For those nine decades, the city's beloved Rep has worked, lived and loved in Canberra - reflected in the name of its 2022 season.

It's also where Rep has put on shows, and not even a pandemic could destroy it.

COVID-19 meant the 2021 season was cut off early - one play was set to preview the very day the last lockdown was announced.

All three unmounted 2021 productions have been carried over to 2022 with the same directors and (mostly) the same actors.

The show cancelled at the last minute was Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, directed by Cate Clelland, which will open the 2022 season.

Josh Wiseman and Lainie Hart will play two minor characters from Hamlet who now become the leads.

Stoppard's dark comedy shows them flitting, bewildered, in and out of Shakespeare's play and pondering such issues as fate, chance and mortality.

Only one cast member had to be replaced, acting society president Antonia Kitzel says.

The show will go on in February.

The second play, and second holdover, is Australian playwright Hannie Rayson's comedy-drama Hotel Sorrento, going on in April.

It's directed by Alexandra Pelvin, helming her first Rep production, and tells the story of three sisters with very different lives who are reunited awkwardly after a decade apart.

In June, a real-life couple will be directing a play about a fictional couple in straight Shakespeare, sans Stoppard.

Kelly Roberts and Chris Zuber will direct Romeo and Juliet.

"I'm very excited about that one," Kitzel says, adding that it starts out like a comedy but descends into stark tragedy.

Of the directors, she says, "We hope they're a happier couple than the couple in the show."

That wouldn't be difficult.

At the end of July comes an actual comedy, albeit one even darker as the elderberry wine that features prominently in the story.

Directed by Ian Hart, Joseph Kesselring's Arsenic and Old Lace is, Kitzel says, "one of those plays that most people have sort of heard of but might have forgotten a little bit."

Mortimer Brewster has to deal with being the only sane member of a family that includes one brother who thinks he's Theodore Roosevelt, another who's a murderer on the lam and two spinster aunts who murder lonely old men to put them out of their misery.

"It's silly on so many levels. with characters that you probably wouldn't meet in real life," Kitzel says. One can only hope not.

Karen Vickery, seen recently on the Rep stage in Brighton Beach Memoirs, will sit in the director's chair for Our Country's Good, to mark Rep's birthday month in September.

This play by American-born, British-based writer Timberlake Wertenbaker, is based on Thomas Keneally's historical novel The Playmaker.

The sixth and final work is also the final holdover from 2021. Kate Hamill's adaptation of Jane Austen's first novel, published in 1811.

Sense and Sensibility will be directed by Liz Bradley, it follows the fortunes and misfortunes of the Dashwood sisters after their father's sudden death as they seek security and love.

"It was suggested that this close out the year," Kitzel says.

That makes sense. After all - technically a spoiler alert but it's been more than two centuries - who doesn't love a happy ending?