Introduction to 2025 Season - From Our Artistic Director & CEO, Jonathan Bielski

Welcome to the 2025 Season of Auckland Theatre Company.

For our 32nd season, we bring you six beautiful, big plays, each with something to say.

The theatre is a place for ideas, enlightenment, education, disagreement, reflection and entertainment. In 2025, we go to all those places at the behest of an array of great playwrights. Our season promises heartbreaking poignancy, fascinating insights, murder and mystery, challenging historical truths, thunderous bolts of lightning and big, loud laughs.

Our Company has always been passionate about new plays by New Zealand playwrights and so it continues in 2025 with two world premieres, an Auckland premiere, and a translation of a classic of our canon.

I welcome playwrights Ahi Karunaharan, Sir Roger Hall KNZM, QSO, Witi Ihimaera DCNZM, QSM, and, making their debuts with us, Jess Sayer, and Maioha Allen.

For the first time in our history, we present a play in te reo Māori on the mainstage. In a revival of Witi Ihimaera’s classic Woman Far Walking, visionary director Katie Wolfe (The Haka Party Incident) re-imagines this timely and searing comment on the age that has passed since the signing of Te Tiriti o Waitangi. The story is presented in a two-part partnership between English and te reo Māori – Tiri: Te Araroa Woman Far Walking.

Our season’s directors are six of the very best in Jane Yonge (Scenes from a Yellow Peril); Shane Bosher (Long Day’s Journey into Night); the great Sir Roger Hall interpreter and much-loved actor/director Alison Quigan QSM; our ever-dazzling Artistic Associate Benjamin Kilby-Henson (The Effect); the aforementioned Katie Wolfe; and a special welcome back to Oliver Driver (Amadeus), who played a major role in the development of our Company. All of these directors are bold artists, with big ideas and even bigger hearts. We are in for a year of extraordinary theatre.

2025 will see year four of our Youth Company. Alumni of the Youth Company are in tertiary training in New Zealand and abroad, while others are now making their way in the world as artists. The experience we provide makes a difference in the lives of young theatre makers. This is possible because of the Youth Company Supporters Group. Please consider a tax-deductible donation directed to the Youth Company.

 

 

We can do the work we do in large part thanks to the generous support of the taxpayer, through Creative New Zealand, and the ratepayer, through Auckland Council and the Auckland Regional Amenities Funding Board. We record our deepest appreciation to those organisations and the community whom we serve. Our backers include Foundation North, sponsors, charitable foundations and generous private gifts, particularly from the ATC Patrons Group. Thank you to all.

I am delighted to welcome the Friedlander Foundation as a major new supporter, enabling us to work in primary schools and invest in the training of the next generation of directors and designers.

Each year, as we prepare a new season and launch the plays, I am overwhelmed with a sense of gratitude. So much hard work goes into creating a season and then bringing it to the audience. The pay-off for us is the reactions of, firstly, our loyal subscribers, and then of those who buy tickets for individual shows. Buying a ticket is not just a night out; it is a personal commitment to ensuring our community has a strong and vital theatre company where artists dream and play.

So, I conclude my introduction to 2025 with a heartfelt expression of thanks to the people of Auckland who subscribe, who donate and who buy the tickets in order to experience the work of Auckland Theatre Company.

This is your theatre company. We eagerly await your arrival at ASB Waterfront Theatre very soon.

 

Jonathan Bielski

Artistic Director & CEO