For its 86th season, Canberra Repertory Society has taken the theme Power and Passion. Rep President David Bennett says that in a year that marks the centenary of the end of World War I it's also worth remembering that just over 70 years have passed since World War II has ended and a little over 40 since the Vietnam War was resolved. Power and passion were a part of all of these conflicts, he says, and while only one of the plays in the season addresses war directly, they all deal with the stated themes in one way or another.

Opening the season is Dr Frankenstein by British playwright Selma Dimitrijevic (April 5-21), based on Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein. Jordan Best, who directed Wait Until Dark for Rep earlier this year, says, "It's a new telling of the story and in it the doctor is a woman."

In this version of the Gothic tale, Victoria (not Victor) Frankenstein is the doctor on the fringe of society wanting to create life in a less than conventional manner and ends up creating a monster.

"Once you add that she's a woman in Victorian times, it doesn't get much fringier than that," Best says.

Best says she's a fan of Gothic literature and Shelley's novel in particular and the feminist twist on the story - with the doctor having a sister, Elizabeth, instead of a fiance - appealed to her.

Bennett says the second play of the season is Arms and the Man (May 17-June 2),"one of the lesser-known of George Bernard Shaw's plays". Directed by Ed Wightman (Twelfth Night), it's a comedy set during the Serbo-Bulgarian War in 1885 in which the Bulgarian fiancee of a war hero hides a Swiss mercenary soldier in the Serbian army and is shocked to discover he carries chocolates, rather than bullets, in his pockets. George Orwell wrote, ""It is probably the wittiest play he ever wrote, the most flawless technically, and in spite of being a very light comedy, the most telling."

Next comes something new and different for Rep. Radio on Repertory Lane (June 7-16), directed by Jarrad West (The 39 Steps) will present a suite of radio plays presented as if the audience were present in the studio at a live broadcast.

Bennett says, "There will be a bare stage, there will be a foley artist, a director, an announcer and a group of actors with scripts, some playing more than one character."

An Agatha Christie play written for radio will be included in the line-up but it has to be finalised along with the rest of the program which might be made up of a thriller, a comedy and a drama.

Although Kurt Vonnegut was best known for his novels he was also a playwright and Rep is presenting his 1970 comedy Happy Birthday, Wanda June. directed by Cate Clelland (Australia Day). Harold, a big game hunter and war hero, returns home to his wife Penelope and 12-year-old son Paul having been missing, presumed dead, for eight years Penelope, who has two suitors - a doctor, Norbert, and a vacuum-cleaner salesman, Herb,- is aghast and Paul is distraught and what unfolds is, among other things, a comic variation on Homer's Odyssey.

Clelland in her director's notes says, "The play is a passionate, anti-war, anti-violence (particularly violence against women) statement which questions ideas about 'manliness' and offers alternative attitudes towards this ... It is entertaining and funny and crazy and offensive, and intellectually provoking."

Chris Baldock, who directed Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge for Rep in 2017, will return to direct a much lighter play, Richard Bean's One Man, Two Guvnors (November 15-December 2). It takes Carlo Goldoni's 1746 comedy The Servant of Two Masters and sets it in Brighton, England in the 1960s. In it, Francis Henshall is working for two different bosses and trying to keep them from finding this out. But inevitably, matters grow more and more complicated.

"There are mistaken identities, women disguised as men, original songs and a skiffle band," Baldock says.

This was the last show he directed in Melbourne before moving to Canberra and he seized the challenge of tackling the broad, high-energy farce again.

The first play of 2019 and the last in the season will be Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen, in an English version by Simon Stephens (February 14-March 2). It deals with the relationship of Nora and Torvald Helmer in 19th-century Norway at a time when a crisis threatens their marriage and the assumptions and feelings underpinning it. In his director's notes, Aarne Neeme (Witness for the Prosecution) says,"The play is now 140 years old, and my intention is to play it straight, its original period, without any clever trappings. To see how far we have come, and how far we have yet to go." Neeme quotes Ibsen himself: "It was not my desire to deal with so-called problems. What I wanted to do was to depict human beings, human emotions and human destinies, upon a groundwork of certain of the social conditions and principles, of the present day.

"A dramatist's business is not to answer questions, but merely to ask them."