> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://melbournestagereview.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Hitherto: God may have a dramaturg - URL: https://melbournestagereview.com/hitherto-god-may-have-a-dramaturg/ - Published: 2026-10-14T06:46:54.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-14T06:46:54.000Z - Description: God, death, shame, desire and the appalling inconvenience of other people. Hitherto turns the existential crisis into a gloriously funny theatrical playground, where meaning is always just within reach — until someone starts meowing. - Author: Ellen M. Scott - Tags: Reviews If I weren't already booked into another five nights of Melbourne Fringe, I'd happily spend them all watching *Hitherto* again. Not because I understood everything the first time. Good heavens, no. But because Evangelos Arabatzis has written a play about God, death, shame, desire and the appalling inconvenience of other people, and somehow made it one of the funniest things I've seen at Fringe. I suspect a second viewing would reveal entirely new reasons to laugh. A third might bring enlightenment. By the fifth, I'd probably be meowing. More on that shortly. Arthur Angel and Rebecca Howell play two nameless beings who find themselves together in a world without apparent instructions. They don't know who they are, what they're doing here or quite what to make of one another. These are, of course, questions that have occupied philosophers for millennia, although few have approached them with quite this much theatrical mischief. The pair circle one another through a dizzying succession of encounters, shifting between tenderness and contempt, intimacy and hostility, authority and submission. They confess, accuse, seduce, philosophise and occasionally remember they're in a play. The script, we're repeatedly assured, is nearby. It's a magnificent running joke. Just as someone appears to be approaching a profound existential revelation, the other reminds them that the whole business has already been written down. Free will is difficult enough without someone waving the stage directions at you. God, it seems, may have a dramaturg. ![Rebecca Howell (Character 2) in Hitherto, framed by the doorway and atmospheric stage lighting.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/10/IMG_5837.jpeg) Rebecca Howell (Character 2) in Hitherto. Photo: Constantia Thomas Arabatzis has a marvellous ear for language, and his dialogue is thick with lines that deserve to be caught, examined and perhaps taken home for safekeeping. “You'll be the death of my ego,” Howell declares. Angel wistfully recalls a time “before nuance crept in uninvited”. And, in a splendid improvement upon conventional wisdom, “Don't count your serpents before they hiss.” The language is poetic, sometimes startlingly so, but Arabatzis is far too mischievous to let a beautiful thought sit undisturbed for long. Howell delivers a meditation on the devil's purpose, arriving at the deceptively simple proposition that his objective is to separate humanity from God. It's a moment of genuine philosophical weight. Then the lighting changes and she starts meowing. Not the usual theatrical approximation of a cat, either. Howell produces something alarmingly close to the real thing. For a moment, we're somewhere entirely different, although where that might be is anybody's guess. Elsewhere, an existential question receives a cartoonish *boing* sound effect in response. An imaginary visitor is welcomed with elaborate politeness before becoming so intolerable that the hosts resort to increasingly desperate measures to remove him. Eventually, Angel must physically eject someone who isn't there. “And stay out!” I was helpless with laughter. The extraordinary thing is how recognisable it all feels. Who hasn't endured a guest who overstays their welcome? Wanted someone to ask how their day was? Found themselves simultaneously desperate for intimacy and furious at the person offering it? At one point, Howell describes someone who ties his own shoelaces together and then cries out for help. It's a delicious little indictment of our capacity to manufacture the very difficulties from which we demand rescue. And this is where *Hitherto* becomes more than an accomplished exercise in theatrical nonsense. Its absurdity is less an escape from human experience than a way of examining it. Shame, envy, loneliness, desire: these familiar afflictions become wonderfully strange when stripped of the ordinary explanations we use to make them respectable. ![Arthur Angel (Character 1) onstage in Hitherto, wearing the character’s red beanie and black costume.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/10/IMG_5867.png) Arthur Angel (Character 1) onstage in Hitherto. Photo: Constantia Thomas Angel and Howell are superbly attuned to this peculiar universe. Their performances have an exhilarating elasticity, capable of moving from philosophical authority to emotional nakedness to complete idiocy without signalling the change. Howell is particularly delicious when exercising power, whether through a sudden change of accent, an imperious gesture or an unexpected transformation into something altogether less human. Angel makes a wonderfully bewildered counterpart, his attempts to assert himself frequently producing precisely the opposite result. The production's technical elements are in on the joke, too. Jimmy Pucci's sound and lighting design is full of sly interventions: a spotlight illuminating somewhere other than the person speaking, a few insistent notes of double bass, children's voices drifting faintly through the soundscape. The lighting can transform the emotional temperature of a scene in an instant, sometimes with the impeccable timing of a third comedian. Constantia Thomas's costumes, all curious silhouettes and shifting possibilities, give the performers another means of unsettling our expectations. Nothing stays put for long. A declaration becomes an accusation. A philosophical enquiry turns into a domestic squabble. Someone discovers a new angle from which to regard the other person, and suddenly the relationship must be renegotiated. Language itself eventually gives up. Howell announces that she's finished speaking with her mouth, clamps it shut and attempts to continue communicating anyway. Angel offers Italian lessons. Why Italian? Why not? Yet for all its exuberant foolishness, *Hitherto* has an unexpectedly tender streak. An offer of tea becomes a negotiation about the usefulness of somebody leaving the room. The two later share an imaginary cup. Elsewhere, the desire for another person to nod enthusiastically when we speak seems almost unbearably modest. Beneath all the elaborate philosophical manoeuvring is the simple, humiliating business of wanting to be understood. Whether these two beings ever manage it is another question. They certainly make a magnificent mess of trying. There's a temptation, confronted with a work like this, to start identifying its philosophical antecedents and pinning its unruly ideas to the nearest intellectual tradition. Beckett is an obvious presence; Kundera's *The Unbearable Lightness of Being* is invoked repeatedly. But *Hitherto* is too alive to its own ridiculousness to become a lecture on existentialism. Just when you think you've caught its meaning, it wriggles free, changes the subject or makes a noise that no respectable philosophical argument ought to make. And thank goodness for that. For an inaugural production, *Hitherto* is something of a triumph. The writing is wickedly inventive, Angel and Howell are a joy to watch, and the whole enterprise has the exhilarating confidence of a company that knows exactly what it's doing, even when its characters haven't the faintest idea. --- [*Hitherto*](https://www.melbournefringe.com.au/whats-on/events/hitherto?ref=melbournestagereview.com) plays at [The Motley Bauhaus](https://www.themotley.com.au/?ref=melbournestagereview.com), Carlton, until 18 October 2026, as part of [Melbourne Fringe Festival](https://www.melbournefringe.com.au/?ref=melbournestagereview.com). --- Disclosure: A complimentary ticket to *Hitherto* was provided to Melbourne Stage Review for the purpose of review. Melbourne Stage Review retains full editorial independence.