth of Theatre

Hello! My name's Ryan and it's lovely to meet you. I'm a theatre-maker from Narrm (Melbourne) and I make it a point to see as much theatre as I can. Let's start with the basics:

• I saw 238 shows
• I spent 19,150 minutes // 319 hours // 13.5 days spent watching theatre
• I saw shows from 205 different lead artists
• I attended 6 festivals
• I spent 5.5% of my waking hours watching theatre

Like a silly goose, I didn't keep track of anything about the theatre I watched in 2024 beyond the names of the shows, so I spent December putting together this massive spreadsheet with all of the details of all the shows I've seen. Many thanks to archive.org for retrieving all the event listings on the festival websites which get taken down when the festivals close, and Georgie Wolfe (my best theatrical judy) for remembering all the little details about shows which nobody writes down.

Every Single Show I Saw in 2024

I'll say this here before we go on: a lot of this data is very qualitative. What makes a work devised and not drama? How much participation makes something participatory? And what sector of the theatre industry is a show even in if it's in the Arts Centre basement?

These are all tricky questions which underscore that theatre doesn't belong in (black) boxes. But my appreciation for graphs necessitates it, so here we are. With that warning out of the way, please enjoy my messy analysis of the theatre I watched in 2024.

⏰ The When and Where

Let's start with where I see theatre.

Venues I Visited the Most

In 2024 I visited 63 unique venues but there was only one which hosted 25 of the shows I saw: and that was Trades Hall. While I spent 25 hours at Trades watching shows, it wasn't the venue I spent the most time at—that would be Arts Centre Melbourne with 27 hours (over 14 shows) and fortyfivedownstairs with 25 hours (also over 14 shows). I visited both venues for 6+ hour works this year, 8/8/8:Rest at ACM and The Inheritance at 45 which both significantly added to the amount of time spent at these venues.

The Geographic Distribution of my Theatre Visits in Narrm

This year I also saw a fair bit of theatre outside of the CBD, venturing as far as Darebin Arts Centre in the north, the Substation to the west, and Monash University in the east.

Number of Shows Seen by Day of Week

To no one's surprise the most frequent day of the week that I saw shows on were Saturdays, with 48 shows seen across the 52 Saturdays in 2024. Although, it should be said that my viewing habits during Melbourne International Comedy Festival & Melbourne Fringe (where I tend see multiple shows one after each other) mean that I didn't actually visit the theatre on 48 out of the 52 Saturdays in the year.

Number of Shows Seen by Day of Week, Split by Month

When we break things out by day of the week and months, we can see how busy April & October were for my theatre viewing, and how comparatively quiet months like December are. September was actually my quietest month which is thanks to a third COVID infection and the fact that I was deep in rehearsals for Fringe the month after.

There were only three days this year where I managed to see five shows in a day, which were April 12, April 19, and October 12.

🎟️ Tickets and Plus Ones

This year was pretty exciting in that I began receiving invites to some MTC shows (screaming crying throwing up that’s so cool) and I was also lucky enough to join the Green Room indie theatre panel.

How I Sourced my Tickets

I was pretty surprised that overall the most frequent way I acquired tickets this year was by purchasing them. I was expecting that being part of the Green Room panel or having artist passes at MICF/Melbourne Fringe/Fringe World would be the biggest source of tickets, but no, I mostly just buy them.

Also of note is the sole show that I saw by volunteering at the bar. In past years this was a major way I caught shows at fortyfivedownstairs but I haven’t had need to volunteering there as much since joining the GR panel.

Who I Went to the Theatre With

Wow so I love seeing shows with my friends and there’s one friend who I love seeing shows with a little bit more than everyone else: the inimitable Georgie Wolfe who is always down to see a show.

In 2025 I would love to get the count of shows I see alone down (not that seeing theatre alone is bad, but it is a missed opportunity to catch up with a mate) and to work towards a more even spread of theatre amongst my friends.

