SUDS Reviews
Love in a Thoughtless World: 1984 at Riverside
By Elena Garcia Araujo
If you've ever felt policed for thinking differently, for dreaming too boldly, loving too freely, or questioning too loudly, 1984 at Riverside Theatres is your mirror, your warning, and your wound.
From the moment a spotlight scans the audience, we are no longer just watching. We are being watched. Bomb sounds erupt in sync with flashes of light. The world of 1984 is cold, grey, and stripped of comfort — and the stage reflects that perfectly. Stark lighting evokes confinement. A looming screen tracks Winston’s every move and thought, flickering with self-taped confessions that blur the line between memory and surveillance.
Winston’s connection with Julia is subtle, flickering, forbidden. In their rare moments of intimacy, the lighting shifts. Warm tones enter briefly, offering colour in a world drained of it. In a thoughtless world, even the act of thinking becomes dangerous.
They are star-crossed not by feuding families, but by a system that punishes feeling. Like Romeo and Juliet, they hide their love in secret places. But unlike Shakespeare’s lovers, they don’t die together in defiance. They survive each other. They are broken apart, psychologically destroyed, then turned against one another. Betrayal replaces tragedy. Silence replaces sacrifice. This is Romeo and Juliet rewritten by a fascist state.
If you've ever longed for a version of Romeo and Juliet where love is punished not with death but with slow erasure — where passion survives only to be undone — then watch this play. It won’t offer comfort. But it will offer truth.
UNSW MTS: merrily we roll along
By Cormac Herron
It seems I’m developing a bad habit of reviewing shows that are concerningly relevant to me at the time I’m watching them. Merrily We Roll Along, directed by Sasha Cole, is a story of yearning: for your art, for success, and for one another. You can have it all, just not at once. As I sat watching Franklin (Matthew de Meyrick), Charley (Daniel Mark Wakeford), and Mary (Theresa Landy) in ‘Our Time,’ I couldn’t help but think back to all the days I had spent with my closest friends as we revelled in all we had: each other, and to be honest, I started to miss it. These days, things are much more complicated, but for some reason, I’m okay with that. I wouldn’t have started missing those days nearly as much if it weren’t for the acute sense of friendship between these characters that the main trio had fostered. De Meyrick, Wakeford, and Landy were all masterful in their character work and I really found myself wondering if these even were characters in the first place. It’s not often I find myself moved in quite the way that this cast was able to move me, but I fear such compliments quickly become platitudes, especially outside stage doors and in reviews, so I will keep them brief.
Often when I watch theatre, I forget just how much effort goes into it, and that the audience is only seeing a fraction of the effort that has been put into the work. Luckily though, it was coming out of the seams. For a musical that isn’t quite a dance musical, the choreography was tight and well restrained.
Restraint was an overall theme for this production, and in this case, it was good, but in other cases, like on the musical side of things, I wonder if the reins could’ve been loosened on the cast’s voices at times. I think this ultimately comes down to Sondheim’s composition and the overall length of this production, but sometimes phrases felt like they were cut just fractions too short for me to properly process and enjoy them. On the other side of the fence was hair, makeup, and costume, which I have no comments for besides that I would love to have even just one hour to go through their wardrobe.
I now come to the end of my laundry list, with lighting and set written in a big scratchy font, then underlined, then circled. One persistent thing that I love about student theatre is that it always makes the most of its resources, and you could see that with their set, which was well adorned with frames filled with photos of the cast. It really helped reinforce that deep sense of history between the characters, especially as you watch their stories in reverse. For lighting, I must confess that my first thoughts about it were that of concern because I wondered how long that must’ve taken to plot in tech. In return, they were rewarded immensely for their work, the world felt so much more alive and grand with their lighting. This is student theatre, you have to make the most of what you’ve got, especially with minimal set.
Now if you’ll forgive me, I have to go now. I need to find my Franklin and Mary before it’s too late.
Riverside Theatre: The Offering
By Faye Tang
Omar Musa and Mariel Roberts Musa take on the tremendous task of condensing such material as can fill an intergenerational epic novel into the space of a 90-minute piece of theatre. They do so, in The Offering, with the time-warping help of music: the “seafaring oratorio” combines Omar Musa’s ambitious range of rap, spoken-word poetry, and song with Mariel Roberts Musa’s accompaniment on cello and—briefly, but gloriously—two hanging gongs.
Mariel’s classical training hums like an undertone to her virtuosic, expressionistic performance. She plucks and bows vigorously, operates her own analog recording and mixing, using every piece of the cello’s anatomy like a seasoned chef would poultry. Her solo sections ranged from a slow, sombre cadenza to a macabre dance piece to an almost unbearably tense frenzy of deep strings, injecting life and movement to the eerie, spare illustrations projected behind her. Her collaborations with Omar’s vocal music were also inventive; this has to be the first time I’ve heard a cello accompaniment to angry rap.
One of the most moving pieces of the set is a historical “lecture” on the island of Borneo. Omar spins a rhapsody out of a close-reading of Borneo’s flags, under the Union Jack, the Rising Sun, then various versions transitioning towards cultural independence. Generations of Omar’s family come and go under the shifting symbols, and he narrates an arresting history of ordinary people who had their lives shaped by the decisions of foreign powers—ancestors who were exploited by the brutal British empire; grandparents who had the imperial Japanese anthem carved into their muscle memory; a nation plundered for its rich climate and rainforests, looted for the spice-melange-like commodity of palm oil.
