Silo gets off the white sofa and into the dirt

Jennifer Ward-Lealand plays a "beautiful monster" addicted to booze, pills and her son, while Robyn Malcolm will be half-buried in a mound of existential dirt in the Silo's lineup for next year. Silo artistic director Shane Bosher says his team want the theatre to move in a new direction over the next few years, and that includes a shift from "the modern epidemic of the white sofa play".

"That's where everybody sits on white furniture and talks very wittily and acerbically about contemporary relationships and life and all that kind of stuff. Plays like Rabbit, The Little Dog Laughed and The Scene are all in our white sofa territory. Even if there is no white sofa on the set, there is a metaphorical one.

"We looked at our programming history and thought, five years ago we were presenting really in-your-face stuff, with sex, drugs and rock'n'roll, while in the recent past we've been looking at contemporary urban life and the phenomenon of celebrity, that kind of stuff. With the programme for next year, we want to present work that has a really theatrical bent to it."

The year kicks off in March with That Face by young British writer Polly Stenham. The Daily Telegraph's Charles Spencer who called it "one of the most thrilling debuts for decades". Directed by Bosher, it will star Ward-Lealand as Martha, an upper-class "co-dependent Oedipal wreck who drinks, smokes, pills and consumes everything in her sight", says Bosher.

Stenham was just 19 when she wrote the play that sent Spencer "reeling into the night", and Bosher says it is the perfect vehicle for Ward-Lealand to create "a beautiful, beautifully spoken monster".

In June, Bosher also directs When the Rain Stops Falling by Australian playwright Andrew Bovell, who wrote Speaking in Tongues, the play that became the film Lantana. A family saga that spans 80 years, leading up to 2039, it predicts a future where fish are rare, rain falls incessantly and mankind is paying for decades of environmental abuse. Above all, says Bosher, "it also looks at what happens to the notion of family, what we take from the legacy of our parents". He says when he saw the play performed in Sydney, he left the theatre with tears streaming down his face.

Stephen Sondheim comes to town in July in the company of Assassins, a subversive musical written in 1990 with John Weidman which parades America's long list of people who have tried, often successfully, to assassinate presidents. The assassins (or attempted killers) include John Hinckley, Squeaky Fromme, Lee Harvey Oswald and John Wilkes Booth, and the cast also includes a gun salesman, a narrator and a chorus. Oliver Driver will direct.

Bosher says the Silo has been looking for a premium role for Malcolm for some time, and Samuel Beckett's Happy Days is it. In August, she will play Winnie, a prattling woman half-buried in the ground under never-ending sunlight who is "still attacking life with this huge sense of optimism and persistence". Dame Peggy Ashcroft called the character a "summit part"; Michael Hurst will direct.

Oliver Driver, so terrific in Ruben Guthrie this year, will fly solo again in September in Thom Pain [Based on Nothing] by American writer Will Eno, directed by Peter Elliott. Bosher says the comedy, about a broken-hearted man who gets wound up by "all these little things which have shaped his life", has become a cult hit at places like the Edinburgh Festival.

The Silo will wind up the year in November with New Zealand comedy Glorious by Dunedin playwright Richard Huber, starring Natalie Medlock and Matt Whelan in a "shameless new take on the 1940s convention of screwball comedy", explains Bosher, who will direct.

The Silo's other big news this week is a significant shift in structure from 2012, when the company will become ensemble-based, moving away from its position as a freelance employer.

"We have recognised over time that the freelance nature of the industry which has evolved over the last 15-20 years has really started to hold it back to the point where we can see holes now," says Bosher. "Freelancers are always thinking about the next job so what it means is that people don't necessarily concentrate on the job at hand.

"They concentrate on pleasing everybody so they can get another job.

"That doesn't help the work at all."

For six months of each year, the Silo will hire 12 actors - four emerging, four established, four senior - along with guest designers and directors to work together on four or five big pieces of work.

This is a huge development for Auckland theatre.

The aim, says Bosher, is to eventually produce work of such a high standard, it can be toured internationally.