Fuck Your Funding

Welcome to a Melbourne theatre awards night, a night of decadence, schmoozing, and... hostage negotiations? Fuck Your Funding is a thrilling site-specific look at how art gets made in Australia in 2026, created by a multi-award winning team of emerging queer theatre makers.

A decade of cuts to arts funding has left Australia’s performing arts in hyper-crisis. No schools. No venues. No money. All that’s left is a legion of livid artists prepared to take matters into their own hands.

So, while a pack of indie theatre makers take the arts minister hostage at the biggest awards night of the year, one over-funded and over-nominated Opera soprano goes on the run to keep the money flowing and the doors locked behind her.

Written by Ryan Hamilton, the multi-award-winning Fringe artist that co-created Full Cream (Winner of the Melbourne Fringe Emerging Company Incubator award in 2023), the work dissects so-called Australia’s ambivalence to storytelling: How are artists meant to make theatre in a capitalism-fucked colony which doesn’t care if anyone lives or dies? Why is every show so fucking boring nowadays? And could killing every Opera singer fix everything?

Fuck Your Funding brings together a team of Green Room Award nominated designers, including sound designer Jack Burmeister, and lighting designer Georgie Wolfe, to build a striking depiction of an arts sector on fire.

Describing the play, writer Ryan Hamilton says:

We desperately need art which acknowledges the ransacking of our creative sector and which imagines a way out of the neoliberal crisis we’re all stuck in. To do that, we drew inspiration from the Australian Cultural Terrorists who stole Picasso’s Weeping Woman, the pumping dubstep of the early 2010s, and David Finnigan’s Kill Climate Deniers. It’s entirely tongue in cheek, and probes why artists keeps telling stories while all the money dries up.

In this theatrical fight to the death over Australia’s cultural policy, these artists want to know: whose side are you fucking on?

Proudly unsupported by all funding bodies and philanthropists.