SUDS Reviews

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.