SUDS Reviews

Sydney theatre company: the shiralee

By Sophia Grover

Tough and Tender...

From laughter to tears, love to jaw-dropping twists, Sydney Theatre Company’s new adaptation of D’Arcy Niland’s “The Shiralee” delivers it all. Directed by Jessica Arthur, this production transforms the well-known Australian novel into a poetic and deeply human story about growth and the weight we carry through life, our “shiralees”. This adaptation by Kate Mulvany (who also stars as Marge, Macauley’s wife) is beautifully done - perfectly paced, well-structured, and engaging right from the first scene - the two and a half hours flew by!

The story follows Macauley (Josh McConville), a rugged itinerant worker travelling through 1950s Australia with his young daughter, Buster (Ziggy Resnick). What begins as a reluctant partnership becomes a heartfelt journey. Through shifting towns, strained relationships, and lots of Aussie wit, the story evolves into something universal, a reflection on how love can both burden and transform us. The play also touches on themes of generational trauma, depicting the influence our parents have on the way we behave and choose to parent. It is both entertaining and quietly profound; a reminder of the depth and compassion that come from understanding a person’s upbringing.

The acting is phenomenal. Josh McConville gives a compelling performance as Macauley; you feel every fiery frustration, at times almost too well – I was genuinely scared! But the capacity to build such strong relationships with the audience, to the point where we sympathise and viscerally connect with the characters and their struggles, is truly remarkable. Kate Mulvany deserves particular mention, not only for adapting the story but for her portrayal of Marge. Her performance is subtle yet powerful, full of micro-expressions and incredible tone. The small cast of only eight deserves high praise, and the production was very well executed. It is rare to be this immersed in theatre, to forget that you are really watching people act.

Jeremy Allen’s set is minimal yet symbolically rich with a curved timber floor, fire pits glowing beneath the stage, a functioning water well, and sparse natural elements, all of which elevate the rural Australian landscape. The use of shifting props allows for seamless transitions between locations without interrupting the play’s momentum. Lighting (Trent Suidgeest) and sound (Clemence Williams) are minimal but balanced, enhancing the dynamic tensions and the locational environment.

For those who grew up in Australia, you’ll find this play wholly nostalgic and incredibly witty. And for those just visiting, it’s a creative introduction to the Australian culture.

Whether it be a line, character, or scene, this play will find ways of resonating with you. It reminds us that even parents who don’t see eye to eye can find unity in love for their child; that no one is too strong or too old to cry, and that our children can often be our greatest teachers.

But be warned, you’re sure to be singing “Aeroplane Jelly” for the rest of the week!

Beautifully written and brilliantly acted - “The Shiralee” is running at the Sydney Opera House until 29 November.

riverside theatre: Daytime deewane

By Katie Ord

Electricity is pulsing, pumping, pounding in the air.

On a traverse stage, the audience is locked into their seats, ready for an immersive ride.

And Daytime Deewane delivers!

The vibrant rhythm, director Sepy Baghaei has brilliantly orchestrated, is unparalleled, matched only by that of Shakespeare or Lin Manuel Miranda.

Set in the legendary daytime raves in 1997, London, Daytime Deewane is a tender portrait of what it means to be torn between respect for one’s culture, customs and traditions and rebellion - where freedom is tasted on the tongues of many Pakistanis but dare not uttered in their houses.

As the dance floor fills and the afternoon unfolds, Farhan (Ariyan Sharma) is still clutching his school bag - a fish out of water, a long way from home, a goody two shoes and a proper Pakistani boy. He meets his cousin there, Sadiq (Ashan Kumar), a cool, confident and stylish Pakistani boy with a natural grove for the music and a tongue mastered in rap that rhyme is a native language.

Mixing spoken word poetry and Bhangra fused dance music, the play creates its own rhythm, each scene excellently executed, the tempo, spun by composer and sound designer, Chrysoulla Maarkoulli, is the perfect blend of EDM and a Shakespearean ballad on steroids.

Despite being a two-hander, the play always feels dynamic. It mixes soliloquies and spotlights with stichomythic dialogue. It fuses lightning-fast costume changes with crystal sharp lighting cues. The rhythm is so palpable it sends currents of electricity and spine-tingling energy from stage to audience. It asks you to join the dance, literally! And speaks to you with and without the fourth wall.

The rave club is a black shiny traverse stage with a mixture of loudspeakers at either corner, and a low hanging lighting rig that runs around the whole stage, emits an electric pulse timed to perfection. Brockman’s immaculate lighting and set design reflects a liminal space, functioning as a transitional bridge where people can shed their normal identities and experience a temporary state of ambiguity and transformation.

Similarly, the play’s concern with biculturalism is equivalently evocative of a liminal space. Transporting us into the lives of two British Pakistani boys. It’s a space between cultures, one often characterized by ambiguity and a continuous process of reconciling or integrating different cultural values.

Yet, it’s also a space where audiences on either side of the stage feel fearless and capable of dancing across that bridge with Farhan and Sadiq. We feel the bravery of Sadiq’s decision to leave London, his law degree, and his Pakistani expectations behind. His decision feels like a cultural betrayal to his family but a personal loyalty to himself and his inner dignity. And at the same time, we empathize with the fear in Farhan’s voice, still too innocent, naive, and young to cross that bridge that defies his family’s expectations, to answer the question “everyone will need you, but what do you need?”

But for a moment, at the daytime rave, Farhan seems to forget all that, and loses himself entirely and utterly in the music. A new, proud, and hot, courage emerges - one drizzling in rizz, steaming with confidence, and dazzling with dance moves. A masculinity that is rephrased as “peacock energy”, a term which metaphorically mixes something spiritual with something beautiful. A metaphor that helps us unlearn a masculinity that is aggressive, dominant, or sexually entitled but one that is self-confidence at its humblest.

Azan Ahmed’s writing fearlessly takes these steps, allowing the play to shine in its radical joy and its bold, stereotype-defying performances. The choreography of Shyamla Eswaran is magical and spellbinding, beautifully synced to the rhythm of our hearts. Movement becomes a way to clear our minds, make us weightless and free. Peace is not only a mosque, it’s also a dance floor.

There’s a moment in the play that will stay with me forever.

A spotlight falls upon an aged Farhan. He’s remembering that moment in the past before the daytime rave was shut down forever. He’s an accountant now, a father with a wife and children. But the spotlight brings him back to the dance floor. And suddenly he summons the radical joy once more. With a wave of his hand like a wand in the sky, he commands the light to spin like an electric current around him - and we feel the surge of strength that empowers him to uproot his life and his new family in quest for the man that gave him his first taste of freedom.

