Jasper Jones

The 2016 smash hit returns to Belvoir for a quick season in January 2017 and then hits the road.

The backblocks of Western Australia. It’s 1965 and Charlie Bucktin’s thirteen and smart. But when blamed-for-everything Jasper Jones appears at his window one night, Charlie’s out of his depth. Jasper has stumbled on the body of a local girl in the scrub, and he knows he’s the first suspect – that goes with the colour of his skin. He needs every ounce of Charlie’s brains if the truth is to emerge before Jasper finds himself at the pointy end of a deep anger.

As the boys negotiate the secrets of a small town, the winds of change blow – but how do teenage Australians solve the riddles of a Grown-Up World?

Kate Mulvany’s adaptation of Craig Silvey’s award-winning novel is daggy-funny and wise. A coming-of-age story for a generation, and a nation too.

It’s clear that there’s something deeply binding about this show, and very human. It already feels like a classic. It poured out delight in 2016, and the clamour for tickets was so, well, huge, we felt we couldn’t leave it at that. – Eamon

Kate Box
Tom Conroy
Steve Le Marquand
Matilda Ridgway
Guy Simon

Based on the novel by Craig Silvey
Adapted by Kate Mulvany
Director Anne-Louise Sarks
Set Designer Michael Hankin
Costume Designer Mel Page
Lighting Designer Matt Scott
Composer & Sound Designer Steve Toulmin
Fight Choreographer Scott Witt
Choreographer Sara Black
Indigenous Advisor Jada Alberts
Stage Manager Isabella Kerdijk
Assistant Stage Manager Jennifer Pasonage

Merrigong Theatre Company
22-25 February, 2017

Civic Theatre Newcastle
1-4 March, 2017

This piercing adaptation is very much worth seeing for the way it depicts – and shows ways across – some of the deep and enduring divides in our society.

Jason Blake | The Sydney Morning Herald

This much-loved novel is given a beautiful stage treatment in Kate Mulvany’s adaptation. Anne-Louise Sarks’s warm and lively production … is brilliantly cast.

John McCallum | The Australian

This is a moving, astute and often very funny production…

Ben Neutze | Daily Review

Mulvany has created something crackling and genuine here, a glimpse of racial and gender inequity in our all-too recent past. Take a teen.

Cassie Tounge | Aussie Theatre

…the creatively rich production that opens Belvoir’s 2016 with that most welcome phenomenon: the big fat, satisfying, thought-provoking, laugh-making, tear-jerking smash hit.

Diana Simmonds | Stage Noise