This compelling personal history is, however, somewhat undermined by the jarring, Twitter-style motif, “fact-check me but facts are not truth, facts are not truth, facts are not truth…” Internet profundity is difficult to reach, buried under mantles of irony, and this motif was a little too blunt at its cusp, at least to touch a generation of social media users already drowned in scepticism.
Omar, who is a poet and visual artist, wrestles with the question that confronts anyone who has scribbled blank verse on the backside of a receipt: “can poetry in any way forestall the rising tide?” That is, what is the role of the poet in fighting against societies—an entire world—that is failing? The poet plays all roles. Witness first of all to the passing of oral and ecological histories, judge and jury in its activistic stance. Victim, also, to a capitalistic orientation that forces art, especially by people of colour, into commodity or poverty (Omar raps, “the colonisers fuck me with mechanical dicks”).
But finally, and crucially, the poet is a perpetrator. Omar recounts a childhood scene with his grandmother, who produces for him a treasured box of turtle’s eggs, a delicacy she coveted in her youth. Omar recounts greedily cracking them open, one after the other, and guzzling the yolk inside. “I wouldn’t do that anymore,” he says sagely, launching into an elegiac verse to the beauty and divinity of sea turtles who are terrorised by plastic and by human recklessness.
The poet is a person who participates in the ebbs and flows, the swings and dips of personhood. It is in playing every role or, indeed, in understanding every role that they have played, that the poet can make their infinite offering.
ENSEMBLE THEATRE: THE HALF-LIFE OF MARIE CURIE
By Elena Garcia Araujo
The Half-Life of Marie Curie: Minimal Set, Maximum Chutzpah at Ensemble Theatre
Starring Caroline Craig (Hertha Ayrton) and Francesca Savige (Marie Curie) Ensemble Theatre, Kirribilli
The curtain is the first thing that pulls you in. Translucent and draped across the stage, it acts like a veil between public and private. It invites the audience to peer in — not just as spectators, but as silent witnesses to something unguarded. At times, it feels almost too intimate, like we’re watching something we weren’t meant to see. It doesn’t keep us at a distance; it draws us closer. And in many ways, that sums up the play itself — both intimate and raw, exposing two women at their most vulnerable as they try to make sense of what remains.
Set in 1911, the play follows Marie Curie in the aftermath of a scandal. Her affair with a married man has been splashed across the newspapers, and her reputation is in ruins. Seeking refuge, she’s taken in by her old friend Hertha Ayrton — an engineer, suffragette, and force of nature in her own right. On the English coast, the two women reckon with shame, grief, legacy, and the raw work of rebuilding.
Curie — the physicist who discovered radium and polonium and became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize — isn’t presented as a distant icon, but as a woman in crisis. That’s what makes this piece feel urgent and alive. This isn’t a historical drama for the sake of it. It’s a story about how women endure— how they are complex and how they still live even when the world turns on them, sometimes in spite of it.
The staging mirrors this emotional rawness. Set designer James Brown explained in an interview with SUDS, “The set was inspired by the Victorian era, but we wanted to give it a modern twist.” A minimalistic stage holds that balance well. Light, projection, and sound work in tight harmony. And even though the space is bare, it leaves room for what matters. Pure electric emotional energy that vibrates at the bottom of the stage where the light bulbs are scattered.
Hertha is loyal to a fault, fiery, and quick-witted — the kind of friend who sees through your pain and pushes you to stand. Marie is quieter, but no less fierce — a woman wrestling with love, loss, and longing. This is no tidy friendship. It’s messy, complicated, and full of fire. When Hertha yells, “I am Hertha!”, it’s not just a line — it lands like a roar.
Marie, meanwhile, is more than the labels forced onto her — widow, mother, genius, scandal. The play doesn’t judge her. It asks: is it really so wrong for a woman to want something more, and reach for it?
At its core is the tension between how society sees her and how she sees herself. The headlines call her a disgrace. Her own mind, at times, calls her a fraud. But Hertha — steady, relentless — sees the real Marie. Not the widow. Not the lover. Not the Nobel Prize winner. Just her and she is enough as she is.
Grief runs beneath every scene — not just the loss of a husband, but the loss of control, reputation, identity. Hertha becomes both mirror and anchor, reminding Marie of her worth, truthfully and sometimes harshly but ultimately telling her what she needs to hear.
What makes this play shine is its refusal to shrink women into roles. These women are suffragettes, yes — but also funny, angry, loving, and painfully human. They’re allowed to be whole. And they carry every bit of that chutzpah.
QTOPIA: SKANK SINATRA
By Elena Garcia Araujo
Cabaret Review: Skank Sinatra at the Loading Dock – One Queer South African’s Life Story, Told in Full Glam for Pride Month.
She commands attention and needs no introduction. No expensive set, no ensemble cast—just shine, sass, and absolute control. Skank Sinatra, performed at Sydney’s Loading Dock in Darlinghurst, is an interactive and deeply personal piece of cabaret where the audience isn’t just watching—they’re part of the story. Jens Radda, a WAAPA-trained performer and storyteller at heart, moves with a poise and precision that speak to years of discipline—each gesture, each dance step, landing not just on rhythm, but with elegance and instinct.
