Highlights include Kate Mulvany in an Ibsen gender-switch, an adaptation of Bliss, and a revival of the Hayes’ Calamity Jane.

The world may be a mad, crazy mess, but rather than wallow in it, Belvoir Artistic Director Eamon Flack has programmed a 2018 season that he hopes looks to the positive and the playful, that celebrates the things that are good and gets angry at the things that aren’t, but with a view to doing something about them.

“There are serious themes in there – about change, about what we want to leave behind and what we want to hold on to. But more than anything it is playfulness – the best human instinct of them all – jazz-like, upbeat, free-spirited – which is the tune,” he writes in the 2018 subscription brochure.

^{Hsiao-Ling Tang and Alex Lee will perform in Single Asian Female. Photographs courtesy of Belvoir}

Speaking to Limelight, Flack says: “Theatre has always been good at that thing of going, ‘this is terrible but it’s also ridiculous and a bit funny’ or ‘this is terrible but rather than...