The Lewis Trilogy has been awarded the Critics' Choice Award for Best Play of 2024 in Time Out Sydney’s inaugural Arts & Culture Awards.
Griffin Theatre Company took a big swing when deciding on a production to farewell their legendary home, The SBW Stables Theatre in Kings Cross (it's currently closed down for a major renovation), and it paid off. A fitting send-off for the home of Aussie writing, The Lewis Trilogy was a loaded triple-bill (more than five hours of theatre in total!) spotlighting the work of legendary playwright Louis Nowra, which opened in February 2024.
An epic experience that could be attempted over multiple evenings or an entire Sunday, this nostalgic and immense production was as much a love letter to Nowra's writing as it is to the spirit of Kings Cross, to Aussie theatre, and to community, wherever we may find it.
The Trilogy was a collaboration between Griffin’s Artistic Director Declan Greene and Louis Nowra himself, associate directed by Daley Rangi (Takatāpui). It brought together Nowra’s two hit 1992 works Summer of the Aliens and Così, and his 2017 return to writing for the stage, This Much is True. The first follows Lewis as a young teenager chasing UFOs on the housing commission, and the second shows us a post-university Lewis directing Così fan tutte at a psychiatric hospital. The third brings us to Woolloomooloo, drinking wine with a drag queen, a meth cooker, a jack-of-all-trades, and other misfits who regularly visit a place like “the Rising Sun Hotel” (aka the Old Fitz, that grand pub with a theatre underneath it, just around the corner from the Stables). The plays could be about Lewis, or Louis, but they aren’t – the true stars are found in the community of vibrant weirdos that surrounds him in each tale, as he moves further and further into the background, observing.
In our reviewer’s words: “You could be between divorces, searching for UFOs, living in a room full of mentally ill people, aspiring to be bigger, aspiring to be smaller – and the magic of The Lewis Trilogy is that there’s a way to find yourself somewhere in the expanse of it all.”