Staged in Pride Month, the show is a love letter to queer identity, camp theatricality, and the power of story. Drawing from her South African roots and queer life in Australia, Skank shape-shifts through costumes, characters, and moods with theatrical finesse. Sinatra classics get cheeky makeovers, woven into a narrative of survival, self-invention, and fabulous resilience.
She locks eyes, points, pauses—constantly reading and responding to the room. One moment, you're laughing at the raw politics of drag romance; the next, you're quiet, caught in the ache of migration, rejection, or reinvention.
It’s cabaret as it should be: intimate, fearless, and unforgettable. Skank Sinatra doesn’t just perform. She connects. She confesses. And yes—she absolutely kills
Riverside theatre: The trojan war
By Divya Nandyal
Historically, I’ve been a skeptic of Drunk Shakespeares, modern re-staging of classical texts (especially if, god forbid, it’s set in a high school) and the like. Walking into A Slightly Isolated Dog’s Trojan War at Riverside Parramatta, advertised as a ‘high-energy dress up party’, I was, understandably, nervous - but these nerves were misplaced, because this production created a most delightful sense of play.
The ensemble of five, flamboyant, flirtatious, faux French actors holds the audience’s hand - often literally - through a very abridged, very tenuously accurate plot summary of the Trojan War. Prophecies are created, condemning Achilles to a fate of dying in battle, and Hector to dying at Achilles’ hands. There is love, betrayal, battle, loss, war, victory, and of course, the push and pull between fate and moral culpability.
What makes this production different from any other Iliad retelling? Perhaps the minimal design; a bath towel used as a hood, a bucket with broom stuck on top to represent Achilles’ iconic helmet, a cardboard box Trojan horse. Perhaps the jukebox musical interludes, my personal favourite being a deeply impassioned rendition of Miley Cyrus’ Wrecking Ball. Or, perhaps, most strikingly, the constant audience interaction.
From the very beginning, we were made to feel a part of the production, greeted in a startlingly personal member, flirted with to the point of confusion - are they really into me? The ensemble asked questions of us one on one, remembered our names, and traits, throwing them back at us during the show. ‘What do you do with yourself?’ was asked of my plus one: ‘I’m a languages student!’ Later on, the same actor calls out to her ‘Is it true you’re good with your tongue?’
Rather than Achilles’ lover Patroclus storming into battle, before dying heroically in his stead, we had audience member Er Ol strutting down the stage, killing enemies with a flick of a wrist, a kick of a leg, and finally, most impressively, a singular, perfectly timed, twerk. Zeus, Athena, Ares, and the Fates were played by various audience members, with varying levels of enthusiasm, enacting their powers on the mere mortals when called upon by the ensemble.
Here, I’d like to commend the sound team, for their precision - despite the unpredictability of audience members’ performances, the cues landed perfectly, with each flick of the deities’ fingers cueing explosions. The same can be said of the lighting team - amongst the stripped back design, and chaos of performance, the lighting team constructed a compelling sense of time, place, and atmosphere. Particularly, during the surprisingly heartfelt and sorrowful moment after Patroclus’ death and Achilles’ defeat of Hector, the pulsing lights built palpable tension - despite the comedy, we felt anguished for Achilles’ loss.
Knowing that this emotional vulnerability was possible in this production, I have to say I left the theatre wishing that some of the repetitive, physical comedy heavy moments were replaced by further tender exchanges. Helen’s lack of agency is hinted at a few times throughout the show, but perhaps allowing her a moment to shine, or giving Er Ol (Patroclus) and Achilles’ relationship genuine weight, rather than reducing it to a cheesy rom com montage, would have maintained the balance between humour and humanity.
This show was in no way the ultimate way to engage with the story of the Trojan War; had I not had a prerequisite knowledge of it, I would have left with only a barebones understanding of the events. But! It is an excellent way to spend an evening - despite my critiques, I can only describe my experience as fun! The brilliant ensemble had me engaged by their theatrical and musical performances throughout. A Slightly Isolated Dog’s production of the Trojan War was playful, sorrowful, delightful.
Flight path theatre: run rabbit
By Faye Tang
Run Rabbit: crash course in militant feminism
To combat the culture of violent misogyny, Susan Sontag recommended that women “whistle at men in the streets, raid beauty parlors, picket toy manufacturers who produce sexist toys, convert in sizeable numbers to militant lesbianism…deface…disrupt…organize.”
That’s just about what Victoria Abbott does, perched atop a small stage, carrot in hand.
Run Rabbit, created by Kate McGill and Victoria Abbott, co-produced by Madeleine Withington, is forceful yet playful, confronting yet kind. The play is splintered, or deconstructed, into several parallel narratives that illustrate the realities of harassment and violence embedded into the experience of presenting as a woman. Abbott makes us aware that many women are present throughout the play: different versions of herself, one of her ancestors, members of the audience, and those who have found themselves a statistic in the institution of violent crime.
Much of the play follows Abbott’s ancestor, Black Agnes who, alone in her Scottish castle in 1338, defends herself from a horde of twenty thousand Englishmen. She’s irate, acerbic, heavily Scottish (which Abbott plays convincingly). She calls on “prissy boy” (a well-built, elderly man in the audience) to read her letters. She hurls insults, metaphors, and threats at another member of the audience. And she mounts her roof that has been catapulted by the English Siege, spine straight, sinews strung:
How dare you men bond with each other over breaching my gates?