New theatre: The laramie project

By Aidan Haale

In 1998, 21-year-old gay man Matthew Shepard was kidnapped, beaten, and tortured on the outskirts of Laramie, Wyoming. Matthew Shepard was found the day after tied to a fence, bloodied beyond recognition, and in critical condition. Six days later, he died in hospital a victim of a horrific hate crime. Suddenly, all eyes were on Laramie, and an ensuing media storm sent the city and the wider American public into a fervent debate on morality, crime, and queerness.

I spare no pleasantries or detours in detailing the gruesome tragedy that was Matthew Shepard’s murder. Nor does the New Theatre’s production of Moses Kaufman’s ‘The Laramie Project’ (2000), Directed by Mark G. Nagle and Assistant Directed by Nick Bradshaw. And, frankly, that’s exactly how it should be.

Kaufman’s play follows him and his team between 1998 and 1999 as they interview the people of Laramie, navigating their responses to the murder of Matthew Shepard. The play is constructed from these interviews, as well as personal records from Kaufman’s team, court transcripts, and other factual documentation. What is then represented by the actors is verbatim: a picture of a city debating, bereaving, grieving, and accepting a tragedy it didn’t know it could execute.

Nagle’s production of ‘The Laramie Project’ values this picture of Laramie above all else. A variety of vibrant, dynamic, and methodically detailed tableaus are assembled by the ensemble cast to construct the city. A line of bodies splayed out against the wooden fence; a sea of black umbrellas mourning; angel wings encasing the anti-queer protests. These directorial decisions muster so much emotion out of the play and do well to invite the audience, us strangers, into this other world of Laramie. It is a severe cliché to say that Laramie is its own character, although I fear that it is also severely apt.

It would be remiss of me to mention the ensemble and not point out the standouts. John Michael Narres and Samantha Lambert offer phenomenal performances, with distinct variations between their characters and powerful stage presences. I was often engrossed during any one of the ensemble’s performances, but I was entranced when either of those two were the focus on stage. Same goes for Rich Knighton’s powerful rendition of Dennis Shepard’s “I grant you life” speech to the murderer of his own son. There were some in the audience crying after his speech (which may or may not also include a few tears from me).

Please be warned, this is a production that may easily make you cry, and it is by design. Space is given by the ensemble to whoever is talking; whoever is talking is often talking directly to the audience. And the content that they talk about is distressing and confronting, but also pressingly relevant now. At the back of my mind, I was always thinking about how America could possibly be swayed by Trump politics after this happened in Laramie. Perhaps that’s why an Australian theatre decided to put on ‘The Laramie Project’–– a reminder of the abject horror behind that thought and a reflection of our own political state.

When dealing with thoughts and feelings like these during this production, cast member Rayyan Khan had this to say: “These are real things that happened to real people. It’s okay to feel those distressing emotions because that’s what those people felt. So, the way we worked around it was to not fight it but embrace it because everything we do is in service of what actually happened.” It is also of specific note that Khan’s portrayal of Matthew Galloway provided much needed levity and humour after the play’s more intense moments.

On these intense moments, Alexader Sussman’s compositions elevate the poignancy that makes this play so confronting. Sound is used sparingly, but it is all the more effective because of it. It gives the production an ever-changing weight to its text that makes the voices in Laramie feel contested and divisive. Yet, it also conveys that some of what’s said holds more importance.

Although I think this production gave the necessary space to be confronting, I must admit I was not fully convinced on the set. Set Designer David Marshall-Martin builds Laramie out of shapes; sculptures of wooden fences and concrete stairs whose shadows vaguely resemble buildings when darkened by Tash McBride, Raphael Gennusa, and Rubis-Chanel Carlton’s lighting. It is an impressive idea and sometimes works. However, bringing these set pieces back into the light reveals that the space is a bit too cluttered. And, with all the height that the set brings, I was a bit disappointed at how frivolous the use of levels felt.

All-in-all though, New Theatre’s production of ‘The Laramie Project’ is fantastic. Seeing it in the context of today’s world reveals again why this play was genre-defining. And I believe the people watching the night I went share my sentiment. The audience were still clapping well after the actors left the stage. If that doesn’t motivate you to go see this play, then I will: go see this play!

‘The Laramie Project’ is playing at New Theatre until November 1st.

SELKIE: Old fitz

By Elena Garcia Araujo

The Old Fitzroy Theatre in Sydney is one of those rare gems: a pub theatre with old timey vibes where history hangs in the air. Known for staging the underbelly of Australian theatre, it has long been a home for emerging artists and independent productions. Affordable and unpretentious, it is the place to be if you are chasing raw and ambitious indie theatre, and Selkie is a good place to start.

Written by Finn O’Branagáin and directed by Kurtis Laing, draws on Orkney mythology to tackle the heavy themes of domestic violence and coercive control. In folklore, selkies are creatures who live as seals in the sea, but shed their skins to live as humans on land.

Here, Rónnad (Celeste Cortez Davis) sheds her seal skin and finds herself stranded without it. She is “rescued” by Séan (Josh Hammond), who takes her into his home, clothes her, and vows to help her retrieve her skin. But the skin is gone, and its absence becomes the play’s central tension. Without it, Rónnad cannot return to the sea, leaving her bound to Séan and the relationship, no matter how suffocating it becomes.

What makes this production truly stand out is the movement direction by Josie Stanger-Jones that works seamlessly with the music, the sound designed by Matthew Forbes. Much of the relationship unfolds not through dialogue but through physicality: every breath, every hesitant touch, every lingering glance deepens the story. Dance and gesture become the vocabulary of the couple’s connection, mapping out shifts from desire to dependency, warmth to possession.

This low budget set is simplistic in nature, most of the action taking place in the living room built around just two couches. The simplicity throws the focus squarely on the actors, and the chemistry between Davis and Hammond is magnetic. Their connection is palpable, at times tender — intimate.

In the end, what lingers most about Selkie is its physicality. For a play about domestic violence, it finds imaginative ways to dramatise coercion and control. Yet at times it risks romanticising the relationship, softening the brutality of the subject. A more nuanced take could have pushed the work further.

Hell Is A Teenage Girl - She Threaded Dangerously: Old fitz

By Lola Kate Carlton

Old Fitz Unequivocally, beyond torture, death, or destruction, the most deplorable human experience has, and always will be female puberty. That god-awful period of thirteen to eighteen, where all of a sudden you’re at a very special age where you want things and have feelings that you’ve never felt before. And yet, it is not puberty itself that is the true evil of the Female Puberty ExperienceTM, it is the fact that we, as a culture, tend to throw our hands up to the sky and decide we don’t want to deal with it. In layman’s terms, we hate thinking about the fact that young girls get horny. Socially, we all expect it from young men. Teenage boy libido is built into our culture, into our media, into the way we interact with them on a day to day basis. However, in our refusal to think of our girls as anything else but little angels, we manufacture a blind spot for ourselves. Because we don’t give them an outlet for these new-found feelings, or even acknowledge they exist at all, they grasp behind our backs for what they can get, which tends to, ironically, put them in more danger than they would’ve been if we’d just let them explore in the first place. Truly, as Needy tells us in Jennifer’s Body, hell is a teenage girl.

