For its 2026 Production Season, NIDA, Australia’s national dramatic arts educator, has brought together two of the country’s most distinguished theatre makers: Simon Phillips and Rachael Maza AM.
They are joined by directors Zindzi Okenyo, Anthea Williams, Dino Dimitriadis, Margaret Thanos, Claudia Osborne, Miranda Middleton, music director Zara Stanton, and playwright Keziah Warner, whose new work receives its world premiere.
The eight productions are performed by third year Acting students and created by students across design, costume, props and effects, technical theatre, stage management, set construction and make-up.
Phillips opens the Winter Season with A Midsummer Night’s Dream on the Parade Theatre stage. Maza AM closes the Spring Season with Michael Gow’s Away, Australia’s most produced play in its 40th anniversary year, brought to the stage for the first time through a First Nations lens.
The six remaining works include the first Australian production of a play described by The Times as “the play of the decade”, an operatic co-production with the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, a queer-inclusive musical, a revenge drama widely hailed as one of the most important Australian plays of the decade, the Australian premiere of a political thriller, and a brand new ghost story.
David Berthold, Artistic Director in Residence, NIDA said:
“Eight productions, one question: what do we owe each other? It’s asked in a courtroom, a haunted house, a hospital, a beach at summer’s end, a revolution broadcast live, and a forest where lovers lose themselves in the dark.
It’s asked with rage, with laughter, and with music. And it’s asked it in the company of some of the finest theatre makers in the country, working alongside the next generation of Australian storytellers.”
Winter Season: 4 – 13 June 2026
Winter Season launches with A Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed by the acclaimed Simon Phillips, who brings his hallmark clarity and velocity to Shakespeare’s wildest comedy on the big Parade stage.
Associate Artistic Director of Griffin Theatre Company, Anthea Williams, directs Possessions, a newly commissioned play by the award-winning Keziah Warner in which grief, guilt and something beneath the floorboards refuse to stay buried.
Green Room Award winner Miranda Middleton directs, and Zara Stanton leads the music for In Pieces, Joey Contreras’s new, queer-inclusive musical exploring friendships, families and former lovers and the fragments of love that linger.
Dino Dimitriadis brings their distinctive artistry to The Bleeding Tree, Angus Cerini’s bracingly funny, fiercely lyrical revenge tale hailed as one of the most important Australian plays of the decade.
Spring Season: 3 – 13 November 2026
Zindzi Okenyo directs Robert Icke’s The Doctor, the first Australian production of a play described by The Times as the play of the decade; a gripping moral thriller that exposes unconscious bias with razor-sharp wit.
On-the-rise director Margaret Thanos steers the Australian premiere of Elinor Cook’s Image of an Unknown Young Woman, asking what we owe strangers in an age when a single image can ignite a revolution.
In a co-production with performers and musicians from the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, Claudia Osborne directs Ravel and Colette’s spellbinding short opera L’Enfant et les Sortilèges, a surreal fantasia in which a child’s tantrum sets the whole world against him.
Rachael Maza AM directs Michael Gow’s Away – Australia’s most produced play – in a 40th anniversary production that brings a First Nations lens to the play for the first time.
NIDA’s 2026 Winter Season tickets are on sale now. National Institute of Dramatic Art, Sydney.
Tickets for the Spring Season are on sale in September. View the full Season line-up here.
Website: https://www.nida.edu.au/
Socials: https://www.instagram.com/nidacommunity/
Photo credit: Phil Erbacher