Why are you here? You’re here to lay siege to me, to breach my walls and drive me from my home, all because you’re unhappy in your own!
Black Agnes’ spitting reproach travels centuries to attack the culture of the manosphere, where pretensions to masculinity form a sort of lattice, thick as a cult, through which the suffering of non-men are unable to be seen, unable to be felt. It resounds with critic Elif Batuman’s reading of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, which holds that the nineteenth-century epic reveals why men of war become men of war—due almost ubiquitously to unhappiness in the domestic sphere, which is created by the oppression of women, which is enforced by the conditions of war, and so on and so forth, perpetuating a violent, miserable cycle of unhappiness. It also resounds with the ongoing, violent siege currently occurring in Gaza, a parallel that Abbott herself draws, concluding her piece with a hopeful, angry, heartful “Free Palestine.”
Abbott steps down from the promenade. She’s no longer Black Agnes, leaving no time for the audience to register the change. She squats down, so low that she’s almost sitting, and emits an animalistic squeak. “I’m so hungry,” she simpers, in a childish voice. “If only somebody would give me that carrot.” Indeed, a carrot lies in the corner of the stage, two metres away.
“If only somebody would help me reach that carrot,” she sighs.
Nobody moves.
“If only somebody would kindly offer to pass me that carrot.”
This goes on for about an entire minute before a guy in a mustard sweater says, “I’ll do it,” and swaggers awkwardly down onto the stage. He passes her the carrot like a baton. Abbott pounces him immediately. You think I can’t do it? I can’t get my own food with my dainty little lady paws? The audience dissolves in laughter.
Abbott excels at manipulating the syncopated pulse of the play, and of her femininity. Scenes are stitched together abruptly, but Abbott ensures the audience is comfortable, gently describing methods of dealing with triggers, even as she prepares to contort herself into the next powerful or obscene character. After empowering us, harassing us, condescending to us, pleading with us, joking, insulting, educating us, she stands centre stage for a final monologue. “One in three women,” she tells us, “is a victim to violence in her lifetime. One in six men. Not to speak of the countless horrors imposed on those outside that binary.” The following show, Melon, confronts watchers with one such horrific, visceral case.
Run Rabbit is at once charming and confronting, running at breakneck speed to an off-kilter heartbeat. It’s an entirely unpredictable experience, and although Abbott plays the rabbit, there is an unspoken understanding that between the two of you, she’s not the prey.
Run Rabbit is playing at The Flight Path Theatre until the 31st of May
Qtopia: heaven
By Ruby Scott-Wishart
In a rural Irish town at a wedding, Mal and Mairead’s marriage falls apart. But do we watch the pair break, cry and fight in real time together, face to face? No. Eugene O’Neil’s Heaven does not give the audience this gift.
Heaven is unlike most shows I’ve seen. The two characters on stage for most of the show, do not interreact at all, speaking only in monologue to the audience. It’s a bit arresting at first, but you get used to it. Instead of scenes acted in front of us, it feels more like re-enacted diary entries.
For the faults and uncertainties I have with the show, Lucy Miller, who plays the fiery Mairead, and Noel Hodda playing the closeted and gentle Mal, are able to hold your attention. That’s a hard job to give an actor but they do it well. The intimate setting of the Loading Dock at Qtopia is the right fit for this show - you are up close and personal with these performers, and they have the time and space to sit in their performances. The very minimal set enhances the storytelling feel of the play. We are not here for flashing lights or stunning set, rather to see these two people.
They both have moments where they perfectly capture the light and shade of these characters, and the light and shade of life. The highs – cocaine in a car, sex with your first love – and the lows, the realisation that the person you have chosen to spend your life with isn’t the right one for you. For Mairead, her life with Mal has unsatisfied her, they are ‘pals’, a pair, but not lovers. For Mal (who I argue is the more interesting character) his queerness, a part of himself that he has pushed so far down he can’t even name it when it arrives, finally does. In a clip online Hodda describes Mal’s journey as “his reality become[s] the dream he’s always had, and the dream he’s always had becomes his reality.” This dream is embodied in Hodda’s performance. It truly feels like a child, a young boy’s spirit trapped in the body of a middle-aged man. On that, I must add that it is a gift to watch older actors perform – they have life, energy and spirit.
However, there are times when the characters falter and feel unreal. For example, both characters refer to Mairead’s fraught relationship with her daughter, Siobhan. As Mairead wanders the town square trying to find her husband, deciding whether to run away with her first love from her youth, and wondering what her life has all built up to, she receives a call from her daughter. She is pregnant. And suddenly it all falls into place: this is what her life has built up to, to be a grandmother, to guide her daughter through this change. But it feels unsatisfying. This realisation comes in the last few minutes of the play – if this was the point Mairead was going to come to, why did we spend most of the time listening to her retell her desires for a passioned love affair? Telling that story, of women of all ages getting the chance to freely explore their sexual lives deserves to be told in its entirety. And so does the complexity of familial relationships.
And just when Mal finally decides he will let his life, the life he pushed underneath, his queerness, become his life above, he disappears. We don’t see him again. I felt a bit gypped. I really wanted to see these characters come together, even if it was just for a moment. To watch the reality of their actions and realisations come crashing down, just for a moment. But that doesn’t happen, and I really wish O’Neil hadn’t made that choice.
