Melbourne theatre guide: 5 best shows to see in June 2026

In the June round-up of best theatre to catch in Melbourne, we’ve got a couple of restaged award-winning Australian independent works that haven’t been seen in Melbourne for many years; a new Australian comedy about perimenopause and cosmetic surgery by Marieke Hardy; a one-man show that blends the personal and political by British-Egyptian actor Khalid Abdalla as part of RISING; and a retelling of a Greek tragedy from a woman’s perspective.

Happy June, theatre-lovers!

Brian Lipson: A Large Attendance in the Antechamber

This one-man show devised, written and starring British-Australian theatre legend Brian Lipson is launching a return season as part of Melbourne’s RISING festival.

It’s set to be a treat for theatre-lovers and fans of historic buildings alike. Lipson will be treading the boards of the intimate and recently restored Old Council Chambers at Trades Hall, an intricately designed Victoria-era important-man cave – think chandeliers, bronze fittings and filigree, dark wooden circular bench seats and deep green and wine tones – and the perfect place for a journey into the mind of a Victorian polymath.

Lipson’s play centres the story of Sir Francis Galton, the 19th century British amateur scientist who founded the pseudoscience of eugenics, which applied ideas of Darwinian natural selection, inherited characteristics and selective breeding to humans – to a range of racist, sexist and classist conclusions.

This work was first performed in Melbourne in 2000, where it won two Greenroom awards, and has since toured internationally, including to Edinburgh Festival. While one-person shows aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, with Lipson, you’re in safe hands.

This return season is a rare chance to see one of our true theatre greats in action, in one of Melbourne’s most beautiful and historic Victorian-era venues, while considering the pernicious nature of ideology when wielded by a powerful intellect.

And while you’re waiting for the show to start – have a look up at those hand-painted friezes, featuring portraits in each corner. Delicious.

A Large Attendance in the Antechamber plays from 28 May to 7 June at Melbourne’s Trades Hall – Old Council Chambers as part of RISING.

Ganesh Versus the Third Reich

This is an all-too-short opportunity to see the multi award-winning experimental production Ganesh Versus the Third Reich by Geelong’s Back to Back Theatre before it heads to Paris for the prestigious Festival d’Automne later in the year.

The work, which was first performed in 2011 at Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre, is directed by Back to Back’s Artistic Director Bruce Gladwin and co-devised by the company’s ensemble – a group of actors who identify as being intellectually disabled or neurodivergent.

The parallel narratives follow, on one hand, the surreal story of the Hindu Elephant-headed god Ganesh travelling to Nazi Germany to reclaim the Swastika, which had been a benign Hindu symbol representing good fortune before they got to it, and on the other, the metanarrative of the actors in the play arguing with their director about whether they have the right, as non-Jewish and non-Hindu performers, to tell these stories at all.

Back to Back’s co-devising model of theatre-making has established a long and successful history of creating deeply personal works that explore the politics of disability. The actors’ lived experience brings a complexity to their theatrical storytelling and provide opportunities for an audience to interrogate our assumptions and sit within and investigate our own discomfort.  

The little company from Geelong has been celebrated the world over, and in 2022 became Australia’s first theatre company to be awarded the IBSEN International Theatre Award – an award regularly touted as the Nobel Prize of theatre.

Since Ganesh Versus the Third Reich first opened, the play has been staged around the world at major festivals and racked up an impressive array of awards and widespread critical acclaim, winning the Helpmann Award, three Greenroom Awards (for best production, best direction and best ensemble performance) and the Edinburgh International Festival Critics’ Award.

It’s showing for only three days in Melbourne – so if you missed it the first time around, time to book, book, book or forever be kicking yourself. Unless you decide to follow them to Paris, in which case: go you!

Ganesh Versus The Third Reich is on at University of Melbourne Arts and Culture from 17 to 19 June.

Eurydice

This 2003 play by Tony Award-nominated and two-time Pulitzer Prize Finalist American playwright Sarah Ruhl (In the Next Room, or the vibrator play and The Clean House), turns the focus of the Greek myth of Orpheus in the Underworld to his dead lover Eurydice and her experience.

In Ruhl’s version, Eurydice is grieving the loss of her father. After she dies accidentally on the eve of her wedding to Orpheus, she heads down to Hades where she’s reunited with her dad. While Orpheus is busy working out how he can cheat death and bring his love back, Eurydice and her father reconnect, and her father helps to restore her lost memories.

The story was one of Ruhl’s earlier ones – written while she was in her late twenties, as a response to her father dying of cancer when she was only 20. For Melbourne theatre-goers, the last chance to see the play was in Red Stitch Actors’ Theatre’s 2014 production, with company member Ngaire Dawn Fair as Eurydice. Last year, an Off Broadway production starred Maya Hawke (Stranger Things).

This Melbourne Shakespeare Company production is to be directed by Gary Abrahams, and stars Aisha Aidara as Eurydice, Tomas Kantor as Orpheus and John Voce as Eurydice’s father. I last saw Adara as Ophelia in Melbourne Shakespeare Company’s production of Hamlet last year, so it’s exciting to see her cast in this meatier role.

If I can read the theatre tea leaves, this production has all the elements there to be a very moving piece of theatre about family, love, loss, grief and memory – and being set across the realms of the living and the dead, the designers will surely get to stretch their creative legs. I’m looking forward to seeing how this one comes together.

