Canberra Repertory Society is heading in new directions in 2019

Canberra Repertory Society's recently launched 2019 season - its 87th - is called New Directions for good reason. It is introducing some changes as well as creating some links to the past.

Firstly, there will be six shows in 2019, including one originally announced for the 2018-19 season.

Rep's president Michael Sparks says, "We're back to a one-year schedule again."

Having the season overlap by one show into the following calendar year was tried recently. However, Sparks says subscribers wanted Rep to go back to the one-year subscription season so it was changed without regret.

"We think it makes more sense logically," Sparks says.

Sparks hopes there will "something for everybody" in 2019. Next year, Rep will present five shows it has never previously done - one being also a Canberra premiere - and one show being staged for the third time in Rep's history.

Instead of the plays being chosen by a Rep committee, six directors chosen for 2019 each pitched Rep a number of plays they were passionate about and the company created the final shaping of the season.

The remounted show, also the first in the season, is Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House (English version by Simon Stephens) from February 14 to March 2. Aarne Neeme, whose last Rep show was The Threepenny Opera in 2016, will direct.

Sparks says A Doll's House is "one of the great classics of all time". Ibsen's 1879 play is about "marriage and independence and having control of yourself". Susannah Frith will play the unhappy middle-class housewife Nora and Rob De Fries her self-centred and patronising husband Torvald.

The second play in the season is To Kill A Mockingbird (March 28-April 13), a 1990 adaptation by Christopher Sergel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Harper Lee. It tells the story of small-town Southern lawyer Atticus Finch, who takes on the defence of an African-American man accused of rape during the Great Depression. Anne Somes, whose company Free-Rain Theatre mounted the play in 2012, will make her Rep directorial debut with the play. It's being presented by Rep for the first time.

Finch's children Scout and Jem are a big part of To Kill A Mockingbird, which Sparks calls "a coming-of-age story" with themes such as racism and domestic violence that are still contemporary even though it is set during the 1930s.

Next is a show Sparks believes is a Canberra debut. The World Goes 'Round, directed by Jarrad West, who recently directed Radio on Repertory Lane and The 39 Steps for Rep. This 1991 off-Broadway revue features songs by Broadway and movie songwriters John Kander and Fred Ebb including comic and romantic numbers from the musicals Cabaret, Chicago, Kiss of the Spider Woman and the films New York, New York and Funny Lady.

"It's done with a small cast of five and a band on stage," Sparks says.

Chris Baldock, who directed Rep's production of A View from the Bridge and is directing its upcoming One Man, Two Guvnors, will return for Michael Green's The Art of Coarse Acting (July 25-August 10).

Green, a keen amateur performer, was inspired by his theatrical experiences to write about coarse acting in a 1964 book (which, revised, is still in print).

"It's one of the favourite books about acting," Sparks says, as it details the problems that can plague amateur theatre and its practitioners with costumes, lighting, sets, performances and everything else.

Among Green's descriptions: "A coarse actor is one who can remember his lines, but not the order in which they come ... His aim is to upstage the rest of the cast. His hope is to be dead by Act II so that he can spend the rest of his time in the bar. His problems? Everyone else connected with the production."

Green also wrote a number of short plays to allow coarse actors to strut their stuff and Rep will present six of them including the mystery Streuth, the prisoner-of-war story Stalag 69 and the Noel Coward send-up Present Slaughter.

"Anything that can go wrong does go wrong," Sparks says.

"It will be interesting to see how we get six different plays in different settings in two hours."

Sparks says Green's work inspired such later comedies as Noises Off and The Play That Goes Wrong, both of which also chronicle theatrical disasters.

A work of a more serious nature is the 1998 Australian play, The Woman in the Window, by Alma De Groen (September 5 to 21). Liz Bradley, who directed Rep's productions of The Fox on the Fairway and The Odd Couple, will direct this drama that takes place n two different time settings.

Sparks says, "In Stalin's Russia, the poet Anna Akhmatova is under house arrest and forbidden to write."

Her plight is contrasted with the lives of a group of women in the 23rd century where information is controlled and where, Sparks says, "To be a poet is ... to write about poetry."

He says the play is about the lives of women and independence as well as art and expression.

Finally, it's back to comedy with Noel Coward's 1960 play Waiting in the Wings (November 27-December 7).

"It's set, hilariously, in a retirement home for actresses," Sparks says."

The residents are organising a fundraising charity event to build a solarium at the home but face old enmities and other problems along the way.

Waiting in the Wings will be directed by Stephen Pike, program manager at the Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre, and will also have a short season at that venue (November 23 to 27). Rep is working in partnership with the Queanbeyan Palerang Regional Council for this production.

Sparks says this is a deliberate effort to reach out to a different audience. It's also, he says, part of an attempt by Rep to employ directors who run other local theatre companies themselves or with others (West's Everyman, Somes' Free-Rain, Bradley's Pigeonhole, Baldock's Mockingbird) to promote a feeling of community rather than rivalry in the region's theatre world.

"We want to actively embrace it in this town."

The season will unfold at Theatre 3 in the newly named Naoné Carrel Auditorium, after the Rep stalwart who died four years ago and was, Sparks says, "one of the great contributors to Rep in the 1990s and 2000s."

She served as Rep's president for seven years and appeared in many productions.

Sparks says next year the society will also feature a Legend of Rep at each show with information about the person - for example an actor, director, designer, front of house person - who has made a significant contribution to Rep. So Rep is including some affectionate nods to the past as well as going in new directions for the future.