I must admit, I’ve found it hard to write about this show. It’s not incredible nor terrible, its good, not great, but okay. Presenting queer stories from diverse backgrounds however, whether that be campy drag queens, gay lovestruck teens or the stories of closeted older queer people, is important and these stories must continue to be told.
Heaven is playing at Qtopia’s Loading Dock Theatre until the 31st of May
This review was written on the lands of the Wangal people of the Eora nation, and Qtopia resides on the land of Gadigal people.
Sydney Theatre company: happy days
By Cormac Herron
This is not a review. This is a love letter to Samuel Beckett. I don’t write love letters often, but I have to break tradition for this show, so humour me. If you’re looking for a neat description of the piece that explains it and its meaning you will not find it here.
I couldn’t sleep two nights ago. I sat in darkness and noticed the rare drone of tinnitus I get in my right ear: you value your hearing more after being born deaf. A joint in my hand had flared up and it hurt to use it. At least my cough had subsided. I’m young, but lately, I’ve been getting reminded that despite my age, I’m not invincible. That night, before I failed to sleep, I had been revelling in the ‘choose life’ monologue from Trainspotting. Lately, I’ve been trying to remember to ‘choose life.’
A close friend of mine and I sat across from each other at the pub before the show. We both want to act. We had one of those conversations that wasn’t remarkable, but after it, I got the strange feeling I’ll remember it distantly for years to come. We were talking about a whole range of things but we were really talking about our hopes and dreams. We’re young; it’s natural to have those.
At the risk of being any more obvious, the proximity of death and the future have been on my mind lately. I’m not overly superstitious, but it feels like I’ve been put in that direction for a reason, and I think it culminated in watching this show.
So, we walked into the theatre; we started down the rabbit hole. The lights dim, we’re swept into darkness, and there is a great wind; we’re not in Kansas anymore.
Happy Days by Samuel Beckett is best described as a reminder of the closeness of death, how dangerous monotony is, and how quickly time creeps up on you. I raised my wrist to look at my watch and realised it’s been forty minutes. It dawned on me that I could’ve been here for days and I wouldn’t have noticed because I was enamoured by the desperate death rattle before me. That scared me. It’s not often you go from talking about your dreams for the good part of your future to watching the very real possibility of the bad part; the part where every day is the exact same and nothing changes and you feel like you’re suffocating and no matter what you do there’s no going back.
Before me is Pamela Rabe as Winnie, up to her chest in a mound of dirt that takes up the entire stage and can’t get free. Despite being stuck in place, she manages to expertly give her performance. She has the rare kind of face where every single emotion can appear on it at once. Winnie’s husband, Willie, sometimes stands on the other side of the mound, occasionally giving monosyllables and grunts as he’s turned away from the audience. Played by Markus Hamilton, the back of someone’s head has never been more expressive. Watching a wiry man trace his hat and flick through his newspaper hasn’t caught my attention before, but Hamilton made me hold onto it each time.
Mastery breathes out of the pair’s performance, which is strange, because what I watched was an absurd play, it was nothing, and yet, it had my full attention, my smile wouldn’t break. Everything that Winnie and Willie did was measured, not with the kind of precision that you get from practice, but the kind you get from years and years and years of living the same day, which is exactly what the couple had done and would continue to do.
I couldn’t take my eyes off the staging throughout. I had this weird sense I was about to watch Video perform the public execution of the Radio Star. Nick Schlieper’s set notably contained a literal frame through which we watched Winnie and Willie and behind them lay a sky-blue screen. After looking at it long enough, it started to seem like it was unsettlingly tessellated, like what I was really watching was a pair of caged animals before tiled walls. In the centre lay the implacable, ageless, timeless mound of dirt, representing nothing more than itself. As my eyes grazed the layers of the mound, I began to think that not only had my hearing failed me but also my eyes. I could’ve sworn there was a mirage, what, with the illusions of the sky-blue screen but now the light upon the mound was shifting. I liked this disorientation, like I was only just as lucid as Winnie was.
The second act was even better. Winnie was now up to her head in dirt, leaving her face, and importantly, her eyes to work with. They slammed from side to side in their cages with such intensity. I began to wonder if I could ever do such a thing, and to think that her performance was still so powerful. Rabe’s performance toed the line between lucidity and delusion perfectly, returning me to realities I’ve experienced, reminding me of how little I’d like to end up like that.
Grimly, I found myself noticing how old the audience was. When they stopped laughing at the jokes Winnie was making – jokes you can only make and really get at a certain age – I wondered if it was because they saw too much of themselves in Winnie and Willie. I wondered if Rabe and Hamilton had scared them more than they had scared me.
The problem with performances and plays like these is that words can’t quite capture what I’ve seen. Yes, I can give simple qualificatory expressions, saying that “I loved it,” which is true, but that wouldn’t be quite right, it doesn’t do it justice. In some weird way I think this makes sense, because every single thing you watch on that stage, every single word uttered, is meaningless, and so the only way that I can really give this review is to tell you how it made me feel, to give Beckett my love letter.
Happy Days is playing at The Wharf 1 Theatre until the 15th of June.
