Hub Fest Play Festival
As part of the ACT Hub Development Program, we are excited to introduce our newest opportunity: the Hub Fest! Offering theatre practitioners in-kind support to produce and stage a theatrical production, this festival will see two different productions of Australian works being staged in repertory across February 2025.
The festival includes two new pieces, both Australian works! The shows will perform on a rotating basis, with 6 performances of each show running from 16–22 February. Read more about each of the shows below!
The Bestiary
The year is 2038 and free creativity has been completely eliminated from Australian society. The arts in Australia seemed lost, until The Minister for Aesthetics offered a reprieve. A revolutionary facility, the institution, was to be constructed. A place where artists would be valued and cared for.
After a decade of operation, the intake has increased exponentially and yet scarcely any artists have returned. Those that have been released seem changed for the worst. For the rest of the country the Minister for Aesthetics demands complete expressive conformity. A miniscule network of artists attempts to survive in hiding, driven underground and forced to live like animals.
The Bestiary begins in one such bunker. Four renegades known only as Fox, Badger, Donkey and Goat surround their entrammelled oppressor. The Minister for Aesthetics has a lot to answer for and the animals will ensure their justice is served. Now that they have him the question is, will they ever let him go?
The Forsaken
Alone in his rundown second-story apartment, Leonard, now an old man, sits and listens through the walls. On one side live 3 kids in their late teens and early twenties. They’re trying to balance escaping from their fucked up home lives, studying and making enough to live, not just survive, in a cost of living crisis. Through Leonard’s right wall is a young family. Jackson and Isla were high school sweethearts and never left town. They are trying to cling onto the social status afforded to them by their private school education. But money is tight with a young daughter and in a claustrophobic apartment, their undealt with trauma from the past 10 years begins to bubble to the surface.
This is a play about loneliness, toxic masculinity and the Australian cross-generational identity. Leonard sees versions of himself in the stories he listens to, points in time that he regrets and choices that led him to where he is now. His journey is one of self-reckoning. But rejoining a society that has abandoned you is easier said than done, and even if you make the decision to, what is left for you in a world that has left you behind?
Details
When: 16 February – 22 February 2025
Where: ACT Hub at Causeway Hall
Performances
The Bestiary
Ticket prices
- All tickets: $20
The Forsaken
Ticket prices
- All tickets: $20