Searching forSappho
The story
Searching for Sappho is an exploration of ancient queer history set in a modern love story.
Ten years ago, Liv and Salome wrote a bestselling Sappho translation — but a last-minute change to the manuscript tore their friendship apart. Today, with newly-discovered fragments about to drop and the media outside their door, Liv and Salome must come together to reckon with the consequences of their choice: for their own lives, and for how they depicted Sappho's.
Told in two timelines, the play explores the power of Sappho's poetry, the politics of translation, and the struggle to represent a woman in her own words.
The production
Follow our development.
Complete
Semi-staged presentation
August 2026
Searching for Sappho reached its first audience in a closed semi-staged reading after a brief rehearsal period. We were thrilled to see the story come to life and inspired by the audience's warmth and energetic reception.
- Date 16 August 2026
- Venue 16th Street Actors Studio
- Director Jaye Syson
Cast
- Kelly-Anne TaylorLiv
- Rosie RusselSalome
- Marissa EconomoYoung Liv
- Kaiya JonesYoung Salome
Up next
Full production
Coming 2027
We're seeking a home to produce the world premiere of Searching for Sappho.
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Writer's Note
Why Sappho?
You burn me.
Reading Sappho for the first time is almost universally disappointing. After having heard one or two fragments that steal your heart, you're faced with page after page of ellipses, the gaps often outnumbering the words. It takes time to appreciate the beauty in what we don't know of her poetry as much as the words we do.
As I studied Sappho's poetry, I began to understand how the lines that have been engraved in bracelets and tattooed on ribcages and embedded in wedding vows are anything but definitive. Every choice in a translation changes the feeling of a poem, and alters the intended meaning.
Searching for Sappho invites the audience to consider how we tell stories about others, and ourselves, and recognize how the centuries of editing Sappho echo in the pressures Liv, Salome, and all of us sometimes feel to edit ourselves.
— Monet
Our Team
Writer
Monet Slinowsky
Monet is a writer and theatre-maker whose work moves between theatre and fiction. She loves exploring theatre that makes complex subject matter accessible and relevant to today's audiences, whether it's Sappho, the development of the natural selection theory, or the history of birth control. She's written several books, represented by Katie Erickson of the Jennifer de Chiara Literary Agency and runs a popular YouTube channel and Substack on the craft of storytelling. She brings years of narrative craft to the page, along with formal scriptwriting instruction at Oxford. There, she made use of the Bodleian libraries to research Sappho's poetry, an experience that served as the inspiration for this play.
Director & Dramaturg
Jaye Syson
Jaye is a queer, neurodiverse director and theatre-maker based in Naarm. She is passionate about developing and directing new Australian work that invites audiences to engage deeply with complex questions about identity, relationships, memory, and the stories we choose to tell about ourselves and others. She is the director/creative director of Small Dog Productions, with proven success leading world premieres of independent theatre productions since 2019. Most notably, she wrote and directed Between the Fractures, a new Australian work that was awarded the South Australian Mental Health Commissioner's Grant in 2024.