Such is the thesis of She Threaded Dangerously at the Old Fitz theatre. A discomforting but culturally vital demand of us to acknowledge that if we don’t foster healthy desire, it will simply grow in other, more rotten places. Upon entering the theatre, the four young women, Mel (played by director Claudia Elbourne), Sophie (Larissa Turton), Luna (Karrine Kanaan) and Natalie (Alyssa Peters) are already sitting in the space. As we make our way to our seats, our presence immediately feels like an invasion. The Old Fitz’s tiny black box means that we almost have to step around them to make our way to where we need to go, and chips away at the standard separation between artist and audience. The stage is stripped back, three benches and a tree in the background, and relies on the narrative to do much of the imagining for it, although it successfully provided a backdrop for much of the piece. The four girls are dressed exactly the same, regulation uniforms that are both militarily sexless and eerily sexualised, as we see later in a skirt inspection scene and the only too familiar experience of the see-through white blouse. I was immediately drawn in by the performers. Even in the dark of the pre-show chaos, each character was decisively physically characterised, and in moments of reshuffling and adjustments, all the girls acknowledged the movement, checking in on one another. In this way, it felt less like a tableau and more like we were in a classroom with them, waiting for the bell to ring.

The piece began with an explosion of movement, which succeeded to create pacing and tension that carried throughout the rest of the piece. Although I must admit I am not personally a fan of the one-word-at-a-time storytelling that seems to be fairly popular in the independent theatre scene at the moment, it was an immediate focus point for the piece and created much of the early humour. Although, as I often find with this particular ensemble trope, when longer, fuller, more characterized lines are traded out for fast-paced rhythm, the slower scenes tend to suffer for it - and indeed, many of the earlier monologues struggled to find the settled emotional nuance needed for them to thrive. As the piece evolved, so did the performers, and slowing down provided all four enough time to comfortably settle into a much more naturalistic acting style. Perhaps the strongest example of this was Larissa Turton’s scenes with the adult cop she develops feelings for. Although perhaps slightly over-performing in their first scene, by her second one-on-one moment, she brimmed with the subtle anxieties and brash faux-overconfidence the character needed, and the two of them continued to impress for the remainder of the show. Karrine Kanaan was another substantial performer - and I was left wishing I had seen more of her throughout the piece. Kanaan provided a bullseye interpretation of the larger-than-life emotional experience of teenage-hood whilst never bleeding past the point of believability. Her monologue admitting that she had seen Sophie and the cop was delivered with beautiful light and shade. Alyssa Peters bloomed during the second half, really finding her stride in an incredibly touching moment between her and Kanaan where they express their most vulnerable anxieties about what’s happening around them. Claudia Elbourne, valiantly taking on the role late after the departure of Lilian Valverde, provides an energetic and watchable depiction of Mel - although lacks the vocal and emotional nuance of the actors around her, simply due to a lack of rehearsal time with the character. She did, however, provide an uncomfortably accurate representation of the too-overt clumsy sexuality of teenage girls. The men of the cast, although having significantly less on-stage time, certainly pulled their weight. Micheal Yore’s depiction of the new-age predator and the weaponisation of the teenage girl desire to feel special and interesting was truly bone-chilling, and Hamish Alexander and Leon Walsh provided strong emotional support to their scenes with the girls.

Past the performances, lighting designer Luna Ng and sound designer Alexander Lee-Rekers provided invaluable support to the climactic moments of the piece, keeping it on its feet and moving at all times. I was particularly drawn to Lee-Reker's use of a buzzing sound in the anxious moments of the play. Elbourne’s direction is incredibly clear stylistically and emotionally, bringing to it a cohesive flair often missing from young directors. The script drives at a fast pace, and although I understood why it thought it needed it, I was left wanting for a more thoughtful use of rhythm throughout the show. Much of the writing was slightly on-the-nose, which made the already difficult task of injecting nuance into the teenage experience even moreso. However, the insidious patriarchy that infests every character and the development of the stakes were done brilliantly. It also created an incredibly accurate portrayal of vengeful teenage cruelty and the manipulation tactics of their adult abusers. It, like the performers, seemed to begin to trust the audience more as the piece continued. I did wish for both Luna’s hinted queer identity and her viewing of Sophie and the cop’s relationship to be teased out further, but as the show continued 20 minutes past its advertised runtime, I understood why it wasn’t.

As a smash-cut of the dangers of the infantilization of teenage girls under patriarchy, She Threaded Dangerously shines, and leaves its audiences either reminiscing on their own pubescent experience, or for the men in the crowd, perhaps more willing to understand one they didn’t have. Its whipcords of tension and humour cross deliciously, and provide a strong thesis to its audience, one that they demand gets listened to. Led by strong performances and a cohesive style, it delivered a powerful emotional experience that will sit with me long after leaving the Old Fitz’s tiny theatre. Patriarchy is a clever animal, and it is up to us as the elders raised in it, to deny its continuation in the next generation, even if that means accepting the ick of teenage horniness.

Riverside Theatres: Trent Dalton’s Love Stories

By Elena Garcia Araujo

Should you watch Trent Dalton’s Love Stories? If you’re after a simple boy-meets-girl romance, this may not be for you. But if you want to see love redefined and your eyes opened to the many forms it can take, this play is well worth your time.

In 2021, Dalton spent two months sitting with his typewriter in Brisbane’s CBD, asking Australians from all walks of life one simple question: “Can you please tell me a love story?” The collection of intimate confessions became his book Love Stories. The stage adaptation, which made its debut at the Queensland Performing Arts Centre, has now arrived at Riverside Theatres Parramatta, adapted by Tim McGarry and directed by Sam Strong.

The play opens with narrator Jean Benoit, played by Rashidi Edward. He enters not from the stage but through the same door as the audience, beating a drum. This rhythmic entrance sets the pulse of the performance, as Benoit guides us through the unfolding stories alongside the typewriter that started it all. His presence is amplified on a large screen above the stage, creating an immediate sense of intimacy.

What makes this production truly distinctive is the use of close-ups projected onto that big screen. It is rare in theatre to be able to study an actor’s face at such proximity, to catch the flicker of a smile or the tremor of a lip. Those micro-expressions, normally reserved for film, become part of the live theatre experience, pulling the audience closer into the private world of each story. It gives the ensemble’s work an added layer of honesty and vulnerability that lingers well beyond the stage.