BElvoir st theatre: The Wrong gods
By Carmen Rolfe
S.Shakthidharan’s ‘Wrong Gods’, set by a sacred river in rural India, is a heartfelt interrogation of ambition, beliefs and ultimately the challenging love between a mother and daughter. Ideas of old and new swarm, clash and break across the set, whose endless tree rings carvings act as a constant reminder of what we owe to the places and people that we come from, and where we are going.
In the opening scene, we meet a young girl whose big ambitions to go to school and become a scientist are in conflict with her mother Nirmala, a farmer and the head of her village, who demands that Isha stays to help her on the land now that her husband has abandoned them. Isha’s brief time at school in the elusive ‘city’, which is referred to through her longing looks cast offstage, has sparked the fire of curiosity and ambition and lead her to question the lifestyle and beliefs of her mother. This conflict is exacerbated by the appearance of a mysterious stranger. ‘Lakshmi’, appropriately named after the god of prosperity and abundance, who appears in a with a trustworthy smile and a packet of seeds promising to solve all their problems. The seeds will allow Nirmala to grow more crops and thus Isha can return to school, with her education fully funded by Lakshmi herself.
The play then jumps ahead to 7 years later, where Nirmala has formed an unlikely alliance with ‘stupid Ms Devi’ to protest the building of dams that will destroy the environmental balance of the village. In a heartbreaking moment, it is revealed that Isha now works for the company building the dams and she returns to the stage beside Lakshmi dressed in restrictive, grey business suits that sharply contrast the bright pink and florals in which she was previously dressed.
This careful set-up of distinctive, opposing characters within this sacred space, beside the river and overlooked by the Gods creates a sense of momentum that builds to a climactic standoff between Nirmala and Ms Devi, and Isha and Lakshmi. As the devastating truth behind Lakshmi and the dam companies’ true intentions are revealed, the weight of this confrontation is imbued with a sense of cosmic significance as the fate of thousands lies in these few characters' hands. Yet the actors' performances succeeded in holding a delicate balance between articulating lengthy and nuanced examinations of capitalism, environmentalism, religion, education and colonisation, whilst still maintaining the grounded essence of each character and the relationships between each other. Nirmala, played by Nadie Kammallaweera was most definitely a standout performance, intertwining deep wisdom and humour through her beautifully poetic monologues and embodying the grief of a mother losing both her daughter and way of life to a rapidly changing world.
Additionally Hannah Goodwin and S. Shakthidharan’s careful construction of distance between the characters, specifically the mother and daughter, was incredibly powerful in building up tension. Despite the intensity of the verbal confrontations, there were still unanimous gasps of shock from the audience when Nirmala and Isha finally came into physical contact, whether aggressively pushing each other or finally collapsing into an embrace.
‘Wrong Gods’ is both heart-breaking and thought-provoking. The evocative language and passionate performances leaves the audience in deep consideration of the sacrifices we make for ‘progress’, creating space for nuanced perspectives and dynamics to play out and capturing the complexities of tradition and ambition in the modern, rapidly changing world.
The Wrong Gods is Playing at the Belvoir Upstairs Theatre until the 31st of May
Ensemble theatre: The Lover & The dumb waiter
By Frosia Gorskikh
The Ensemble Theatre have delivered two of playwright Harold Pinter’s one-act plays in an uneasy double-bill serving. I was instantly intrigued by director Mark Kilmurry’s The Lover and The Dumb Waiter, when they were promised to be “claustrophobic”. Really the quaint theatre situated on the harbour was anything but, at night adorned by specks of small lights reflecting endlessly in the water. Yet I’m relieved to declare that within that intimate theatre and amidst feverish anticipation, the three actors delivered on the promise.
To begin with The Lover. An ordinary 1960’s couple talk in the morning while the husband gets dressed for work, a tedious office job. He politely asks his wife if her lover is coming in the afternoon, one who she is openly spending time with in the comfort of their living room. She asserts yes. He agrees to stay back at work. They leave after a quick dispassionate kiss, but something so inexplicably uneasy has remained in the air.
While watching, attempting to decipher the couple’s lifestyle and dialogues as they play out in such a puzzling manner, impossible to define or construe, I really just sat there, thinking, “Oh? Uhh. Hmm.” And at the same time it was so hilarious.
Instantly as they appeared onto the scene - a cozy living room adorned with warm glows of lamps and a record player - the actor’s movements were mesmerising. So precise, so purposeful. The woman moving to fix the music with her high-heeled leg stretched out, the man following her with a hungry gaze, with each wrinkle on his forehead so particular, felt uncomfortable and rigid. In every physicality echoed the private domesticity of married life. The couple effortlessly embodied the bourgeois effort, the stiffness. The kisses were so cumbersome, yet at the same time filled with such camaraderie, as if there was a private joke between them that the audience didn’t share, and was punished for it.
Whenever they argued over their actions it was almost impossible to watch, as watching felt like taking the role of a perverted intruder into the depths of their personal life. The way the couple looked at each other when discussing their respective affairs was filthy, perfect.
Specifically the wife (Nicole Da Silva), embodied such a mystifying artificiality in her voice and movement. In this way she controlled the room and particularly her husband. And then of course the husband (Gareth Davies), appeared so tired and distraught, a man lost in his own jealousy, but at the same time so depraved, culminating in an asinine fantasy that could only develop as a symptom of their tedious domestic life.
It was unclear exactly what was happening in the climax of their perversion, as the playwright and the actors weaved entangled fantasies and desires in a mind bending maze of disintegration, disorder, sexual yearning. But of course this was intended.
