COST OF LIVING

ArtsHub

Australian Book Review

Time Out

Limelight

Stage Noise

By Martyna Majok

Co-Directors Priscilla Jackman and Dan Daw
Set and Costume Designer Michael Scott-Mitchell
Lighting Designer John Rayment
Composer & Sound Designer Guy Webster
Rehearsal and Production Photographer: Morgan Roberts
Cast: Dan Daw, Philip Quast, Kate Hood, Zoe de Plevitz
Stage Manager Grant Gravener
Assistant Stage Managers Yanni Dubler, Sophie Woodcock, Brooke Kiss
Theatre Access Assistant to Kate Hood Madeleine Lewis
Personal Assistant to Dan Daw Lauren Smeaton

Australian Premiere: Queensland Theatre and Sydney Theatre Company Co-Production, 2024

About the project

A multi award-winning story of survival

Martyna Majok’s moving and impassioned investigation of human connection and life in an increasingly inaccessible world has its Australian premiere.

2018 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Cost of Living follows the development of two relationships. Ani, a woman with an acquired disability, reconnects with her estranged husband Eddie who is battling feelings of guilt and loneliness. John, a wealthy Princeton student with cerebral palsy, hires Jess, a woman juggling multiple jobs just to stay afloat, as his carer. In a series of intriguing and stirring vignettes, Majok carefully teases out the nuanced power dynamics, pathos and humour of these characters’ lives, whilst also painting a vivid portrait of austerity in the twenty-first century.

Dan Daw (in the role of John) joins forces with co-director Priscilla Jackman, the directorial mind behind 2022’s smash hit RBG: Of Many, One, to bring you one of the best pieces of new writing to emerge from the US in the last decade. Cast also features three time Olivier Award winner Philip Quast, Kate Hood and Zoe de Plevitz. At once urgently contemporary and timeless in its humanity, Cost of Living is an essential theatrical experience, not to be missed.