📊 Content, Sectors, and Festivals

What Festivals Did I Attend, Broken Down by Sector

To no surprise to anyone, I mostly see indie theatre (god I love indie theatre). Interestingly over half of the indie theatre I see is presented as part of a festival, while on the mainstage only about a third are presented in festivals. Within the commercial sector I mostly saw shows during Comedy Festival, which would’ve been because of my Funny Tonne artist pass getting me in for free (wow commercial theatre is just so expensive).

Most Frequently Viewed Genres

I also decided to break out the shows I saw by genre which is a very very loose term but I thought it was interesting. Just over a quarter of the shows I saw in the year were during Comedy Festival, which does mean the ‘genres’ I’ve used have a slight skew towards comedy genres, and the comparative amorphous-ness of indie theatre meant that I over-applied ‘drama’ (which here means scripted traditional theatre) as a genre.

Who Predominantly Made the Shows I Saw?

I also wanted some way of capturing the diversity (and lack thereof) of the artists who I'm seeing. So, for each show I noted whether the creative team was comprised of a majority of individuals from given backgrounds.

The breakdown isn't perfect. For example, I wish I had broken queer artists out into queer artists and trans and gender non-conforming artists (a note for next year). It also feels a little reductive categorizing art like this but at the same time I think it's a useful benchmark to consider how diversified my theatre-diet is and how to improve it.

The Qualitative Bits

AKA... my favourite shows of the year

There was just so much theatre to love this year and I want to talk about it, so here's 10 of my favourite shows that I saw in 2024—presented in the order I saw them.

The Inheritance

11/02/2024 | fortyfivedownstairs

2024 started so very fucking strong with Matthew López' The Inheritance: a six hour long spiritual successor to Angels in America (which I hosted a reading of for my birthday this year). It follows the lives of a community of gay men in New York in 2015 grappling with the legacy of the aids crisis, the utility of politics for queer liberation, and how we faggots care for each other.

I think it may be the first 3+ hour long show I’ve ever seen and god I loved seeing it all in one sitting. There was one character who passed away in the first half of the show and who reappears as a ghost late in the second part and the moment he returned to the stage left me sobbing. The actual grief of like falling in love with a character, seeing them pass, and return after three hours away was like lightning in a bottle.

I want to particularly shout out Director Kitan Petkovski who also directed Things I Know to Be True, and The Hall and which both just broke me. I remember sitting in Georgie's car after seeing Things just sobbing for twenty minutes straight. Kitan is so adept at shaping an emotional story and I'm just obsessed with his work.

37

06/03/2024 | Southbank Theatre

MTC was absolutely killing it this year, and I don’t think anything exemplified quite like 37. Nathan Maynard’s impeccable script and Isaac Drandic’s lyrical direction unearthed the AFL’s indigenous roots, and fervent racism. Kate Mulqueen writing for ArtsHub put it eloquently:

Every game we play in life – in politics, in society, in relationships – is a choice. No matter how much we think there isn’t one to be made. And that is where true power lies. 

I was a teen who hated having to play sport when Adam Goodes faced systemic racism in the AFL. So the context of 37 was pretty unfamiliar to me so I was surprised by how much I connected to a show about a sport I’ve never watched—let alone played.

I walked away and I remember remarking to Georgie how masculine the show was? For all the patriarchy and misogyny on our stages we don’t actually see enough work which critically explores men‘s feelings and the way they navigate the world. As someone who’s both not fully a man and not fully Australian it was exhilarating to see both identities pried apart as they are in Maynard’s writing.

So good. I wish I could see it again. 👀

Shark Heist

09/04/2024 | The Motley Bauhaus

When I watched Shark Heist in April I wrote:

It’s hard to describe Shark Heist. It’s storytelling, but participatory, but some of it’s improv, but also it’s a campy heist movie, but basically it’s really funny. Really really really funny.

