The play's the thing: What's in store for Launceston's local theatre companies' 2024?

Several of the city's major theatre troupes have let slip the productions they're putting together for 2024 - and it's another stage-storming year.

Detective dramas and dynamic musicals - as well as heart-rending stories of prejudicial murders - will play in Launceston next year, courtesy of the city's theatre companies.

And, although more productions are expected for announcement, The Examiner has taken an early dive into the shows from local actors and directors that you won't want to miss next year.

Launceston Players bring black comedy to the Earl Arts

The earliest production to arrive on our list is a lauded, Laurence Oliver award-winning play of dark themes being brought to the stage by the Launceston Players: Martin McDonagh's The Pillowman.

The British-Irish playwright - famed for films like In Bruges and The Banshees of Inisherin - has penned the story of a short story writer, Katurian, who becomes embroiled in his own real-life detective story.

To be directed for the Players by local Mitchell Langley, Pillowman takes on the horrifying subject of several child murders, which Karturian is arrested and interrogated for when police realise his short stories have an uncanny resemblance to the recent crimes.

But, his brother Michal has also been arrested in connection to the murders, and detectives Tupolski and Ariel - a good cop, bad cop duo - are trying to wrestle a confession from the pair.

The Launceston Players' iteration of The Pillowman - which treats its themes with a gallows humour not uncommon to McDonogh's work - is set for the Earl Arts Centre in April 2024.

Encore Theatre Company says, "It's your move"

With the Cold War at its coldest, every frontier is as important as the last - which is why a chess tournament between two grandmasters, one Soviet, the other American, becomes a point of political contest in Encore Theatre Company's upcoming musical.

The long-standing troupe will bring the Broadway darling Chess The Musical to the stage with some of Tasmania's finest voices in March, including the likes of Dean Cocker as Russian grandmaster Anatoly Sergievsky and Scott Farrow as American Freddie Trumper.

And to make it even better, Chess is backed by the music of ABBA legend's Benny Andersson and Bjrn Ulvaeu, who lent the production a pop-rock score of hit singles like One Night in Bangkok and I Know Him So Well.

But, despite the chilly political climate, Chess isn't a frigid, boring political contest, it's a heated one: the grandmaster pair's fight isn't just over the world championship, nor the Soviet Bloc versus the Land of the Free - it's over the love of a woman.

Samantha Hammersley will play Florence Vassy, the manager of one of the chess champions who has fallen in love with the other.

Chess The Musical will arrive at the Princess Theatre from March 8 to 23, with tickets already available at the Theatre North Website.

IO Performance to give a leg-up to emerging directors

IO Performance is staying tight-lipped about its upcoming season, with a launch for the group's 2024 productions to be announced in January.

But the city's newest troupe has let audiences know that plenty of emerging and early career artists and directors will be getting their starts and putting on performances at their Cimitiere Street home.

Antonio Zanchetta, Steph Francis, Grace Roberts and Chris Jackson will grace IO's director's chair in 2024, with details to come about what they'll be bringing to the stage.

Three River Theatre travels to Laramie

In 1998, Matthew Shepard was crucified on a fence in the small town of Laramie, Wyoming. He was 21, and died six days later in a hospital.

He had been beaten to death because he was gay.

Months after, Moisés Kaufman and the New York-based Tectonic Theatre Project travelled to the tiny American town to piece together Sheppard's story, which eventually became the verbatim theatre play The Laramie Project.

Rather than being a dramatisation of events, Kaufman's play is a "human story of choices, prejudice, hatred and the unpeeling of a town in all its confluences, conflicts and contradictions", and will be Three River Theatre Company's first August production at the Earl Arts Centre.

Using the actual words of the people of Laramie, the ensemble-cast play takes the personal narratives of what was a single, appalling crime and turns it into a mosaic of humanity, and cements Sheppard's enduring legacy

Three River Theatre Company's The Laramie Project will arrive in August at the Earl Arts Centre.

The Player's year of murder and mystery

The Launceston Players' second announced production of the year will arrive in the year's later half, and again takes on a ghoulish incident of murder most foul.

The troupe will bring to life The Curious Incident of The Dog in the Night Time, a play based on the best-selling novel by Mark Haddon and adapted for the stage by Simon Stephens.

The extraordinary thinker and 15-year-old Christopher - a savant-level mathematician and observer of things nobody else sees - struggles with everyday life; in fact, he's never ventured alone beyond the end of the street.

However, Christopher finds himself in a compromising position one night: he's in the front yard, it's seven minutes to midnight, and Mrs Shears' dog is lying dead at his feet, a garden fork in its neck.

It looks bad for the young man; but he didn't do it, but he'll certainly be the chief suspect and public enemy number one.

So who can solve the mystery? Only Christopher, of course. And what he uncovers takes him on a journey that even he couldn't have predicted.

The Curious Case is set to be directed by local theatre legend Jeff Hockley, and play at the Earl Arts Centre in September.