Sydney Theatre Company is playing it safe in 2025 with a suite of plays “set to inspire and delight” according to former Artistic Director Kip Williams, who programmed the season. Opening with US writer Amy Herzog’s intergenerational heart-warmer (which has been produced in Sydney before – and very effectively – in 2013) is about as safe as it gets.

Still, if “inspire and delight” is your mantra, it’s an ideal property – a warm, wise and pithy character study of two people from very different generations stuck in an uncertain present.

Nancye Hayes and Shiv Palekar in 4000 Miles. Photo © Daniel Boud

4000 Miles begins with the arrival of 21-year-old Leo (Shiv Palekar) at his 91-year-old grandmother’s Greenwich Village apartment at the end of what was meant to be a character-building, malaise-busting west-to-east bicycle ride across America.

Leo plans to stay a day with grandma Vera (Nancye Hayes), get some sleep, dip his bike’s front wheel into the sea somewhere (the required ritual to mark the end of a cross-country cycling odyssey, apparently), and head back west again.

But the overnighter turns into weeks and Leo becomes fixture in Vera’s rent-controlled time...