The staging is deliberately minimal. A sign reading “Sentimental writer collecting love stories” and a single typewriter draw the eye, while the screen at the back of the stage does much of the storytelling. It shifts from clouds to a starry night sky, echoing the characters’ journeys and underscoring the power of the words. Choreography by Nerida Matthaei adds another dimension, showing us the language of love in motion. At times bodies collide and intertwine in sweeping gestures that suggest passion and intimacy. At other moments, dancers peel away from one another, movements sharp and fractured, embodying separation, grief and the quiet ache of unrequited love. The physicality of these moments translates emotion into shape and space, giving the audience a visceral sense of the different textures of love.

At its heart, Love Stories reminds us that love is not one thing. It is parental devotion, the kind that says “we live to make our children happy.” It is the grief that holds on long after someone has gone. It is unrequited longing, love in sickness, messy love and enduring love. By the end of the play, we may find ourselves realising that soulmate love is not something we must keep searching for, but something already woven into our everyday lives.

The Art of Experimentation: Firehawk at Sydney Fringe

By Lola Kate Carlton

Sydney Fringe serves as one of the truest opportunities to fully immerse oneself into the experimentation aspect of the creative process. Creatives who want to build something sharp, raw, and never-before-seen will find a safe haven in this fast-paced festival. Out are the polished overdone works we’ve seen a hundred times, and in with the new, the fresh, the wonderfully innovative. Firehawk is right at home with Sydney Fringe in this regard, a bold and absurdist exploration of ideas done through a multi-genre, multi-media exploration of femininity and sisterhood through a 50 minute absurdist fairytale drama.

I stepped into Firehawk completely blind, knowing nothing of the thesis of the play or the world the performers were asking us to build and inhabit. In some regard, I feel now I did a disservice to the work by neglecting prior research into the questions the piece would then attempt to explore. Set in the cozy rooms of Erskineville Town Hall, the space is in some ways as bold and experimental as the work itself. Stripped back to necessary elements. Two boxes, two suitcases, a single basket of wood. As we settled in, a curling, eerie line of flute filled the space (played by Anna Rushmer), joined by a grounding piano score underneath it from Nathaniel Kong. The soundscape, paired with the flickering, fiery red of the lights, began to introduce us to the twisted fable we were soon to witness. The boundaries of the stage were created by us as the audience, seated in an L shape, which although often presents a blocking challenge for less experienced shows, was not a problem for this team. For an unconventional space and a tight budget, and without a dedicated set designer, the design of the space remains impressive in its decisive simplicity.

After thoroughly unnerving us through Firehawk’s composition, the piece began. In a gorgeous exploration of the unconscious dreaming of the play, Ella Roper took the stage in the leaps and bounds of reimagined ballet, immediately drawing us into the emotional world of the piece. In delicate white lace costuming, she resembled something just beyond the fingertip touch of reality. By the time Madison Chippendale peaked out from the curtain, we were transfixed by what the piece wanted us to feel, and so began the search for logic. Madison Chippendale is a strong performer- expressive eyes, complete and utter belief in her situation, a style just beyond naturalism but never painfully larger than life. This quality of performance never quivered, and in a piece this unusual, that must be credited. Indeed, all the performers were substantial in their own regards, strong representations of their form. Thus, my confusion throughout the piece cannot be credited at all to the performers themselves. The first speaking scene of the play defines the space we inhabit as a hotel in rural Australia, ravaged by consistent storms and the ever-present threat of the Firehawk, a destructive creature inspired heavily by the Brother’s Grimm Fitcher’s Bird. Instantly, the question in the room is “what is the Firehawk, and what does it mean for this piece?” My first guess - as scribbled down in my notebook - was “Climate ideas??” And yet, as the piece evolved, I understood my interpretation to be wrong, and yet was never truly given a ballpark of what was right, or perhaps, more importantly, what the creators of the piece were aiming for it to be. After researching the piece when I got home, the word “desire” crept out in the directorial vision. Thus, the “thirst” the Firehawk had created was of a more metaphorical sense and more literal sense than I’d understood it to be. In that regard, I wish I had been able to see the piece again with that framework of understanding, as I found the piece itself struggled to reveal that to me on its own.

The script, aside its flaws of clarity, did make up for it in beautifully evocative imagery. And indeed, the piece continued to be beautiful. Whipcrack moments of humour broke cleverly created moments of tension, and the relationships created on stage brimmed with clear trust and respect the performers had for one another. The composition work was incredibly strong, creating a story underneath the one on stage through motifs and bold dynamic work. Further, co-director Spark Sanders Robinson gleefully unveiled her expertise through the use of shadow puppetry in poignant moments of the show, never taking from the performers on stage. A particularly impressive example of such were the eyes of the hawk, and the flickering fire behind them. Ella Roper continued to impress with the delicate longing she created through her movement, and Madison Chippendale’s rising level of neuroticism kept the stakes high and her audience gripping their seats. Madison successfully played multiple characters and re-enacted full conversations, and Rushmer was a strong critical voice of realism throughout the play. Admittedly, when on stage together, a vocal strength disparity did emerge between the three women, and I found at points both Roper and Rushmer were struggling to keep up to the dynamics Chippendale was setting. Furthermore, both were slightly greener actors, and at times lacked the emotional nuance needed in specific moments. However, in a multi-media setting such as the one Firehawk was presenting, these discrepancies are easily forgiven through the showcasing of each performer’s primary medium. The story’s ever-evolving twists and turns consistently engaged the audience, and I was deeply intrigued by the idea of being forgotten that the story began to create through the back half - although somewhat ironically, seemed to also somewhat forget. In its final moments, the brutality of the play built to an explosive finish as Chippendale’s character is revealed to have been behind the mythical killings of the Firehawk, its imagery reminiscent of Lady Macbeth as she scrubs at her spots. The sisters, now reunited as a complete front, are prepared to tackle the storms of the future, and finally satiate their “thirst”, delivering a dark, grinning look to the audience as if tempting us to join them. This metaphor, although evident upon my later research, required a stronger foundation throughout the piece to be fully actualized for the audience in the room - especially when surrounded by other images that sway the connotations of the idea.

Upon reflection in the foyer, I was left with two final thoughts, firstly, that the play had succeeded in making me feel something, and second, that whatever it was trying to tackle, I hadn’t quite wrapped my head around whilst in the room with it. Many younger works often struggle with this issue, a desire to tackle a multitude of ideas vaguely rather than zeroing down into a crystal clear singular thesis. However, I will never be caught saying that this is some sort of cardinal sin in the act of theatrical creation. Sydney Fringe Festival is built for experimental works of theatre like Firehawk, and the piece was deeply enjoyable as the active work of creation that it was. As a self-devised work, Firehawk is an innovative and confident example of the opportunities of multimedia and absurdism in theatre, and is a deeply soothing example of the future of Sydney theatre at large.

