Stray and The Parricide

Stray is a Homeric odyssey told from the perspective of a stray dog as he journeys through Melbourne's urban landscape. Raw performance, a designed soundscape and an epic and poetic text combine to create an extraordinary adventure.

The Parricide is set in St Petersburg, Russia, 1866. Nihilist revolutionaries have taken to the streets and the rule of the Tsar is under threat. In a small flat, Fyodor Dostoyevsky grafts out a novel for an unscrupulous publisher; it isn't the novel he wants to write, but he is under contract, so he works. All the time, though, he is haunted by a story from his past - that of a parricide, a young man who kills his father. As the characters in his imagination take shape around him, he finds himself forced to choose between rebellion and repression, authority and chaos, passion and love.

DIANE STUBBINGS is a writer and reviewer. Her plays include The Parricide, The Possibility of Zero, These are the Things, Void, Entangled, The Annotations, Darkwater and Willowdene. Stubbings' work has been four times shortlisted for the Rodney Seaborn Playwrights' Award and three times longlisted for the Queensland Premier's Drama Award. She is the recipient of an RE Ross Trust Development Award, and a Grace Marion Wilson Fellowship. Her plays have also been shortlisted for the Griffin Award, and the Internationalists' Global Playwriting Competition, and longlisted for the Theatre 503 (UK) Playwriting Award. Stubbings' fiction reviews have appeared in The Australian, The Canberra Times and the Sydney Review of Books. She has written essays for Sydney Theatre Company programs, and published a work of literary criticism. Stubbings is a graduate of the Victorian College of the Arts.