Packer & Sons

James Packer believes you want to be him. ‘I recognise that the vast majority of people would swap places with me and I wouldn’t swap places with—with anyone.’

Is he right? This is the origin story of the Packer prince told over three generations of tycoons who each battle to inherit their gargantuan birthright and drag it into a new era. Packer & Sons is about the family who told Australia how to think, how to relax, how to be—and the knowledge that was passed from father to son—wisdom, acumen, politics. But also, how to forge your body-armour.

Tommy Murphy (Mark Colvin’s Kidney, Strangers in Between, Gwen in Purgatory and Holding the Man) is his generation’s great theatre chronicler of the mess that is contemporary Australia. His writing covers vast terrain—the nature of power, who owns the truth, how our society shifts its plate tectonics. Packer & Sons is also a play of intense detail, and the quiet moments when powerful men pass lore to tomorrow’s kings.

This landmark theatrical event takes aim at patriarchal power, the catastrophe of entitlement and the greed that pervades Australian life.