Sydney Fringe Festival Unveils First Highlights of the 2025 Program

Sydney Fringe Festival, New South Wales’ largest independent arts festival, has revealed the first highlights of its 2025 program taking over the city from 1 - 30 September. Marking CEO and Festival Director Kerri Glasscock’s final program after 12 years in the role, announced highlights include inaugural collaborations with Canberra Theatre Centre and Merrigong Theatre Company bringing locally made works to the Sydney stage, and the annual Touring Hub showcasing smash-hit shows from around the world. 

Kerri Glasscock, CEO and Festival Director, said: “I’m delighted that I can announce a first glimpse into the dynamic 2025 program, which includes exciting new collaborations with performing arts organisations in Canberra and Wollongong, and powerful, original work by leading theatre-makers from Australia and around the world. The 2025 program is a celebration of the bold, diverse voices that make our arts community so vibrant.”

Overseeing my final Sydney Fringe program as Festival Director has been a deeply rewarding experience and I’m incredibly proud of how far this festival has come. Over the past 12 years, we’ve grown from a small community event into a NSW Foundation Event and the largest independent arts festival in the state, unlocking underused spaces that have strengthened the cultural fabric of the city and forging lasting partnerships that have brought groundbreaking work to Sydney stages.”

Showcasing the best of Sydney’s independent theatre-makers, festival staple Made in Sydney presents two incredible contemporary works across two weeks at PACT Centre for Emerging Artists. Multi-award-winning theatre maker, writer and actor Charlotte Otton brings her darkly comedic one-woman show I Watched Someone Die on TikTok about the unsettling experience of navigating today’s digital hellscape; and Māori artist Daley Rangi will present their show Takatāpui, a deeply personal exploration of their lived experience of gender, sexuality and culture.  

For the first time ever Sydney Fringe is teaming up with Canberra Theatre Centre’s NEW WORKS program to present Made in Canberra at PACT. Delivered straight from the nation’s capital, this week-long program includes an inventive dance experience SUPERPOSITION by Gabriel Sinclair and Jazmyn Carter informed by principles of quantum mechanics and incorporating a continually evolving soundscape; and the Sydney premiere of actor and playwright Christopher Samuel Carroll’s thrilling solo performance The Cadaver Palaver: A Bennett Cooper Sullivan Adventure. Presented in collaboration with Merrigong Theatre Company’s MERRIGONGX, the inaugural Made in Wollongong program will feature local independent works including The Cardinal Rules, an innovative eulogy inspired by actor, theatre-maker and clown Rose Maher’s Catholic upbringing; and new musical work Dear Diary by Kay Proudlove, taking audiences on a journey through a collection of intimate and vulnerable stories and songs. 

Featuring a diverse lineup of boundary-pushing shows from the international Fringe circuit, the Touring Hub finds it home once again at New Theatre in Newtown. Highlights include prolific Singaporean playwright and performer Jo Tan’s one-woman show King. A tour de force performance examining stereotypes, gender construction and discrimination, the work tells the story of a public relations executive who decides to attend an office party in the guise of a man. Joining the program is leading Danish performance company Himherandit Productions’s electrifying, high-intensity dance work Mass Effect exploring physical endurance and group dynamics; spooky, all-ages fantasy adventure Shadow Necropolis, featuring cinematic Japanese shadow puppetry; and Melbourne-based emerging theatre collective Pummel Squad’s madcap work of self-discovery Twenty Million Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Following on from last year’s critically acclaimed Drink Rum With Expats, UK Fringe icons Sh!t Theatre are back with Or What’s Left Of Us, a heartwarming new show on folk music and grief. 

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