Cam Venn is a masterful guide through the zany world of Shark Heist, and he establishes a comfortable and safe relationship with the audience, such that even the shyest amongst us felt comfortable participating in some way. Venn invites the audience up to take on roles, performing and improvising with him, and it works phenomenally. Not many comedians could surrender so much of their show with their audience, and trust that they’ll give it their all, but Venn exceeds at it.

It’s heartwarming and nostalgic and joyous and so so so campy. Wish I could see it again.

That all remains true. I really do wish I could spend another evening in Venn’s freewheeling world of participatory comedy.

Counting and Cracking

02/06/2024 | Union Theatre

Another show which left me weeping. I was so excited for Counting and Cracking to arrive in Melbourne five years after it’s Sydney premiere. Truly, this show was an epic: 19 actors, 50 characters, 3½ hours, 3 languages, and a story which spans half a century.

Counting and Cracking loosely follows the story of writer S. Shakthidharan’s family’s journey from Sri Lanka to Australia, exploring democracy in Sri Lanka, transnational migration, and how we love and protect our families.

In an interview for the ABC with Vyshnavee Wijekumar, S. Shakthidharan said

I think most migrants are only their full selves in private. They connect fully with their culture, their traditions, behind closed doors. To tell the gloriously complex story of your community in full public view, and to have other people embrace that, has been a radical act of belonging.

As a white person, one of the most striking things about seeing it was being in a theatre surrounded by a community made up of people not like me. Like 37 it was an insight into a world apart from mine, which at the same time was very familiar.

In another interview with Anand Giridharadas during the New York season of Counting and Cracking S. Shakthidharan said

I'm sure that a lot of Americans look around them right now and assume that the peace that they see and the freedoms they enjoy cannot be taken away. And we thought that too in Sri Lanka. And democracy is so, so, so fragile. You know, we're really only two or three steps away in our democratic societies from neighbors turning on each other. And what this mother says to her son is, “When I came to Australia, I thought I did it to protect you. I thought I did it because I would build walls so high around you that we could be indestructible again, but I can't protect you." And she starts to open up to him after she realizes she can't protect him. Protection being, "I won't tell you anything. I'll just build really high walls." Vulnerability being what the deeper protection really is.

Incredibly prescient, affective, and illuminating theatre. More please.

CADELA FORÇA TRILOGY CHAPTER 1: The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella

15/06/2024 | Malthouse Theatre

This show was really hard to find words for. Because it was so viscerally about things that are so very hard to find words for: violence against women, rape, femicide.

It’s a really intense two and a half hours which begins as a lecture of sorts where the director/performer Carolina Bianchi tells us about the life and death of Pippa Bacca. Bacca was killed and assaulted while performing Brides on Tour, a work where she hitchhiked from Milan to Jerusalem while wearing a white dress. She didn’t make it to Jerusalem. Her body was found naked, strangled, and decomposing 60km southeast of Istanbul.

Bianchi’s lecture takes aim at the naïveté of Brides on Tour, before expanding into a discussion of feminist performance art. While doing this she explains and prepares for the work we’re about to watch: she’s going to ingest a date rape drag and pass out. And sure enough, she does.

I almost couldn’t believe it was happening but later in the piece a projected monologue from Bianchi explains that a close friend of her tours with her and watches from the audience, always watching over her. Suddenly I understood who the figure who had sat down in the circle two seats over from me moments before she passed out was.

From then on the show is performed by her ensemble who take care of her body until waking her up in the show’s final moments.

I first heard about this through a review by Natasha Tripney who later interviewed Bianchi and wrote that

Key to the piece is the idea that, by performing this gesture, by ingesting this drug, “there is something that is lost.” Something needed to disappear inside the show, she explains, and taking the drug is “my gesture of disappearing,” It's something concrete, she adds. “It's not only a metaphorical disappearance, but also the disappearance of the conscious woman who is guiding you on this journey.” Bianchi is the only figure on stage for the first half of the performance. She commands the audience’s attention and then she falls asleep - she disappears. The taking of the drug is also, she says, “a way of looping myself and my personal history into the show.”