ENSEMBLE Theatre: How to Plot a Hit in Two Days

By Elena Garcia Araujo

How to Plot a Hit in Two Days is a new Australian play by Melanie Tait that transports its audience back to a golden era of television, when free to air was the only option. The play is set in 1985, at the height of A Country Practice, one of Australia’s most loved dramas.

Set in the fictional rural town of Wandin Valley, A Country Practice brought stories of family, community, and rural medicine into living rooms across the nation. At the heart of Tait’s play is one of its most unforgettable storylines: the death of Molly, a character whose warmth and humour made her a household favourite. We are taken into the writers’ room, where the creative team grapple with how to script her final moments. The premise is both funny and deeply poignant, as the decision to kill off such a beloved character weighed heavily not only on the writers but also on the millions of viewers who had welcomed her into their homes.

That cultural impact was palpable on the Friday night I attended. During the post-show Q&A, one woman, teary eyed, shared that she had first watched A Country Practice with her late mother. For her, the play was more than entertainment; it was a reminder of family, community, and the shared ritual of watching television together. That moment captured the spirit of the evening: this was more than a play, it was a collective return to the good old days. Belly laughs rang throughout the theatre, sparked by inside jokes and memories that only those who lived through the 1980s could fully appreciate.

The ensemble cast capture the energy of a writers’ room with sharp timing and playful chemistry, balancing the lightness of comedy with the emotional weight of the task before them. The play moves with a brisk rhythm, keeping the laughs flowing without losing sight of the deeper cultural resonance beneath the humour.

The set design completes the immersion. Mustard yellow and sage green walls instantly evoke the era’s suburban interiors, while a plaid couch with heavy armrests anchors the stage in late seventies and early eighties style. At the centre is a large corkboard, where the writers pin major plot points. More than a prop, it becomes a visual anchor, reminding us that what once sat on such a board could ripple across an entire nation.

This production highlights the strength of Australian theatre, with its ability to tell our own stories with humour, warmth and honesty. Tait shows that revisiting and celebrating our cultural history can be just as powerful as staging international works. It is a timely reminder of how important it is to see more Australian stories brought to the stage.

old fitz: Chekov’s Cream Pie: The Balloon Dog Bites

By Lola Kate Carlton

The nature of the artistic experience is almost always a humiliating one. As artists, we face more than anyone else the badgering questions of friends, of relatives, of lovers, of total and complete strangers. “What are you still doing in that job?” “When are you going to grow up and pick something different?” “Why can’t you let this go?” No matter the love we feel for our craft, creative expression and public shaming seem to forever exist hands entwined, only more true when combined with the queer experience. Thus, we are faced with the question we must all ask ourselves if we plan to take art seriously: What do I care about more? Being a good, well rounded grown up person with a real job, grounded relationships, and a steady future- or this?

It’s this question that The Balloon Dog Bites tackles in its fifty minute interrogation into the humiliation ritual of artistry. As a one man show, we are invited into the intimate and vulnerable crevices of Paulie Accio’s mind (Micheal Louis Kennedy), and lead through his no-good-very-bad day as a practising clown at an Eastern Suburb brat child’s birthday party. Upon entering the space, the aesthetics of the show immediately jump out at you. Blues and whites invoke both a children’s birthday party in all of its cruel innocence, and simultaneously, the feeling of a long-standing depressive episode. Immediately, classic conventions of theatre are broken as Kennedy wanders through the audience, handing out scripts, birthday party hats and instructions for heckling. Immediately, I was impressed by the costuming. An aesthetic combination of Paris’s Pierrot and Comedia del Arte’s Harlequino, big fluffy gently sparkling patches of baby blue and creamy white seamlessly meld Kennedy into the aesthetics of the piece, harken back to clowning’s history whilst also being ever so slightly uncomfortable to look at.

The play starts with a jump of classical music, and a single spot on Kennedy as he somberly applies makeup, wasting no time to introduce us to the comedy of the piece as he cuts face powder into a line with a credit card, then artfully presses to his nose and cheeks. Credit here must go to Oliver John Cameron’s brilliant sound design. Although Kennedy’s voice largely suited the script’s grinning pessimism, I was left wanting in a few key moments for more vocal strength and inflections through his performance - each emotional moment incredibly valuable in a piece this dry. As he jumped between characters, first, the tyrannical French clown teacher, then the buttoned up Eastern Suburbs mother, the genius of the script-writing was exposed. Each character, including Paulie himself, could’ve benefited from slightly more physical and vocal commitment, but with each razor-sharp quip of the writing, constantly moving so fast you had to pay attention or be left behind, any complaint is quickly forgotten. Much of Kennedy’s performance was beautiful in its subtlety, each turn, step and facial expression delightfully deliberate. This continued into the clowning work done throughout the piece. Although two out of the three “sets” acted more as a satire of their original form, the first set, a mime act, was a stunning example of the form. Kennedy zeroed in to a crystal clear objective, and each movement brought the joke forward in a way that dripped with expertise. It was at this moment that I became utterly convinced of the character’s love for clowning, which was a necessary cornerstone to the larger thesis of the piece.

The emotion of the piece comes out through Accio’s cigarette breaks (a brilliant use of prop comedy as he pulls a lit cigarette out of his clown costume) and the conversations he has with one of the neighbors, John, and his senile dog Daisy as he recovers from his sets. Here, Accio admits to us the mourning of past lovers, the discomfort of committing to art as he gets older, and how his will to continue is tested. In easily the most beautiful moment of the show, Kennedy describes a friend from clowning school who’d just lost their father, who delivers a joke about it so well crafted and well timed, Accio began to cry. The older man, in turn, represents the average Australian response to the committed artist, in both his lack of understanding and tentative support. These moments of vulnerability and comfort drive our sympathy for Paulie, and allow us to connect to him properly and feel both his anxiety and wrath when faced with the abuse at the party. The children at the party, played by us in the audience, take turns poking at Accio’s insecurities and asking the questions every artist has heard a hundred times (clearly, as Kennedy mouths along to the script on stage). Kennedy feels this humiliation, then the subsequent exhaustion completely in his body, and we watch the costume literally disintegrate as his will to continue does. It is here that Chekov’s cream pie is first brought up, serving as a brilliant metaphor for society’s willingness to abuse art for entertainment without regard for the artist themselves.