Presented by Melbourne Shakespeare Company, Eurydice is at fortyfivedownstairs from 29 May to 14 June.

Losing Face

Billed as a ‘perimenopausal Weekend at Bernie’s’, the description alone is enough to sell me on this new play opening in June at Melbourne Theatre Company. Precision-perfect marketing copy aside, underneath the hood, Losing Face has all the ingredients for a winner-winner-chicken-dinner of a night out (most likely with the gals, let’s face it).

First up, behind the pen is AWGIE Award-winning Australian screenwriter and playwright Marieke Hardy (Laid), whose particular brand of fast-paced, whip-smart and socially searing comedy writing already gives this play a pretty strong pedigree.

Then there’s the premise: a group of besties head to a wellness resort to celebrate one of the group’s 50th, where their expectations of a pampering weekend of catch-ups is turned upside down when they arrive to discover the fancy medispa is upselling supercharged cosmetic procedures to guests. Yikes! 

On top of this, you’ve got a belter of a cast of top-tier comedy actors, including NZ actor Michala Banas (Upper Middle Bogan), NZ comedian and actor Madeleine Sami (Deadloch), Aussie actor Christie Whelan Browne (Kimberly Akimbo: A Musical) and Aussie comedian and actor Genevieve Morris (Dying: A Memoir, Deadloch).

Losing Face has been commissioned by MTC and supported as part of their Next Stage Writers’ program, which continues to put out some absolutely cracking new theatre in Melbourne – and my bet is this one will also appeal to your hard-to-drag-to-the-theatre mates. Sure to be a romp.  

Losing Face is at Southbank Theatre from 22 June to 25 July.

Nowhere

If you’re looking for theatre that is political and personal and very much for our times – look no further. This one-man play is written and performed by British-Egyptian actor Khalid Abdalla (The Crown) and comes to Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre as part of RISING.

In a world that feels increasingly divided, Abdalla’s ‘anti-biography’ Nowhere explores what it means to belong – or not belong – as he shares his experiences growing up in London as the son of political dissidents, as an activist in Egypt during the Arab Spring protests in the 2010s and being typecast as an Arab actor for a role as a 9/11 plane hijacker.  

The multimedia show combines dance, photography and audience interaction, as Abdalla reflects on his own personal grief after the death of a friend in 2023, about Gaza and about the impact of Western colonialism throughout South West Asia and Northern Africa.

Nowhere made its Australian premiere at the Sydney Festival in January, in a climate of national mourning and trauma after the Bondi terrorist attack when 15 people died. Soon after, the Adelaide Writers’ Festival board disinvited Palestinian-Australian writer Randa Abdel-Fattah citing her inclusion would not be ‘culturally sensitive’ – sparking a major participant boycott of the festival, leading to the festival being cancelled, festival director Louise Adler resigning, followed by the entire board.

As our arts industry has continued to be plagued with controversies over censorship, Abdalla’s Nowhere stands as an example of why we need to be able to hear different stories, and to not have others dictate what stories we may hear.

Abdalla has spoken publicly about the creation of Nowhere being an act of exercising his freedom of expression – as well as the need to balance the many heavy themes of the play with moments of lightness and play.

My sense is that Nowhere will be a much-needed reminder of the need for art and open expression in making sense of the world, a rallying call against artistic censorship and a reminder of how storytelling is a path to empathy, helping us reach across the cultural chasm widened by fear and deepened by righteousness.  

Abdalla’s play stands as an invitation to a theatrical experience that aims to connect rather than divide, through the power of the personal and that oh-so-fearless act of storytelling.

Nowhere is at Malthouse Theatre from 2 to 6 June as part of RISING 2026.

More Melbourne highlights for the calendar

Some other notables I think worth checking out in June are MR BIG aka Tatay, A Transwoman and That Tiring Tune! at fortyfivedownstairs, a dark comedy by trans Filipina artist, actor and writer Dax Carnay-Hanrahan and directed by Beng Oh, and The Wolves at Theatre Works, a 2017 Pulitzer Prize finalist play about an American girls’ soccer team by Sarah Delappe, which looks set to offer a theatrical palate cleanser for those of you with FIFA-fever.

House of Rot is a new cabaret work created by award-winning director and dramaturg Dino Dimitriadias (Angels in American I & II) and musical director Victoria Falconer (My Brilliant Career), House of Rot stars Sydney-based actor, singer and cabaret powerhouse Paul Capsis alongside rising singer-songwriter and actor Adam Noviello.

The Supposed to Be by Chenturan Aran at Footscray Community Arts Centre for RISING also looks like it’ll be a quirky comedy with a philosophical bent about identity and migrant familial expectations.

Although it’s technically billed as dance, I’ll be getting along to see The Shepherds at Arts House, also part of RISING. Some of the most interesting theatre works I’ve seen in recent years have been created or co-curated by multidisciplinary performance artist and theatre-maker Carly Sheppard, so her new ‘dark comedic dance work starring two lost sheep in a slaughter paddock, out to remake Australian mythmaking’, which has been co-created with multidisciplinary choreographer Alisdair Macindoe, sounds like a recipe for a wild night out at the theatre.

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