If you’re curious for more information on the show, I highly recommend Alison Croggon’s review, linked below.

Acts of violence: ‘Cadela Força Trilogy – Chapter 1’

Brazilian artist Carolina Bianchi’s searingly intelligent exploration of misogynistic violence at Melbourne’s Rising is exactly what arts festivals are for

The MonthlyAlison Croggon

One of These Things First

12/07/2024 | Kensington Town Hall

Delta Brooks, Rebekah Carton, and Thomas Richards make up Hot Lunch, a new(ish) company which makes theatre that is rigorously playful, messy and optimistic.

One of These Things First was their first work done as a formalised company and what a brilliant debut it was. I went with Georgie and we rocked up to Kensington Town Hall on a cold and dark winter evening and were welcomed by the entire team. Tom was waiting by the door with a smile, Delta was waiting just inside the room checking tickets and asking us to write down what we wanted to be when we grow up (answer: actor). Rebekah was waiting to chat to us before we sat down about how much participation we were comfortable with (answer: a lot).

I’ve thought (and told my friends) a lot about the genuine warmth and eagerness the team had in welcoming us all to the venue that night. I love when fourth walls are broken and I think the way Hot Lunch did it made the ensuing hour of theatre so much more impactful.

The show was about the things we wanted to be when we grew up, and the things that we in fact did not end up becoming when we grew up. A sentimental and charming hour of reflections on the lives we didn’t lead and the ones we did. Hot Lunch’s style is messy in the very best of ways, leaving a stage covered in cowboy hats and astronaut suits and scrawled-on whiteboards. It was such a deliciously visual treat to watch people play like we used to.

One particularly affective moment was a monologue from Rebekah Carton about how she’s always wanted to be a mother and hasn’t been able to. I can’t remember the specifics of what was said but I do remember feeling profound empathy and melancholy for all the versions of ourselves she and I haven’t become.

I am so very excited by Hot Lunch and what they make. This is the dust we’re in at Melbourne Fringe was another absolute delight where they pulled apart Summer of the Seventeenth Doll and reexamined what it means to be Australian today.

Interior

23/08/2024 | The Substation

In August I saw Interior, made by the Rawcus ensemble with Director Katrina Cornwell and Writer/Dramaturg Morgan Rose. This is what I messaged a group chat immediately afterwards:

Interior was loosely a show about what we say and what we don’t say—why we communicate poorly and what’s left in the silence. It was at turns somber and jubilant, lyrical all the way through. The way Cornwell wove together movement with text was just phenomenal. Plus, the design was out of this world, with a motif of Christmas trees which slowly percolated on stage, turning our perspective of a comfortable if dated interior into a distant view through a forest.

Another thing that really stuck with me was the incredibly well done captions by Dora Abrahams. Some moments in the show were improvised, and the way the captions navigated that was so exciting—making it feel like a whole extra layer to interpret. (How great would it be if more theatre was captioned? It makes it so much easier to follow.)

I just loved it so much. I’m holding this one close to my heart.

Twenty Million Thousand Leagues Under the Seas

06/10/2024 | Trades Hall

Pummel Squad is another company that I’m absolutely obsessed with right now. Made up of Ludomyr Kemp-Mykyta, Harry McGee, and Cooper Donald, the trio presented a (exceptionally) loose interpretation of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas. The story followed a Mr. Bulge (pictured, left), a used car salesmen whose life is turned upside down one day after a chance meeting with his doppelgänger. The adventure takes him to the sea floor, on surreal submarines, and eventually to the moon, before he realises his life is ok where it is; that it’s ok to take things slow and just be as we are. On our own journey in our own way.

Pummel Squad made use of an overhead projector, whiteboard markers, and a heaping of domestic detritus to project, animate, and tell the story of Mr. Bulge, occasionally stepping in front of the screen to play Mr. Bulge or any of the show’s other dozens of characters. There was an engrossing lo-fi aesthetic to the entire thing, and every new way they found to set a scene was a pure wonder.

