Australia's first trans theatre festival is here, and it's not messing around

Four major works, two symposiums, and a month of unapologetically trans storytelling across Sydney and Melbourne.

Told by Paige Turner · 20 September 2026

Australia's first trans theatre festival is running right now, and it is not a gesture or a panel — it is a full programme of work that has already sold out rooms overseas, plus two symposiums built to support the next generation of trans artists.

The Australian Trans Theatre Festival, co-presented by Green Door Theatre Company, Carriageworks and Malthouse Theatre under artistic director Dino Dimitriadis, runs 7–18 January at Carriageworks in Sydney and 21–31 January at Malthouse Theatre in Melbourne. It is the first festival in Australia dedicated entirely to the voices and visions of trans and gender diverse theatre artists, and the programme does not apologise for that.

Headlining is Travis Alabanza with BURGERZ, the first time Alabanza has performed the work in Australia. Winner of the Total Theatre Award at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, BURGERZ has been a sell-out sensation across the world since 2018. The show began after someone threw a burger at Alabanza and shouted a transphobic slur, and Alabanza became obsessed with how burgers are made, how they feel, how they travel through the air, how the mayonnaise feels on your skin. 2026 marks 10 years since that burger slid off Alabanza's face on London's Waterloo Bridge, and the show remains painfully timely — a triumphant response that has taken Alabanza all around the world, now landing here.

Alongside BURGERZ, the programme features Daley Rangi's Takatāpui, a solo performance examining the spectrum of queer joy and violence with love and rage, holding a solitary flame in a blistering call to action. Rangi, a Māori shapeshifter armed with only a microphone and a killer pair of heels, unearths the complexities of identity with welcoming levity and candour, grappling with how microaggressions turn macro through visceral lyricism, cavernous soundscapes, disco outbreaks, and macabre humour.

Glace Chase brings Gull, a razor-sharp sex farce set in plague-stricken London, 1665, where a doomed actress and her boy-player dresser swap roles and costumes to survive, breaking into an Earl's house and trapping everyone inside til dawn. Chase gleefully ransacks Shakespeare and Restoration comedy to claim the classics as our own — filthy, fast and fearless, formally dangerous, emotionally generous, and just plain fucking funny. Gender, power and virtue are not what they seem, and nothing will be the same at sunrise.

Zoe Terakes presents a staged reading of Hermaphroditus, a love letter to trans people who find their way home through fists and words that burn, to ethnic queers, to anyone who has been ripped away from their own life and had to fight their way back in. Directed by Declan Greene, the work begins as a young, charged Greek boy with a fat crush on his Arab best friend, floating through nights out, sex, drugs, until an assault in a toilet cubicle changes everything. Two enter the cubicle, and only one exits.

The festival expands beyond performance with two symposiums at Malthouse. The first, 24 January, features a panel on Trans Theatre: A Global Perspective with Glace Chase, Dino Dimitriadis and Travis Alabanza, networking morning tea, and a reading of Gull. The second, 31 January, focuses on Trans Intersectionality, with short presentations of new trans works in development and a reading of Hermaphroditus. The symposiums create space for dialogue and support for the next wave of trans stories through masterclasses, new play developments, and panels.

This is urgent, ambitious, unapologetically trans-lensed storytelling, and it is a space where artists and audiences can meet to imagine new futures. The work is here, the artists are here, and the room is open.