Southbank Theatre

Southbank Theatre — Melbourne Theatre Company’s home venue

Southbank Theatre sits at 140 Southbank Boulevard in the Southbank arts precinct, two minutes’ walk from the Melbourne Recital Centre and five from the Arts Centre Melbourne. The building opened in 2009 as the purpose-built home of Melbourne Theatre Company after a quarter-century of split tenancy across the Russell Street Theatre and the Athenaeum. The complex contains two performance spaces — the Sumner Theatre as the principal mainstage, and the Lawler Theatre upstairs as the chamber-format second stage.

The rooms

• Sumner Theatre — 480 seats, configurable thrust-stage layout. The principal MTC mainstage with excellent sightlines throughout. Front-half stalls and circle middle are the high-value seats.
• Lawler Theatre — 148 seats, intimate chamber-theatre format. Used for MTC’s smaller-scale productions, premieres of new Australian playwriting, and the company’s emerging-artist programmes.

Getting there

Walk from Flinders Street Station (5 min via Princes Bridge); tram on routes 70, 75, 1, 3 along St Kilda Road. The on-site car park serves both the Southbank Theatre and the Melbourne Recital Centre next door — convenient for a paired evening. The Southbank dining radius covers the Vue de Monde rooftop, Florentino, Coda and MoVida — all within ten to fifteen minutes’ walk.