The stakes continue to build as the abuse from the party-goers worsens, the demands for Accio’s degradation increases and the heckling from the audience becomes targeted and more specific. Suddenly, in a flashing red and white, the children begin to attack him and he is forced to retaliate by flinging one of them over the fence into the neighbour’s garden, straight into Daisy’s jaws. In perhaps the only heroic moment of Accio’s life, he leaps after the child, and is in turn bitten. Time stops, a spot from above opens bright, white heavenly light onto Accio’s panting face. He begins to break down from the pain, and through this breakdown has a moment of true self-actualization, delivering a profound message on the nature of accepting shame for the purposes of artistic expression. His costume is in tatters by this point, and the violence has built to where it almost isn’t quite funny, and yet, as he stands there, leg covered in blood, he is grounded for perhaps the first time. The play ends with the world’s final attempt to degrade him, a cleverly disguised AIDs comment from Christina’s father - “you didn’t get any of that clown’s blood on you, did you honey?” - and yet, instead of being forced into the acceptance of this humiliation, he is finally driven into a moment of power and vengeance. The clown hat comes off, revealing a second, smaller clown hat, and Chekov’s cream pie is realized through the hurtling of a creme brulee at his attackers as he sprints off stage.

The Balloon Dog Bites presents a sharp, funny reality check for the artists of the world, reminding us that we cannot escape the humiliation society will shove our noses into. Our only power then, is through radical self-acceptance and reminding ourselves that we have chosen this needlessly difficult path because we love it. Although the piece could’ve benefited from slightly more energy, on a holistic level, it thrives as a cynical dissection of the creative experience, and the fact that though we may create hungry, though we may create in pain, or sick, or bored, or heartbroken, we cannot stop ourselves from continuing the act of creation.

New theatre: The Frogs: In Hell They Sing Show Tunes

By Liron Peer

Camp, comedic and apocalyptic with a stirring modern touch. Alex Bendall Robson delivers on his world premiere of ‘The Frogs: In Hell They Sing Showtunes’, now showing at the New Theatre.

Right off the bat, you know you are in for a form-bending treat, as Dionysus (Pat Mandziy), the god of theatre and wine and his vexed sidekick Xanthias (Eddy O’Leary), begin the play trying to think of jokes to tell the audience/Heracles and land on knock knock. This dynamic duo have a great commitment to character, and their portrayals juxtapose brilliantly together.

The play follows Dionysus and Xanthias on their journey to the underworld. ‘The world is on fire, people are dying. There’s war and plague and cuts to arts funding. It’ll take a bloody miracle to save humanity.’ In this apocalyptic world, Dionysus gets the idea to resurrect a dead playwright who will save humanity. What ensues is an entertaining and bleak journey, including an off-Broadway serenade by an ensemble of frogs. It was nice to see the cast work so effortlessly together and their commitment to ‘the bit’. Expect some lovely singing, the flute and lots of charisma. Pat Mandziy delivers a hilariously privileged and lascivious Dionysus that balances out well with the rest of the mixed bag of characters. Including: Axel Berecy’s dim-witted and obnoxious Heracles, James Robins' stark and captivating performance as the Porter, and Nicholas Starte’s sardonic Hades. Holly Nesbitt's lighting design helps create the differing atmospheric modes throughout the piece, as well as sound design by David Wilson that builds dramatic effect, allowing the moments of silence to pay off.

This play will sweep you up in its fabulously curated comedy that oddly uplifts the dire truths of modern society.

Sydney Theatre Company: The Talented mr. ripley

By Aidan Hale

It’s always a challenge producing theatre of a work known mostly for its representation in other mediums. On top of actually putting on a production (which in of itself is a hard thing to do), questions about adaptation are always floated. How much do we take from this other rendition of the story? How different should we be from the source material? There’s a delicate balance between too much and too little deviation that all good adaptations must aim for, or otherwise drown in one end of the scale.

I’m pleased to report that what surfaced from Sydney Theatre Company’s ‘The Talented Mr. Ripley’, for the most part, hits the good balance of an adaptation. Directed by Sarah Goodes and adapted by Joanna Murray-Smith, ‘The Talented Mr. Ripley’ follows an abridged and slightly altered version of Patricia Highsmith’s novel.

Tom Ripley (Will McDonald), the titular talent himself, is a young grifter looking to escape his mediocre life in New York City. When Ripley has a chance encounter with the prestigious Greenleaf family, he is sent to Italy on a mission to convince their charismatic heir, Dickie

Greenleaf (Raj Labade), to return home. However, upon arrival, Ripley is swept into Dickie and his girlfriend Marge Sherwood’s (Claude Scott-Mitchell) glamourous lives and begins obsessing over Dickie.

McDonald is an undeniable powerhouse as Ripley. Masterfully blending and blurring the character’s motivations into an intriguing biography of an undesired man. Invisible but charming; calculating and reckless; envious or possessive. McDonald inhabits each contradicting facet of Ripley in a standout, flexible performance. His dynamic with Labade is of specific note: the innocence and playfulness between Ripley and Dickie turned to disgust and animosity was as fun as it then became heartbreaking.

Director Goodes does a lot to bring these dynamics and performances to life visually. Ripley and Dickie’s dance under glittering tassels, a choreographed swing of umbrellas as Mongibello’s beaches are formed, Dickie’s train compartment pulled slowly away from a panicked Ripley. Goodes, and Set Designer Elizabeth Gadsby, draw on Brecht’s minimalistic, yet elegant approach to theatre for a direction that is nothing short of cheeky and colourful. At one point in the play, the walls literally close in on Ripley. Maybe Goodes is a little too cheeky and simple at times, but I definitely found it charming. Although the more filmic decisions, like the trope of Americans spicing their language up with some Italian, felt more out-of-place than it did charming.

That said, props for the colourful moments must also be given to the fantastic ensemble work and sound design. Movement Director Charmene Yap makes the ensemble feel like a part of the world themselves. They’re always on the fringes of Ripley’s story, imbuing the places we go to with so much more life. Assisting this are the jazzy sounds composed by Steve Francis and Madeleine Picard. It makes the world of Ripley feel busy and lively, but the shady undertone accompanying reminds us that something isn’t quite right: that Ripley’s story is fraudulent.

Truthfully, my hesitance with this production unfortunately comes from Murray-Smith’s script. While I appreciate how good a job she does in condensing 252 pages into a 2-hour performance, the result is that the script lacks a bit of punch. The first half is paced a bit too

fast and the second paced too slow. Though we get some great moments to breathe in the middle, the play doesn’t always strike the right impact.

Regardless of my reservations, I think ‘The Talented Mr. Ripley’ finds the middle ground it needs to be a good adaptation and good theatre. It’s not always a killer, but it is a fun time.

‘The Talented Mr. Ripley’ is playing at the Roslyn Packer Theatre until September 28th.

