Queensland Premier's Drama Award 2026 finalists

Melanie Tait’s Mrs Crocodilia is an outrageous new comedy set in Queensland’s biggest tourist attraction, Crocodilia Park. Led by park founder and matriarch Lynnie McGarry and her three very different daughters, this modern, feminist retelling of King Lear is a story of legacy and succession in Far North Queensland. Tait is a broadcaster and writer for stage and screen. Her play, The Appleton Ladies’ Potato Race, premiered at the Ensemble Theatre in Sydney in March 2019 and played a season at Queensland Theatre during its 2021 national tour.

Michelle Law’s Cake is a hilarious and heartbreaking story of family and generational divide set in Brisbane’s Sunnybank. When a young woman joins forces with her estranged father to plan a family wedding, she finds herself willing to mend their relationship until his closely guarded secrets threaten to blow everything apart. Law is a QUT alum whose debut play, Single Asian Female, premiered at La Boite Theatre in 2017. She also wrote Top Coat (Sydney Theatre Company, 2022) and Miss Peony (Belvoir St Theatre, 2023) and was commissioned by SBS to co-write the comedy-drama series Homecoming Queens in 2017.

Alberto Di Troia by My Erotic Journey Through Italian Fascism is a darkly comic thriller set in Australia and rural Italy. A story of belonging and discovery, a young, queer writer travels to his ancestral Italian village where he discovers many of his long-lost family are neo-fascists. Di Troia is a writer and script producer who has worked extensively across screen and theatre, most recently on Netflix’s The Survivors. He was the inaugural Victorian recipient of the SBS Emerging Writers Incubator in 2022 and is Co-Director of award-winning performance company Stage Mom.