Vivian Pham hadn’t seen even a single contemporary Australian play before her own was commissioned by Sydney’s Belvoir Theatre. Now the 24-year-old’s debut play, The Coconut Children, based on her novel of the same name, is not only set to premiere on one of Australia’s most prestigious main stages but, with a cast of 12 (including Boy Swallows Universe’s HaiHa Le and Heartbreak High’s Gemma Chua-Tran), it’s the largest production of Belvoir’s 2026 season.
“In some ways, it’s the major work,” says Belvoir artistic director Eamon Flack. Pham, who has concurrently been working on a film adaptation of her novel, says she has relished discovering “the particular magic that can only happen in theatre”.
The Coconut Children is one of nine mainstage productions in Belvoir’s 2026 season and is also one of six literary adaptations, including Malthouse Theatre’s staging of Daphne du Maurier’s The Birds and new adaptations of EM Forster’s A Room with A View, Craig Silvey’s bestselling children’s book Runt, and Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s darkly comic eco thriller Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. Queensland Theatre’s adaptation of prominent voice campaigner Thomas Mayo’s collection Dear Son, featuring letters by Indigenous fathers, will also make its Sydney premiere at Belvoir, starring Aaron Pederson.
Eight years ago, aged just 16, Pham started working on the story that became The Coconut Children by drawing on her own experience and those of family members including her father, who fled Vietnam by boat at the age of 17.
Set in late-90s Cabramatta, the novel follows two Vietnamese Australian teens who reconnect after a lapsed childhood friendship: daydreamer Sonny, who escapes the abuse and neglect of her home life into romantic fantasies; and rebellious Vince, whose attempts to escape his own hellish home life see him pingpong between the streets and juvenile detention.
While she wasn’t alive in 1998 when the book opens, Pham wanted to write about a critical era for the Vietnamese Australian community of south-west Sydney, where she grew up, as it grappled with waves of heroin addiction, gang violence and crime under the scrutiny of an unsympathetic media.
Pham views her novel as a kind of “anti-Bildungsroman” where her protagonists experience “not the loss of innocence, but a return to innocence”.
The character of Sonny shares Pham’s own propensity for romantic fantasy and her love of teenage love of boybands: Backstreet Boys for Sonny, One Direction for Pham, whose first literary endeavours included writing Harry Styles fan fiction. To write Vince and his ragtag group of friends, Pham interviewed an older male relative about his own experiences, and drew on transcripts of interviews with Vietnamese Australian street kids and heroin addicts by epidemiologist Lisa Maher.
Pham bravely included her personal email address on the back of the book. Since it was published in 2020, she has received hundreds of responses from readers, including students and teachers from schools where her book has been studied.
While many of the emails are from young people who “aren’t used to stories being told about the suburbs they live in”, the characters of Sonny and Vince have resonated far beyond western Sydney.
“It’s really quite common, the disconnect that you can feel as the child of a refugee or migrant, knowing that your parents or your grandparents have survived really quite epic historical tragedies in order to give you the life that you have,” Pham says. “And there’s a very common sense of trying to uphold those pressures, trying to remember a history that precedes you, and then trying to make a life of your own.
“I think these are very common struggles that a lot of young Australians are going through.”
Belvoir’s resident director Hannah Goodwin, who will codirect The Coconut Children with actor Catherine Văn-Davies, says the play is “about what it takes to break cycles of trauma and of violence, and it’s about the kind of epic stories that many people carry without us really knowing it.”
Rounding out Belvoir’s 2026 program are Amplified, a musical tribute to Divinyls frontwoman, Chrissy Amphlett, written by and starring Sheridan Harbridge; a re-mount of Flack and S Shakthidharan’s 2022 historical drama The Jungle And the Sea, a follow-up to Counting and Cracking, set during Sri Lanka’s civil war; and the Australian premiere of UK playwright Sam Holcroft’s “Pirandellian wedding drama” A Mirror.
Belvoir will also present two “up late” shows on the mainstage during its season of Amplified: Grumblism, by Sydney performer Emma Maye Gibson, AKA “sex clown” Betty Grumble; and Role Play by comedian, writer and theatre-maker Hannah Reilly.
Redfern Renaissance, a program of talks and readings curated by Wiradjuri Yuin actor and longtime Redfern resident Angeline Penrith, will also return to Belvoir in January as part of Sydney festival’s Blak Out program celebrating First Nations storytelling.
