Trans Theatre Festival

This inaugural program brings together trailblazing work from across Australia and beyond.

The program expands with masterclasses, new play developments, and panels, creating space for dialogue and support for the next wave of trans stories.

Urgent, ambitious, and unapologetically trans, this is a space where artists and audiences can meet to imagine new futures.

The program includes:

BURGERZ

Written and performed by Travis Alabanza

Winner of the Total Theatre Award at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, BURGERZ has been a sell-out sensation across the world since 2018.

After someone threw a burger at them and shouted a transphobic slur, performance artist Travis Alabanza became obsessed with burgers. How they are made, how they feel, and smell. How they travel through the air. How the mayonnaise feels on your skin. This hilarious and heartbreaking show explores how trans people survive and reclaims an act of violence with a side of serious bite.

2026 marks 10 years since that burger slid off Travis’s face on London’s Waterloo Bridge. Come hear a story that remains painfully timely, unsettling and powerful – a triumphant response that has taken Alabanza all around the world.

TAKATĀPUI

By Daley Rangi

Armed with only a microphone and a killer pair of heels, Māori shapeshifter Daley Rangi examines the spectrum of queer joy and violence with love and rage, holding a solitary flame in a blistering call to action.
Takatāpui shines a light on the shadowy events of just one night among many. Grappling with the infinities of self-expression, Rangi unearths the complexities of identity with welcoming levity and candour. How do microaggressions turn macro?
Contested memories unspool, vividly conjured by a compelling combination of visceral lyricism, cavernous soundscapes, disco outbreaks, and macabre humour. An electrifying storm of story and sound, this is transformative storytelling to haunt and to heal.

GULL

By Glace Chase

or, The Most Lamentable Comedie Called Love
(hereto known as the Trans' Revenge)

1665. Plague-stricken London. With the theatres shut and lockdown looming, a doomed actress and her boy-player dresser make one last ruthless decision: Live. They swap roles - and costumes - and break into an Earl’s house. Inside: a Censor, his Wife, a Libertine and a Pantomime Dame - all trapped til dawn. To survive, everyone will have to act for their lives.

From the audacious mind of Glace Chase, Gull gleefully ransacks Shakespeare and Restoration comedy to claim the classics as our own - filthy, fast and fearless; formally dangerous, emotionally generous, and just plain fu*king funny.  

Gull is a razor-sharp sex farce where gender, power and virtue are not what they seem - and nothing will be the same at sunrise.

Trans Theatre Festival: Symposiums

FIRST SYMPOSIUM: SAT 24 JAN 10am-2pm

• Panel Discussion: Trans Theatre - A Global Perspective (with Glace Chase, Dino Dimitriadis and Travis Alabanza)
• Networking morning tea
• Reading of Gull by Glace Chase 

SECOND SYMPOSIUM: SAT 31 JAN 10am-2pm

• Panel Discussion: Trans Intersectionality (panellists announced soon)
• Networking morning tea
• Short presentations of new trans works in development
• Reading of Hermaphroditus by Zoe Terakes 

See malthousetheatre.com.au for more details and to book for symposiums