Griffin Theatre Company: Birdsong of tomorrow

By Benjamin Tigre La

On entering the Old Fitzroy hotel, a warmth permeates from the small fireplace, it hits me. There is a comforting kind of chaos. The sound of intermingling, glasses clashing, metal utensils scraping against plates. It is loud and busy and everything an Australian pub should be. In the corner, people crowd around a band playing jazz. The jazz lingers so I linger. I head downstairs into the theatre. The Old Fitz is not a big theatre. With a capacity of 55 seats, it begs for intimacy. The theatre fills up slowly, the chaos of the outside reduces to distant murmurs, and the show begins. 

Birdsong of Tomorrow is not just a theatre show. It feels communal, like sitting in your friend's parent’s office after school, listening to them talk about their special interests. The core of this work is, like the name suggests, about birds, and, if I only learnt one thing from this show, writer-performer Nathan Harrison loves birds. It is a crash course on all his favourite birds; the buff-breasted paradise kingfisher, the superb fairy wren, the wandering albatross. Alongside these are observations of the world, the passing of time, the anxieties around change and yet also the anxieties around everything staying the same. Harrison bares his heart in his work, not just his love for birds but also his deep sense of grief that he hasn’t fully reconciled with yet. So perhaps crash course was the wrong term to use, it felt more like a long rant, equal part fact, equal part poetry. One line stuck to me early in the show, that I had to scribble down, “Nothing sang before the birds.”

Like all conversations, sometimes I felt that there were lulls, points where I felt my energy drop and perhaps my attention faltered for a second. It could very well be my fault. I realise I didn’t have as strong opinions on birds as I originally thought. Maybe I should have stronger opinions on birds. Nevertheless, Harrison’s passion and joy was so infectious. Even in these lulls, he was quick and witty, creating great comedic moments. His description of the migratory journey of certain birds or the wingspan of others commanded the space, moving the theatre with him. He performs with the confidence only granted to someone with complete faith in his writing, he is funny, honest, and deeply likeable. 

The stage is littered in nostalgia, an old school projector, a tape recorder, a record player. They do not simply serve as props, but are utilized masterfully throughout the production. Artworks of birds are projected onto screens, recording spin playing bird sounds. The soft hum of analogue machinery underscores the entire performance. They hum with history, forcing us to look back not just at the histories of the show but our own histories. The addition of a live musician Tom Hogan, creating a soundscape for the work was an amazing touch. He was very evidently not just a musician but also a friend of Harrison’s which created a deeper sense of intimacy within the work. 

In the end, Birdsong of Tomorrow, is a reminder to pause, to notice. It calls for us to slow down amongst the chaos of life and delight in the world that we live in, to look at the birds. Nathan Harrison’s passion, humor and honesty bleeds into the audience. He asks nothing of us (except to make the occasional bird sound), except to glimpse into his world and listen.

The Face of Jizo: Memory, Translation, and the Ghosts of Hiroshima

By Katie Ord

How do you translate grief? How do you relive memories? Most importantly, can you? The Face of Jizo, currently showing at the Seymour Centre after a season at the Old Fitz, asks us to reckon with Hiroshima’s aftermath through the intimacy of a two-hander. Written by Hisashi Inoue in 1994 and translated by Sydney local Roger Pulvers, this production is guided by directors Shingo Usami and David Lynch, and produced by Omusubi Productions with co-producer Jade Fuda.

Translation as Cultural Nostalgia

Translation is always a negotiation. While Pulvers’ version occasionally pares down the lyricism of Inoue’s original text, losing some of the symbolic connotations of Japanese dialogue, it makes the story accessible to Australian audiences in a direct, clear and relatable way. What lingers is the universality of trauma and resilience, even if some of the original poetic nuance is softened and replaced by cultural inferences that feel tailored to an Australian audience than a Japanese one.

Direction and Staging

Flashbacks are notoriously difficult to stage, yet Usami and Lynch make bold, simple choices. Instead of heavy reliance on lighting tricks or sound effects, the past is evoked through gestures and memory fragments: cleaning, wringing, miming small household rituals. It’s restrained but effective, letting the performers’ bodies carry the weight of time.

The stage picture, though often concentrated on stage right, is anchored by Tobhiyah Stone Feller’s set design, a space defined by tatami mats, a sliding wardrobe reveal, and the warm glow of a Japanese lampshade. It feels authentic, lived-in, and delicately composed. Matt Cox’s lighting design and Zachary Saric’s sound are subtle yet well-judged, never overwhelming the performers, while Me-Lee Hay’s composition lends a soft emotional undercurrent to the production.

Performances

The heart of this production lies in its performers.

Mayu Iwasaki (Mitsue) delivers a tour de force. Her performance is layered with guilt, grief, and resilience, and her monologues are genuinely heart-rending. The constant wringing of a cloth in her hand recalls Lady Macbeth, but here it becomes a symbol of unbearable memory. By the end, her tears drew my own. Shingo Usami (Inoue), doubling as co-director and actor, offers a playful, humorous counterbalance as the father’s ghost. While some of the more serious scenes lean into bluntness, his warmth and comic timing keep the piece buoyant. Together, the duo create a dynamic of daughter and father that oscillates between tenderness and tension, reminding us that memory itself is never linear, it slips between humour and horror, levity and loss.

Design as Atmosphere

The creative team succeeds in weaving an atmosphere that feels both authentic and theatrical. Costumes are neat and symbolic, the props functional if at times impressionistic. The cutting of vegetables may not always signify a clear meal, but it does root the characters in a sense of ordinary domesticity, a reminder of what was shattered by war. The tatami mats, meanwhile, provide a grounding world for the actors, with humour threaded in through simple staging choices.

A Necessary Witness

What emerges from this production is less a literal retelling and more a meditation: how do we carry the unbearable into the present? The Face of Jizo doesn’t aim for spectacle, but instead for intimacy, an honesty that invites us to witness grief without embellishment.

Independent theatre is often where the most daring conversations take place, and this production proves it. With Omusubi Productions steering and a deeply thoughtful creative team, this staging brings Hiroshima’s ghosts into our present with grace, humour, and devastating clarity.

Go for Iwasaki’s extraordinary performance, stay for the quiet power of the staging, and leave reminded that memory itself is theatre: fragmented, fragile, and achingly human.

Riverside theatres: Trophy boys

After a sold-out season in New York, the Trophy Boys returned home to tour in Australia, arriving at Riverside theatre on August 6th to a tame opening night. 

The set up was exciting and promising. A cast of female and non-binary actors expertly portray a private boys debating team, trapped in a room with the looming assignment “feminism has failed women: affirmative”. 

What follows is exactly what you would expect. About 40 minutes of the four boys desperately trying to find a winning argument that doesn’t cost them being labelled misogynistic pratts and all the while revealing, in not so subtle outbursts, the hypocrisy of their supposed feminist stances. 

