Over the last century, young theatre director Lachlan Houen explains, Australian theatre has produced fantastic productions of British and American plays — but struggled to build an Australian repertoire.
His independent company, Off the Ledge Theatre, launching at The Q next month, wants to set that right: to “solidify the Australian canon and make it a genuine presence — not only in this country, but across the world”.
The new company is dedicated to Australian and queer plays that challenge audiences and make them think — “bold, gritty, and contemporary works confronting uncomfortable truths and the complexity of modern life”.
Those uncomfortable, complex truths include mental illness, the subject of their first production, Kendall Feaver’s multi-award-winning The Almighty Sometimes (19-23 November).
“What better way to start than with a play that is probably the best piece of writing I’ve ever read?” Houen said. “It blew me away.”
Funny and heart-rending, it is “a loving portrait of a mother and daughter, a coming-of-age tale exploring the perils of growing up, a bracing look at what it means to live with a mental illness and the ethics of the mental health profession”. It won the 2015 Judges Award in the Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting (the largest playwriting competition in Europe), the 2018 Best New Play at the UK Theatre Awards, and the 2019 NSW and Victorian Premiers’ Prizes for Drama.
“For me, the company is about second and third productions of Australian works that we want to continue to see, so that we can build them into the canon”, Houen says. “It provides the option to see fresh Australian work that we don’t often get the chance to. It’s bringing these great stories back to life.”
Hundreds of Australian plays written this century are buried, Houen says; he has seen fewer than half the plays cited in Julian Meyrick’s Australia in 50 Plays (2022).
Although the Melbourne and Sydney Theatre Companies and Belvoir Street Theatre have commissioned Australian works, “a lot of them get produced and done, and then forgotten about, put on the shelf”, Houen says.
And yet, Houen argues, many of those plays are wonderful. For instance, Caroline Reid’s Prayer to an Iron God, about the aftermath of a suicide in an outback town, is “phenomenal”, but it was last performed in 2010. Almost everybody knows Louis Nowra’s Così, the comedy about mental hospital patients staging a Mozart opera; few know the other two plays in the Lewis Trilogy.
And these plays please audiences: when Belvoir revived Melissa Reeves’s Furious Mattress (a true crime drama about an exorcism in rural Victoria) this year, the reviews were enthusiastic.
“We can’t all be David Williamson, but there are a lot of playwrights that have as much skill and not nearly enough recognition,” Houen says. “The mission is to go: ‘Let’s pull that one out; it’s exciting; people need to know about it. Hey, look at this — bet you didn’t know about this; it’s an important work, let’s try to make it a core part of the canon.’”
Eventually, Houen wants to get to a point where the neglected 30 plays Meyrick lists are well known, staged by local community theatres, small companies, and Off the Ledge itself.
Next year, Off the Ledge will produce Grace Chapple’s Never Closer, a play set in the Irish Troubles that premiered at the Belvoir in 2022, while Houen will also direct Adam Fawcett’s Every Lovely Terrible Thing, about queer, non-binary identity and family trauma — “All the fun stuff!”.
Later, Houen intends to put on new work by playwrights: “To find a new exciting script that hasn’t been touched is like hitting gold. When those opportunities pop up, we’re not going to turn them down.”
Houen says his artistic practice is driven by examining human connection: “How we exist within and around one another, how we create beautiful communities — and how great we are at tearing them apart.”
He acted throughout high school — plays, musicals, and “all that jazz” (as they say in Chicago) — but was not entirely fulfilled. At college, he directed The Laramie Project, about the murder of young gay man Matthew Shepard, an “insanely confronting” episodic play with 76 scenes.
“I loved the challenge of the big picture, of bringing it together, of seeing how all these different little pieces can make a beautiful image; how the cast work together onstage; how the creative team works behind the scenes; how we create a cohesive piece of art that we can present and impact people. It was a lot of work, but so rewarding. From there, [I understood] this is what I must do now… This is what I wanted to do for my career.”
Since then, Houen has directed plays for ANU, Canberra Rep, and ACT Hub — including Blithe Spirit and Mojo this year.
In the long-term, Houn sees Off the Ledge ‘floating’ — performing in different Canberra and Queanbeyan venues — but always making high-quality theatre that is contemporary, Australian, queer, and makes people think.
“That’s something we don’t get enough of in Canberra; that’s what we’re here for,” Houen said. “There’s a gap in companies that are willing to stage bold, provocative work. It is a risk … but you’ve got to take the risk if that’s the sort of work you want to see: do it, make it, be it.
“The company’s in its infancy — but join us for the ride, because we’ve got some pretty exciting things in store for the year ahead!”
The Almighty Sometimes by Kendall Feaver, 19–23 November 2025, The Q — Queanbeyan. Tickets: https://www.offtheledge.com.au/.
