Season highlights include new productions of The Elephant Man and The Black Rider plus Complicite’s immersive The Encounter.

Matthew Lutton, the Artistic Director of Malthouse Theatre in Melbourne, has announced a season for 2017, which he hopes will “spark debate and interrogation. I think it is one of my most outspoken and fearless seasons,” he says. “I feel really excited by how political and provocative a lot of the work is, but at the same time it is really full of entertainment. It has a lot of big debates it wants to start but often does that by using satire, humour, entertainment and anarchy so I think it’s got a lot of energy as well.”

As usual, Lutton didn’t set out with any particular theme in mind but undertook conversations with artists in Melbourne and around the country about the urgent stories and new writing they wanted to see on stage. “Once we started to line up the local work and the international guests, that’s when a few of the themes started to appear, which helped us curate the season. I think a lot of next year is about...