The 2023 season at Melbourne Theatre Company will begin a decisive new chapter in its history. Artistic director Anne-Louise Sarks takes stewardship of an institution rocked by pandemic closures – it was, she concedes, “one of the most shut down theatre companies in the world” – and her first year of programming responds to the inflection point with an exciting blend of fresh and familiar works.

Sarks herself embodies both qualities. She is the first woman to lead the MTC, but her tenure also marks a return to the convention of having a practising theatre director in the role, after her predecessor Brett Sheehy (who had decades of experience programming major arts festivals) took a strictly curatorial approach.

Theatregoers can look forward to the vision of someone who’s lived and breathed the art from a young age. Sarks’ parents were heavily involved in the Genesian Theatre in Sydney – an amateur company named after the patron saint of actors, with alumni including John Bell, Bryan Brown and Baz Luhrmann – and she saw her first show at six or seven.

“I remember going into the dressing room and taking a feather from a feather boa afterwards,” she says. “And I still get a thrill when I walk backstage. Everything artists bring to make a show work – I love the sense of community, the spirit of that, I think.”

Sarks knows Melbourne’s theatre community intimately. Her career took flight as a founding member and eventual head of The Hayloft Project, part of a flourishing of independent theatre earlier this century.

Since then, she’s taken theatre across the world from London to Mexico, India to Finland – extensive globetrotting which confirmed for her the artform’s cultural importance and inclusive power.

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“In the UK, theatre is an integral part of their sense of self. It’s at the centre of society; it isn’t peripheral,” Sarks says. “There’s something we can take from that, and it’s something the MTC should do – tell our stories to make sense of where we’ve come from, who we want to be, what is possible here.”

Her programming puts that principle into action. Six of the 12 offerings in 2023 are new Australian works, reflecting a compelling diversity of experience.