Every show I’ve seen from Pummel Squad has been brimming with an idiosyncratic charm which is a pure delight, and Twenty Million was no different. The team’s eccentric stories strike at profound truths about our lives which leave me craving more. I saw Twenty Million twice and I’d have loved to see it twice more. I can’t wait to see what they do next.

Ballkids (or, scenes from a friendship)

12/10/2024 | La Mama Courthouse

Y’all… I freaking love my friends and no show this year has underscored that vibe as much as Ballkids by Liv Satchell and directed Julian Dibley-Hall has.

Ballkids was made up of dozens of short scenes following over two decades of friendship between two ballkids, played with mesmerising chemistry by Izabella Yena and Michelle McCowage. Writing for The Age, Cameron Woodhead said

The acting is an extraordinary masterclass in embodying characters who age over decades. McCowage and Yena inhabit the intricate physical and emotional changes involved in a way that’s so loveable and intimate and funny and true you won’t be able to help grinning in recognition.

Me and Georgie were lucky enough to see it together and I just left giving her a big hug. How brilliant it is to see theatre which places friendship in the rightful centre of our lives.

I'm Ready to Talk Now

12/10/2024 | Trades Hall

I’ve been lucky enough to see Oliver Ayres’ one-on-one performance I’m Ready to Talk Now twice now, first in 2023 at Melbourne Fringe. And then a year later I was invited to see the further developed show in 2024 and I have nothing but accolades to give it (just like the Melbourne Fringe Judges panel who awarded I’m Ready to Talk Now with Best Experimental, and the Change Maker Award).

I arrive for I’m Ready to Talk Now having just scoffed down a vegan mushroom pie with gravy and mash in the bowels of Trades Hall. Ayres‘ presence is soothing and methodical as he invites me to get into a hospital bed, tuck myself in, and choose a stim toy for myself.

I remember he told me to give up on being a ’good audience member’ for the duration of the show, a disarmingly comfortable direction to follow. Ayres offers some access adjustments, I choose to watch the show with captions (fuck yes).

And we’re off. The majority of the text is delivered through a voice over, and it’s a sort of interview with Ayres. He’s telling me about his diagnosis with Stevens–Johnson syndrome, coming less than a year after he began his transition. It’s a disorientating and unstable story, but the projection onto a scrim in front of me is solid and tangible—a long timelapse of sunset through a hospital window, then the interior of a hospital room.

At times Ayres underscores the narration with a searching choreography performed throughout the room. I feel safe in the hospital bed, but the world outside the bed doesn’t feel the same. At one point Ayres crouches against the wall just behind my head and I have to crane my head to watch. He’s sitting. Waiting. Afraid? I don’t know.

Finally, in a moment of catharsis and connection I see Ayres’ face appear behind the scrim. We lock eyes and hold each other there for a moment. It’s profound. I don’t stare into strangers eyes like this. Waves of terror and optimism and hope and awe wash over us. And shortly after it’s over.

We chat, I ask some mundane questions about the hospital bed, and slowly eventually I leave.

There are shades of The Artist is Present in that final moment of connection. The world that Ayres creates and shares is at turns healing and startling, but his stewardship and care throughout is really felt. I‘m glad he shared this moment with me, and I’m glad I was present to receive it.

We made it! Thank you so much for reading my Theatre Wrapped for 2024. It was such a joy making it and even more of a joy getting to see 238 shows. I truly am so madly in love with this stupid art form and I can't wait to see what Narrm turns out in 2025.

I've been thinking about what I want my 2025 to look like and I have a couple of resolutions. First, I want to start and finish The Artist's Way. Second, I want to write a first draft of two new plays. And thirdly, I'd like to write much more regularly about the theatre I see and my artistic practice.

To that end, I'm planning on starting a weekly(ish) free newsletter in a couple of weeks called In the Round. I'm going to write mini reviews of the show's I'm seeing, reflect on the work I'm making, and share with you the books and articles and podcasts I'm reading. I would love to have you along for the ride. 👇