Cybec Electric – Four plays about Melbourne. Now!

MTC Cybec Electric Four plays about Melbourne. Now. Flagstaff station. A peninsula beach. Sherbrooke Forest. A Northside home. MTC’s Cybec Electric play reading series returns to Southbank Theatre in February and March 2016 with new works from a selection of five of Australia’s most promising playwrights.

The plays by Rashma N. Kalsie, Justine Campbell & Sarah Hamilton, Bridget Mackey and Louris van de Geer will each have two public, semi-staged readings by professional actors, with the assistance of directors and dramaturgs.

With each play set in seemingly everyday Melbourne locations, these playwrights see through the placid and the ordinary to the comedy, the cruelty, the fear, the foolishness, and the deep, dark desires, that seethe, seep and echo across our town.

MTC’s Cybec Electric opens with The Day I Left Home – Melbourne Talam by Rashma N. Kalsie, which tells the story of three people at Flagstaff station who just can’t seem to follow the rhythm of the city.

From Award winning duo Justine Campbell & Sarah Hamilton of Human Animal Exchange comes Untold, a story about two estranged sisters who are reunited by the death of their mother and set with the difficult task of settling the estate.

The Exact Dimensions of Hell by Bridget Mackey tells the thrilling expedition of two companions desperate to stop a cult leader getting out of prison.

Closing the Cybec Electric series is The Son by Louris van de Geer, a heart wrenching play about a married couple who realise their cleaner desperately wants something back from their house that she cannot have.

“No work of art is complete without an audience,” says MTC Literary Director and Cybec Electric curator Chris Mead. “And in this year’s Cybec Electric we have brilliant stories and amazing actors, really great drama, hot creative teams and powerful, sinuous, ferociously smart writing. We can’t wait to share all that with an audience. That’s when the electricity really happens.”

Cybec Electric is an integral part of MTC’s commitment to developing and presenting new Australian plays and will be presented from 25 February – 5 March 2016. For more information, visit: www.mtc.com.au/cybec-electric for details.

Image: courtesy of MTC