Narelle is Sydney born and bred but lately she’s lost her sense of belonging. Something keeps bringing her back to Pyrmont. This peninsula was her family’s bedrock, and the home of her extraordinary grandmother June, who held everything together through the decades: a son’s brush with the law, a daughter’s battles with demons, a husband’s decline.
Life revolved around the sugar refinery. For a time this was the sweetest neighbourhood in the country. But the family bedrock, like the sugar, has dissolved away. Narelle can’t fix the past, but maybe she can fix the future.
A story of Sydney – work and corruption, family and massive social change. A story of how Australia went from working class to middle class.
‘Valentine, an essential Australian dramatist, writes the marginalised and oft-persecuted fringes of Australia into our dramatic canon with long-denied dignity and grace. The Sugar House is a gift of theatre; an exploration of who we were, who we are and who we wish we could be.’– TIMEOUT
ALANA VALENTINE is an acclaimed dramatist and librettist working in theatre, musical theatre, opera and film. Described by Time Out as ‘an essential Australian dramatist, who writes the marginalised and oft-persecuted fringes of Australia into our dramatic canon with long-denied dignity and grace’, Alana has three plays on the NSW HSC Syllabus – Parramatta Girls (Drama), Shafana and Aunt Sarrinah (English) and Cyberbile (Design). Her play Letters to Lindy, drawn from the 20,000 letters in the National Library of Australia has had hundreds of amateur and school productions. Alana is particularly distinguished in her skills as a co-collaborator having worked in libretto and musical theatre such as Watershed: The Death of Dr Duncan (co-written with Christos Tsiolkas), Wudjang: Not the Past (co-written with Stephen Page) and Barbara and the Camp Dogs (co-written with Ursula Yovich) The latter won the 2019 Helpmann Award for Best Musical and Best Original Score, as well as numerous Green Room Awards. Her most recent plays are Nucleus, Wayside Bride, The Sugar House and arc for erth physical and visual theatre. Alana has chronicled her practice as a close work/verbatim theatre maker in Bowerbird: The Art of Making Theatre Drawn From Life. Her website is www.alanavalentine.com
| Cast Info | 6F, 6M, (doubling available) |
| Genres | Drama, Australian History |
| Themes | Full length play, Significant female roles, Large Cast |
| Audiences | Adult |
| Extent | 128 |
| Edition | CTS |
| Size | 137 x 210 mm |
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