This leads to the twist half-way through where (spoiler alert), they find out a news article has been released accusing a member of their debating team of sexual assault. From here, the play adopts a much darker tone as the audience is privy to the sinister truths that hide beneath their normalized behaviours and attitudes. These revelations allow for some of the strongest and most captivating performances throughout the show, particularly when Owen, the most convincing feminist on the team, is accused by the other boys as being the assaulter. As the boys are forced to confront the potential consequences of their own actions, the hierarchy and dynamics of the group pull and shift as they each desperately cling to solutions.  

However, ultimately I struggled  to feel any degree of true shock or betrayal at these revelations given that their characterisation in the first act was so satirised that it was difficult to connect with any of the boys as fully fledged characters. It could be argued that this was exactly the point, that the comedy demonstrates just how easily we accept and infantilise the misogynistic behaviour of young boys as just ‘boys will be boys’. Yet at points it felt that the story ceded to cheap laughs over building characters that we can emotionally invest in (ridiculous and immature as they may be). Whilst hilarious at first, eventually the satire began to feel repetitive, superficial and ultimately unsatisfying.

Once On This Island at Hayes Theatre Co – Reimagined Through the Lens of Indigenous Dreaming.

By Elena Garcia Araujo

If you’re after something warm, rhythmic, and full of soul, Once On This Island is your next must-see. This feel-good, heart-holding musical wraps you in colour, community, and connection, all while asking one of life’s biggest questions: what wins, love or death?

With Moana-like magic, this Australian adaptation bursts with life. The choreography is bubbly and impeccably timed, joyous, passionate, and full of heart. There’s a deep sense of soul in every movement, made even more powerful by the show’s cultural richness. Set against a backdrop of minimal staging, the performers use every inch of space creatively, inviting the audience into the world of Ti Moune, a dreamer with childlike wonder and fierce hope.

At its core, Once On This Island is a coming-of-age story about sacrifice, betrayal, and the deep spiritual journey of a girl who dares to want more. Ti Moune isn’t just waiting for love, she’s waiting for life to begin. Guided by the gods of her island, she steps into a destiny that transcends romance.

Director, Brittanie Shipway, a proud Gumbaynggirr woman, brings something truly special to this Australian staging:

“As a Gumbaynggirr woman with Aboriginal roots, I really wanted Ti Moune’s story to feel like a dreaming story,” Shipway shared. “In bringing Once On This Island to Australia, I didn’t want to copy the American version, I wanted to honour the many cultures that make up this country. Some of the cultures reflected in this production include Tongan, Samoan, Māori, Brazilian, Salvadoran, Filipino, and of course First Nations. I wanted the cast to represent who they are authentically, to bring their own languages, cultural dances, and costumes into the show, rather than pretending to be from the Caribbean.”

That commitment shines. There are beautiful hints of Indigenous dreaming, natural connection, and ancestral rhythm. The show becomes not just a story from one place, but a celebration of many cultures meeting beautifully in cultural harmony, a rare and powerful thing on Australian stages.

And at the centre of it all is Ti Moune. Actor Thalia Osegueda Santos, who plays her, reflected:

“Getting to know Ti Moune has been a real journey. For a long time, I was trying to figure out who she was, and then it finally clicked. We’re so alike. We’re both naturally curious, and we share a deep love for healing, family, and culture.”

That love radiates. You feel it in the songs, in the sway of the dancers, in the stillness of the moments between joy and heartbreak. This isn’t just a boy-meets-girl story. It’s a god-guided journey through the thickets of destiny, class, culture, and spirit. And maybe—just maybe—it asks us to redefine love itself.

Once On This Island is full of rhythm, full of culture, and full of heart. And while romance drives the story, by the end, you may find the most powerful kind of love isn’t romantic at all.

Once on this Island is playing at Hayes Theatre Co. until the 31st of August 2025

Sydney Theatre Company: Circle Mirror Transformation

By Faye Tang

For its almost absurdly minimalist name and premise (four strangers participate in an amateur acting class; drama ensues), Circle Mirror Transformation tunes into a wonderful polyphony of emotional experience. 

This charming ensemble piece is built almost purely on characterisation, like a 19th-century realist experiment. Marty (Rebecca Gibney), the acting instructor, is classically bohemian, from her sweet husky voice to her myriad shawls. Her husband, James (Cameron Daddo), is a little harder to decipher, a renegade older man who used to be a revolutionary. Theresa (Jessie Lawrence) and Schultz (Nicholas Brown) are at once recognisable as millennial spoofs, the former touting perma-pilates garb, the latter a klutzy carpenter played with impressive slapstick physicality. And my favourite, Lauren (Ahunim Abebe)—the most naturalistically written and embodied, a close-to-heart high schooler, shy and ironic but later wonderfully witty, who harbours dreams of being an actor.

Though most of the play was anchored in a gentle naturalism, the third act ushered in an uneasy feeling that the delightfully character-driven story was lurching into conflict with a superimposed plot. In the final climax, the ensemble sits in a circle and writes a “secret they’ve never told anyone else” on slips of paper. These—in a frustratingly predictable way—turn out to be sensational, relationship-breaking ‘secrets’, which the audience has been clued into throughout the play. Marty reveals a horrific childhood trauma that’s played for shock and left unexplored; James lets loose his adulterous love for Theresa in a singularly bombast and unrealistic moment; Schultz is again mined for comic relief, misspelling his secret and confessing his addiction to internet pornography, the cherry on top of a Frankensteinian hodgepodge of millennial stereotypes. Chekhov’s gun goes off and off and off, long after any meaningful target has dropped well and dead.

The play travels along the trajectory of Plath’s fig tree: a bright young thing, seductive in its easy subtlety, but curdles as it grows, sucked into the formal constraints that hang heavy over it like April fog. Schultz is straitjacketed into a sitcom ass, as if true bohemians died with the aging of Gen X; short-story sensationalism overwhelms the denouement, bringing an otherwise subtle, gently explorative play to an unreasonably histrionic end.

Despite the ending, Circle Mirror Transformation is a riveting and capacious experience. Its strengths lie in its self-reflexivity, in the delightful inception of actors pretending to be actors. Particularly striking are scenes of layered pretense, as when James (pretending to be Theresa’s ex) fulfills the part of an emotionally abusive partner to Lauren (embodying Theresa), who tries to refute his manipulative tactics in a manner too healthy and detached for Theresa who, enraptured by James’ theatrical reenactment, is pulled earnestly and stridently into the argument, so thick with emotion it’s almost tangible.

The web of metatheatricality is weaved so effortlessly by the actors, easing the audience from one melodrama to another, all the while deepening our relations with each character. It’s a clever ensemble piece, at its best when slow, subtle, and meandering.

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.