HARLOTS to Have World Premiere at Old Fitz Theatre

Launching the Old Fitz Theatre's 2026 Act 3 season, New Ghosts Theatre Company (NGTC) will present the world premiere of Emma Wright's Harlots. Performances will run 21 August - 06 September.

Set in an underground refuge, Harlots imagines the women of Shakespeare's plays who were forced into a terrible bargain: 'die to live'. These are the circumstances Shakespeare gave them. The rest is the story he never wrote.

Part critique and part love letter to the Bard, Harlots interrogates one of literature's most enduring legacies, asking what happens when we shift our gaze away from kings, princes and tragic heroes, and towards the women whose stories have so often existed only in relation to them. Four hundred years after Shakespeare put pen to paper, it asks why these cycles of violence remain so painfully familiar.

Shakespeare consigned many of his women to death, and many others to absence, exile or presumed death. Hermione (The Winter's Tale) and Hero (Much Ado About Nothing) survive their narratives only because, for a time, the world believes they have died. Hidden beneath the world above, they wait for the men who wronged them to atone before safely returning to the land of the living.

Harlots asks what happened during that waiting, who else from the canon might have found refuge among them, and who never had the chance. It also poses deeply contemporary questions about why women continue to bear the consequences of violence, why a woman's value is so often realised only in her absence, and what survival can look like within patriarchal systems.

Playwright Emma Wright says the work emerged from both a lifelong admiration of Shakespeare and an equally persistent frustration with his canon.

'I love Shakespeare. But alongside my admiration and awe has always sat frustration. Women account for less than sixteen per cent of his characters and speak fewer than half the lines. Even when his stories revolve around things happening to women, it is so often the men around them who are given the narrative. What might happen if we centred the women who have so often been pushed to the margins? How does one disentangle the brilliance of the canon from the patriarchy that underpins it? Harlots grew from these questions.' - Emma Wright, Playwright

Directed by Janine Watson, Harlots brings together an all-female and non-binary cast and creative team as part of New Ghosts Theatre Company's IGNITE Collective, championing greater gender equity in Australian theatre while creating new opportunities for women and non-binary artists across every aspect of production.

With a phenomenal cast including 'Ana Ika (The Almighty Sometimes, BLACK SWAN Theatre Company), Ella Prince (Henry V, Bell Shakespeare, Do Not Pass Go, MTC), Hannah Waterman (Naturism, Griffin, Mary Poppins, Michael Cassel Group), Jo Downing (Othello, Bell Shakespeare, The Social Ladder, Ensemble), Madeline Li (Three Sisters, Last Waltz Productions, Romeo & Juliet, Bell Shakespeare) and Megan O'Connell (Much Ado About Nothing, Sport for Jove, Port, KXT), Harlots offers the rare opportunity to experience performers of extraordinary calibre up close in Sydney's smallest dedicated theatre.

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