Up to 245,000 people annually attend performances at the Melbourne Theatre Company.
It is the oldest professional theatre company in Australia and is the major provider of main stage drama entertainment in Melbourne.
The company’s mission is to produce classic and contemporary Australian and international theatre with style, passion and world class artistic excellence. The company performs all year around producing 10 to 12 plays each year in a Melbourne subscription season.
MTC regularly tours productions around Victoria as well as to other capital cities and regional centres, and provides an education program for over 30,000 high school students annually.
Founded in 1953, Melbourne Theatre Company is the oldest professional theatre company in Australia. It is a semi-autonomous department of the University of Melbourne. It is not only Victoria’s major theatre company and one of the major performing arts companies in Australia, but one of the largest theatre companies in the English-speaking world.
In 2009, the MTC Theatre, the Company’s new performance home, opens on Southbank Boulevard in the heart of Melbourne’s cultural precinct, allowing much of the season to be performed on the new 500-seat stage of the Sumner Theatre. The new MTC Theatre is a stridently Melbournian building to designed to reflect the company’s energised progressive qualities.
A spectacle of illumination and shape designed for night viewing, the MTC Theatre is a work of art for the performing arts. The MTC Theatre houses the Sumner Theatre, a state-of-the-art 500-seat venue, and the flexible Lawler Studio for more small-scale and edgy work. There are spacious foyers, a box office, a cafe and bars open for each performance.
The Melbourne Theatre Company is based in the Ferrars Street complex in Southbank, Victoria, which serves as its administrative, costuming and rehearsal base. It has also recently produced shows in the Merlyn and Beckett Theatres at the CUB Malthouse and in Space 28 of the Victorian College of the Arts.