“The Lover” is an eccentric reminder that everything in life is a performance. Watching felt dirty. A good dirty, but also more of a cruel one.
Now, onto The Dumb Waiter. Ben and Gus are common people, two hitmen waiting for an assignment. Pinter’s windowless, buried settings exude tightness, a similar claustrophobia corrupting his characters’ mannerisms. Ben and Gus pass time with purposeless small talk, such as a football match or tea, but begin to be terrorised by a dumb waiter (a small elevator between floors for transporting food), from the floor above them placing obscene orders for meals that the hitmen struggle to fulfil.
Contrasted to The Lover, the Ensemble’s rendition of this play was alright. It’s unclear whether this was the fault of the script or the performance, but after The Lover, audience members were shifting in their seats from the drab small talk onstage. This is what unfortunately made the play more an intellectual pleasure than an emotional one, especially upon reflection after a few days have passed. This is not always a flaw; Pinter’s small talk somehow paradoxically reveals the very nature of his characters, especially Ben (Gareth Davies), the seasoned killer, pretending to be collected and decisive, when in reality the dumb waiter’s demands were unravelling his sanity slowly the entire time. This culminated in Pinter’s final comment that the little guy, like always, gets trampled and terrorised, an observation of how the lower classes are exploited, tortured senselessly for entertainment.
Nevertheless I left with a feeling that something was missing, some kind of scene or detail that would have made the ending more satisfying, and less like a watered down Waiting For Godot. Perhaps the initial small talk was too long. But I will say that this one-act has grown on me since, after I have wrapped my head around it.
There was a brilliantly executed, constant, oppressive feeling of the ‘menace’, generated by the imposing dumb waiter and the frustrating, inexplicable situation, Ben and Gus rendered useless in the face of the torment, the dumb waiter’s ridiculing messages. Coupled with the grumbling sounds closing in on the men, it made them into Kafkaesque bugs in the belittling basement.
In all, this double-bill was a cherished night for an enjoyer of absurdist fever dreams of human intricacies and faults, bathing in a claustrophobic atmosphere of Harold Pinter’s meticulously crafted modern hells.
The Lover & The Dumb Waiter is Playing at the Ensemble Theatre until the 7th of June
SYdney Theatre Company: RBG: OF MANY, ONE
By Carmen Rolfe
Suzie Miller’s one-woman show ‘RBG: Of Many One’ stars Heather Mitchell as the ‘notorious’ Ruth Bader-Ginsburg, the second woman to be appointed to the Supreme Court and a staunch advocate for women’s equality every minute of her life until her death in 2020. First written and performed in 2022, ‘RBG: Of Many One’ has returned to Sydney’s stage with Heather Mitchell reprising her highly acclaimed role at the Sydney Opera House’s Drama Theatre. Walking up the steps of this iconic venue, one must wonder what it means for this play, centred around this American icon of justice, to be given the spotlight for the Australian audience of 2025.
The play begins with Heather Mitchell alone on a bare stage, begging for the phone to ring. From this first moment, Mitchell breaks down the image of RBG as a tough and untouchable lawyer, as her performance is surprisingly comedic, light-hearted and earnest. The first part of the play is centred around her waiting in anticipation of President Bill Clinton’s decision to anoint her as a Supreme Court Judge, and is intercut with flashbacks of her life up to this pivotal moment. The brisk pacing and operatic score gave the first hour of the play the impression of something like a ‘superwoman origin story’, charging through the key moments of her life, from her feelings of great injustice from being denied a Bat-Mitzvah, to understanding the strength of a voice at the opera, to entering Harvard Law school and being made to justify her right to study as a woman in a male-dominated institution and struggling to find work at a law firm. This collection of flashbacks all build up to the tearfully victorious moment where she stands, self-consciously underdressed in the Oval Office, as Bill Clinton shakes her hand and tells her she will be a Supreme Court Judge.
It’s clear from the first hour of the play that the director’s focus was to capture the spirit that RBG represents through these emotional moments that convey to the audience her true sense of devotion and dedication to achieving gender equality in a space that didn’t accommodate her. Whilst the heartfelt tone of the first hour at times felt overly sentimental, with the relentless operatic score occasionally veering towards cartoonish and the raining of law papers across the stage like confetti that wasn’t worth the efforts of the stage-hands to pick up in the black-out, the sense of hope and victory left amongst the audience after the first hour was undeniable.
It is this effective creation of this spirit of hope that allowed for the second half of the play to be so effective and ultimately seal ‘RBG’s’ message to the audience of 2025. It is here where Heather Mitchell hits her stride as the much older, wittier and charming RBG, wrapped in lace collars and gloves. Though Mitchell’s RBG definitely doesn’t lose the humour of the first hour, the comedy takes on a darker tone, with Mitchell’s cunning imitations of Bill Clinton being replaced by simultaneously hilarious and chilling imitations of Donald Trump. It was during the first of these impressions that a shift was felt in the audience. The audience’s laughter was no longer attached to the words Suzie Miller had written back in 2022 but rather was born from the audience of 2025 who held the ominous foresight of Trump’s re-election and the horrors that RBG would never live to see. It felt like a dark secret shared between the audience and Heather Mitchell, who broke the fourth wall through her slow, emphatic delivery of lines concerning Roe-v-Wade, Trump's election, and the dangers of an individual’s influence on presidential decision-making, demonstrating a meta acknowledgement of the irony of these lines being written in 2022 before anyone knew what was to come. The audience’s tears during RBG’s death were reflective of a greater grief. As she spoke of her belief in America’s first female president and her final wish for her Supreme Court seat not to be filled until the 2020 election, the audience shared in grief over the death of hope and progress. With the constitutional crisis in America and the divisive upcoming federal election here in Australia, it seems as if we are years behind the future RBG had hoped for, as we are still fighting for the fundamental equality she was working to establish at the beginning of the play.
