Boomer naturists will face off with a gen Z influencer in an all-nude comedy at Sydney’s Griffin Theatre Company next year, one of five new Australian plays premiering in its 2025 season.
Naturism, by Sydney playwright Ang Collins, is a comedy about a gen Z eco-influencer (played by Camila Ponte Alvarez) on the run who crashes a remote, off-grid bush eco-paradise created by a group of nudist baby boomers. The entire cast will perform nude for most of the play’s duration.
“It’s kind of like a ridiculous, very funny, silly premise,” says Griffin’s artistic director, Declan Greene, who will also direct the show. “But I think the laughter is – like a lot of the best comedies – really in service of something greater. Ang wants to [use nudity to] have this conversation about how vulnerable our species is to our natural environment in a [changing] world.”
Nudity on stage is nothing new, but with cameras on every phone, it presents a different kind of risk for actors. In recent years footage has circulated online of high-profile actors performing nude on Broadway and the West End.
Overseas, some theatres have responded by banning phones and installing infra-red cameras to monitor the audience. Last year, Griffin took a more lo-fi approach, prefacing their production of Sex Magick – which also included nudity – with a strong warning: take your phone out and we’ll stop the show. Happily, audience members were compliant.
“It’s a very brave thing to do,” says Greene. “Like anyone, actors have different relationships with their bodies and with the idea of doing something like this.”
Griffin has engaged intimacy director Chloe Dallimore (who also worked on Sex Magick) as part of the show’s creative team, and nudity will be introduced gradually over the four weeks of rehearsal, so that performers acclimatise to performing while naked.
Ultimately, Greene hopes the nudity will be joyful and liberating for both the cast and the audience.
“I think a lot of the time nudity is used in theatre as a shocking thing, to confront the audience in some way. But I think nudity can also be funny and ridiculous and joyful and playful – and hopefully quite liberating for performers and the audience. I think there’s a beautiful relief when we see bodies on stage that don’t look like sculpted, ridiculous Netflix bodies but reflect the actual reality of what we all look like.”
Within Griffin’s 2025 season, Naturism is not alone in tackling climate change: Birdsong for Tomorrow, a one-man show by theatre-maker and amateur bird watcher Nathan Harrison, explores our changing relationship to the environment through the prism of birds. Greene described it as a “really beautiful show about our relationship with birds and the way we’ve radically shifted how birds interact with the world. It’s also about shifting baseline syndrome: the idea that the human window for perception of our changing environment is dictated by our own lifespan.”
Nucleus, by award-winning playwright Alana Valentine (Ladies Day, Wayside Bride) tackles a different thorny issue – the nuclear power debate – through a complicated relationship between a nuclear engineer and an anti-nuclear campaigner (the latter played by Harry Potter and the Cursed Child star Paula Arundell).
Valentine is the rare veteran in a season dominated by emerging writers, including actors Michelle Lim Davidson (The Newsreader) and Iolanthe (seven methods of killing kylie jenner), who will each star in their own debut plays: Koreaboo, by Lim Davidson, is about a young Australian woman who travels to Korea to meet her birth mother and finds a common language with her in K-pop; and Sistren, by Iolanthe, is a comedy about sisterhood, language and gen Z.
Rounding out the lineup is Dylan Van Den Berg’s award-winning queer Blak love story Whitefella Yella Tree, which will play an encore season at Sydney Theatre Company following a successful premiere at Griffin in 2022.
Developing new Australian work is time-consuming, costly, risky and complex, Greene concedes – but it’s also “the most nourishing thing you can possibly do as a theatre-maker”.
“And that’s the thing that makes Griffin unique and important: we are taking these plays out into the world for the first time.”
In 2025, for the second year in a row, Griffin will present its season at other venues (including Belvoir, Seymour Centre and the Old Fitz) while its Darlinghurst home, SBW Stables Theatre, is undergoing an extensive, $11m renovation.
