Michael Gow’s Toy Symphony is returning to Sydney in June 2026, with a new production at The Sutherland Pavilion to mark the venue’s 50th anniversary. It will be the first professional Sydney staging of the play since its 2007 premiere at Belvoir Company B, where it was highly praised and went on to win a Helpmann Award for Best New Australian Work.
This time round, Gow is directing the production.
Toy Symphony is widely regarded as Gow’s most autobiographical work. It follows a writer named Roland, a character first introduced in Furious (one of Gow’s earlier works), as he struggles through a creative drought. Like his protagonist Roland, Gow is returning to the Sutherland Shire and to the memories that shaped him. In doing so, he reflects the play’s central idea: that no matter how far an artist goes in life, the imagination formed in childhood continues to influence and pull at their work.
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Gow has spoken about how unusual it is for a playwright to revisit their own text in this way, particularly in the place that shaped it. The Shire, where he grew up, forms the emotional backbone of the play. Directing it there now reads as both a professional decision and a personal reckoning.
In 2007, critics described the script as tightly constructed and cleverly layered, full of puzzles that unfold inside other puzzles. That structural playfulness echoes the piece that gives the drama its title, the 18th-century Toy Symphony, a composition written for strings and children’s toy instruments, and long subject to debate over its authorship. In Gow’s hands, the reference becomes a metaphor for how creativity can feel fragile and slightly chaotic, yet still coherent.
Award-winning actor Sam O’Sullivan will take on the role of Roland. His theatre credits include Ensemble Theatre, Belvoir St. Theatre and Sport for Jove, as well as screen appearances in NCIS: Sydney and Home and Away.
Gow has pointed to a cultural landscape increasingly crowded with reboots, safe intellectual property and technology-driven entertainment, and suggested that the play’s core question still stands: what does it mean to make something original, and why does it matter?
The Sutherland Pavilion production will also draw on emerging and established performers from the local area, reinforcing the sense of return. Casting details will be revealed in May.
- What: Toy Symphony at The Sutherland Pavilion.
- Where: 30 Eton Street, Sutherland NSW 2232
- When: June 18-20, 2026
- Tickets on sale now