What Suzie Miller’s ‘RBG’ can serve us on the Sydney Opera House Drama Theatre stage in 2025 is a heartfelt reminder of hope. Heather Mitchell’s loveable and clever portrayal of RBG as she defies the odds and works her way to enact real change shows the audience that change can be possible and that the fight for equality is not over.
RBG: OF MANY, ONE is Playing at the Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House until the 17th of May
SYdney Theatre Company: Bloom
By Cormac Herron
When I walked into the Wednesday night showing of Dean Bryant’s Bloom, I didn’t expect it to be as well timed, thought out, and considerate as it was. As soon as I walked into the Roslyn Packer theatre, I immediately noticed a change in the air.
Bloom covers subjects like the nearness of death, the problems with the healthcare system, love as a senior (and junior), and the ever-looming quality of life vs budget. The young deadbeat, Finn (Slone Sudiro), begins lodging at the local aged care centre for free in exchange for helping out as a carer, but what he doesn’t expect is that he ends up building a bond with his fellow lodgers and fights to uphold their dignity with Ruby (Vidya Makan) and Gloria (Christina O’Neill) against Mrs MacIntyre (Christie Whelan Browne).
Now this is the part where I feel I have to make it clear that I am the most evil kind of theatre-goer turned cynic. My friends can attest to this chronic cynicism, especially after the dreaded incident where I debated for a very lengthy dinner, myself against seven others, about the cultural relevance of Hamilton to an Australian audience. The worst part is that this wasn’t the first time we’d had this debate. I love to take a piece of theatre, chew it up and spit it out, find all the things good and bad, the things I liked and that I didn’t, and then give my plethora of perhaps too critical thoughts and observations on the show.
Like any other night, I thought I would again fall into my usual habits, however, this night, I was at the mercy of the skilled director Dean Bryant, and I didn’t even realise until the last third of the performance that I had been completely duped by the writing and arrangement of Katie Weston and Tom Gleisner and that a few of my gripes about Bloom were actually nifty musical and story-based choices that I had been tricked by until they decided to reveal this.
I would first like to express my surprise at the variation in age in the cast, ranging from early twenties to early eighties, but the older members of the cast more than certainly did not act their age, in fact, they felt just as, if not more youthful than the youngest, giving me a keen reminder of the humanity of these people. I was equally surprised by the vocal strength of the elder cast members, as they truly had some gorgeous and powerful voices among them.
I also couldn’t help but notice that despite the fact that this is supposed to be a musical, it felt more like a realism piece with musical numbers in it. It did not adopt the melodrama of musical theatre but it certainly took the witticisms and pace. I felt like I was watching things that had played out in my own memories, and this was heavily to its advantage, as it helped convey the importance of the issues in healthcare that it was discussing without diminishing or satirising the wrong subjects. Characters mostly felt like they had been given a healthy dose of their archetype, like the old man who doesn’t talk about his feelings (Doug, played by John Waters), the actor (Roland, played by John O’May), or the strong-willed and intelligent young woman (Ruby). There were, of course, exceptions to this, like Betty (Maria Mercedes), the old kleptomaniac, who was propped up by the repetitive jokes of her being a thief and her son coming to visit, who never did.
Repetition seemed to be a running theme of this piece, and while you could argue that this was the point, as it often is in theatre, I would venture to say that the repetition of these running jokes was a crutch. I started to tire of hearing ‘swear jar’ every time someone swore, and while this became relevant later, that in and of itself felt like a crutch to save the plot, just like Betty did, but I relent. What I will say though, is that the non-repetitive humour, the numerous one-liners, did not lose their effect on me. Who else was the queen of this but Evelyn Krape as Rose. Neither the actor nor character disappointed, and I was in awe of Krape’s energised performance. My joy and satisfaction in Rose’s casting is a main reason why I was so happy with the casting on the whole, I felt like everyone was well cast for their character and understood them.
It’s here that I feel I should stop myself from dissecting this production any further, because I know that I could go on for hours on topics like the structure of the pit, the accents that the actors sing in, or the parallels I kept on noticing between this and other theatre that I’ve consumed.
At its core, Bloom is a valuable reminder to the importance of our healthcare workers. Equally importantly though, it also reminds us that we should care about our parents and grandparents, not just for them, as Gleisner writes. The accuracy and care taken regarding these issues was deeply warming considering their seriousness and I am deeply interested to see what he comes up with next. I can’t ignore the timeliness of this play too, with the ASMOF currently on strike for the betterment of their welfare and pay. Bloom has come at exactly the right time. It’s not the melodramatic and grandiose Jesus Christ: Superstar, but it doesn’t need to be.
So should you watch it? Yes. Yes, I think you should.
Bloom is playing at The Roslyn Packer Theatre until the 11th May 2025.