Kindness
Tickets on sale 8 May
Book NowAbout the show
By Matthew Whittet
Directed by Jessica Arthur
World Premiere
“I feel like I've got a hole in my chest... it's getting bigger."
Lukas isn’t in a good place. He hasn’t been for some time.
His friends Claude, Song and Dylan can’t sit by and watch anymore. Tenderly and patiently, they start to tell each other stories. Of the moments they all met. Of the times they were complete idiots. They tell these stories because they know their friend Lukas also needs to tell his. His life depends on it.
This group of 20-year-olds are there for each other in the only way they know how – with ridiculous stupidity, blunt honesty, and unconditional joy.
The simplest acts of kindness are sometimes the most important.
Matthew Whittet is an actor and writer who has worked extensively in theatre, film and television for 20 years. His plays include Silver, Fugitive, Harbinger, Old Man, Girl Asleep, School Dance, Big Bad Wolf, and Seventeen. His feature film adaptation of Girl Asleep won many awards and he has also written for Heartbreak High.
Jessica Arthur was Resident Director of Sydney Theatre Company from 2019-2022. She has created work for STC, Belvoir, Griffin, Melbourne Theatre Company, Red Line Productions and Schauspiel Frankfurt. She is a graduate of NIDA Master of Fine Arts (Directing).
Content Warning:
Kindness contains themes of suicide, self-harm, substance abuse and addiction. This production includes the use of haze/fog, strobe lighting and strong language.
About the writer
Matthew is an actor and writer who has worked extensively in theatre, film and television for the past 20 years. Matthew’s first play Twelve was workshopped at the National Playwrights Conference in Perth, 2006. His second was Silver, directed by Ben Winspear for Belvoir downstairs, in which he also performed solo. In 2010, two further plays premiered in Adelaide; Fugitive (Windmill) and Harbinger (Brink Productions), beginning what has become an ongoing creative bond with the city and its audiences.
In the same year, Matthew was the Philip Parsons Young Playwright Award recipient sparking the development of the play Old Man which premiered downstairs in Belvoir’s 2012 season.
Matthew’s collaboration with Windmill has resulted in four plays, with Girl Asleep being the most recent. Its predecessors are the Helpmann and Sydney Theatre Award-winning School Dance and trilogy stablemate Big Bad Wolf. All three of these plays were concurrently performed at the Adelaide Festival (2014). Matthew’s two-hander Cinderella garnered outstanding reviews at the close of 2014 in the Belvoir downstairs space, and the premiere of his 2015 play Seventeen was a huge success in the upstairs theatre. In 2017, it had a season at London’s Lyric Hammersmith Theatre.
Matthew’s feature film adaptation of his play Girl Asleep (supported by The Hive Production Fund) debuted at the Adelaide Film Festival and went on to open the 2016 Generation 14plus Programme at Berlin International Film Festival. It also won The Age Critics’ Award for Best Film at Melbourne International Film Festival, the 2016 CinefestOz Prize, the Australian Film Critics Association award for Best Film, and the Seattle Film Festival Grand and Youth Jury Prizes. Its release nationally and internationally was followed by a free-to-air screening on ABC TV.
Matthew’s play Fight with All Your Might the Zombies of the Night, winner of the 2015 Foundation Commission Award, premiered at ATYP in November 2016. Matthew was among the seven Sidney Myer Creative Fellows chosen in 2012, and he is currently adapting his play School Dance to feature. In 2020, Matthew’s play No Need to Hide a Light When it Shines Like Hers was the Inaugural Online Voters’ Prize winner for Griffin’s Lysicrates Prize.
In television, Matthew has written for the Netflix / Fremantle reboot of Heartbreak High and has an original television series in development with Goalpost Pictures.
About the director
Jessica is a theatre director and co-founder of The Anchor theatre company. She was Resident Director at Sydney Theatre Company 2018 – 2022, directing productions such as Chalkface, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Wonnangatta, Banging Denmark, Mosquitos and Home I’m Darling.
Jessica also worked as Assistant Director on The Harp in the South Part I and Part II, Dinner, Chimerica and Endgame for Sydney Theatre Company, as well as Miss Julie for Melbourne Theatre Company.
Further productions Jess has directed include Two Hearts (King Cross Theatre), The Wolves (Old Fitz) and itx subsequent Belvoir season, Realism (NIDA), Intoxication (La Mama Courthouse) and Unend (Never Never Theatre Company), which went on to play at the Adelaide and Sydney Fringe Festivals.
Jessica also directed for the Martin Lysicrates Prize for Griffin Theatre at the National Theatre of Parramatta. Her most recent production was the world premiere of Lose To Win for Red Line Productions.
