Auditions

Director: Grant Malcolm

 

Below Audition Link includes all requirements and audition pack

Dates: Saturday 6th and Sunday 7th June

Venue: Marloo Theatre, Greenmount

 

Performance Season: 11 – 26 September 2026

Venue: Marloo Theatre, Marloo Road, Greenmount

 

Inside the Island is an Australian gothic horror play by one of Australia’s leading playwrights, Louis Nowra. Set on a wheat-farming property in western New South Wales in 1912, it follows the wealthy Dawson family — matriarch Lillian, her husband George, and their daughter Susan — as they host a contingent of fifty Australian soldiers camped on their land.

When the soldiers’ captain requests flour from the Dawson mill to bake bread for a picnic and cricket match, Lillian insists that flour be drawn from “Bin Five,” despite George’s protest that something is wrong with it. The grain is contaminated with ergot — a hallucinogenic fungus historically known as “holy fire” — and the soldiers descend into madness, violence and self-destruction.

What begins as a meticulously staged imitation of English colonial gentility — picnic blankets, cricket match, polite conversation — unravels into a feverish landscape of derangement, ritual and apocalypse. The play is concerned with the mechanics of power, the inheritance of dispossession, and the impossibility of grafting an imported culture onto a land that resists it. Nowra’s writing moves from drawing-room comedy of manners to something stranger and more unsettling, lit by what one critic called his “gothic imagination.”

It is a big, ambitious, theatrically rich piece — and a rare opportunity to work on one of the great Australian plays.