Laura Lethlean is an Australian writer and theatre maker. Her work has been described as “conscious drama that boasts great stage and lighting design, puppetry and visual reveals.” (Cameron Woodhead, the Age, 2013).
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ABOUT

ABOUT

Laura Lethlean is a published playwright and theatre maker living and working on the lands of the Wurundjeri, Woi Wurrung and Bunnurong people. Lethlean trained at NIDA, receiving a Master of Fine Arts in Writing for Performance in 2015.

Laura is a co-founder of The Anchor Theatre Company, a Melbourne based theatre company creating ‘new and insightful theatre that is dramatically absorbing and daring in style and technique.’ (Stage Whispers, October 2019). After forming The Anchor in 2015 with directors Katie Cawthorne and Jessica Arthur, several of Laura's plays have been produced for theatre and festival audiences, including, How Are You (DESIGNcanberra Festival 2015), The Three Graces (Theatre Works 2019), Two Hearts (Kings Cross Theatre 2018 and The Butterfly Club 2019, published by Australian Plays Transform), Pillow Fight (Gasworks Arts Park 2022). In 2020, Pillow Fight was shortlisted for the Max Afford Playwrights Award and in 2021 it was shortlisted for STC’s Patrick White Award. The play premiered as a co-production with Gasworks Arts Park as a part of the Melbourne International Fringe Festival in 2022, where it won a Tour Ready Award and has subsequently toured to Wellington, New Zealand and Castlemaine State Festival in Victoria. In 2023, it will also tour to Glen Ira Story Telling Festival.

Laura’s ongoing collaboration with Katie Cawthorne has led to The Anchor’s process of devising. With each project, the pair utilises their robust artistic practice, based on collaboration, inviting individual creatives and performers to join the team and employing a network of artists across Australia and New Zealand. The Anchor explored their process in 2020 at Footscray’s Bluestone Church residency to make a short piece of physical theatre called Circuit, which they toured to Canberra’s Art Not Apart festival. They then received significant funding from The City of Port Phillip to develop a longer version of this piece, entitled Rope Burn, in 2021. Cawthorne and Lethlean have worked together on commissions such as Fading (Canberra Youth Theatre, 2018), The Cockatoo (Victorian Seniors Festival, 2020) and Honey (The National Drama School, 2021)

In 2023, Laura was commissioned by the Sydney Chamber Opera to write the libretto for The Aphrodite Complex, composed by Nico Muhly. She is also apart of Theatre Works’ She Writes Collective, where she is being supported to write her next play, Plunder.

Lethlean wrote and directed her first play, Plastic Pacific, for The Substation’s Fringe Festival season in 2013, receiving a ‘Get it On’ grant to fund the production. Her NIDA graduating play, The Space Between the Fuel and the Fire, was selected for production at NIDA in 2016 and subsequently published by NoPassport Press. Laura’s longer form writing has been published by the Wheeler Centre and Vice Magazine.

“Let me just say writer Laura Lethlean and director Katie Cawthorne are a powerhouse duo and all elements of this production are masterfully executed.”
- Lucy Lucas on Pillow Fight, Theatre Travels 2022

“This piece of theatre is beautifully presented – the script, set, lighting and performances are all first class.”
- Maryanne Cathro on Pillow Fight, Theatre Review 2023

“A sensational production led by an exceptional team, it’s a show not to be missed. I look forward to what the Anchor Theatre Company produces next.”
- Irene Bell on The Three Graces, Theatre Press, 2019

“The Anchor theatre company has provided new and insightful theatrical challenges that are dramatically absorbing and daring in style and technique.”
- Flora Georgiou on Two Hearts, Stage Whispers, 2019

“The Anchor Theatre Company lends heart to the future of theatre that looks to the future and is not manacled by tradition, but has learnt from it.”
- Peter Wilkins on How Are You, Canberra Critic Circle 2015

“In each of Lethlean’s plays she is constantly driving forth a strong message that leaves us with new ideas. She is confident in what she portrays across her stage, bringing out a collection of emotions and ideas that twirl around within our mind. “
- Lara Franzi, PLAYWAVE 2018

“Playwright Laura Lethlean is a restive thinker with a keen ear for contradictions and obfuscations in language that speaks to the failures between communication, intention and experience.”
- Lisa Thatcher 2018

“Lethlean excels in projecting people’s inner thoughts about their relationships with others onto the stage.”
- Jenna Schroder, Audrey Journal 2018

“The strength of the night is the writing detail from scene to scene from Ms Lethlean – its preoccupations are indeed off-centre, quirky and refreshing”
- Kevin Jackson, The Blurb Magazine 2018

“Laura Lethlean excels in projecting people’s inner thoughts about their relationships with others onto the stage.”
- Audrey Journal 2018

"Skilfully crafted exposés that shift and turn, avoiding the banal, the predictable and the cliché, while at the same time establishing relationships and interactions with an instantly recognisable truth.”
- Peter Wilkins, Canberra Critics Circle, 2015

“Conscious drama that boasts great stage and lighting design, puppetry and visual reveals.”
- Cameron Woodhead, the Age, 2013