Sydney Theatre Company has announced its 2019 season, with a swathe of new plays – including the world premieres of works by Nakkiah Lui, Van Badham and Julia Leigh – a new adaption of Friedrich Schiller’s Mary Stuart by Kate Mulvany alongside modern classics like Lord of the Flies, Così and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

According to STC Artistic Director Kip Williams, the season extends on themes of leadership and responsibility presented in this year’s season in works like The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui and Saint Joan. “Conversations about how power is assumed within our society and how power is battled for. Who has an easy path to power in our world and who has a more difficult path to power,” Williams tells Limelight. “And there’s also a shift, inwards in some ways, looking at the most personal of political institutions: the family. So there’s lots of stories about fathers and sons, and mothers and daughters and brothers and sisters – but in particular those centre upon the way in which power operates inside the family.”

These ideas will be nailed to the mast in the first play to...