> ## 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. # “I'm a one-off event”: Toto's Song - URL: https://melbournestagereview.com/im-a-one-off-event-totos-song/ - Published: 2026-10-11T01:13:44.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-11T01:13:44.000Z - Description: Emma Fawcett’s Toto’s Song is a glorious, irreverent and deeply moving portrait of a woman determined to live and die on her own terms. With magnificent performances and exceptional direction from Kate Fryer, this La Mama production is among the finest theatre of the year. - Author: Ellen M. Scott - Tags: Reviews In Emma Fawcett's *Toto's Song*, a woman with five months to live is waiting for a flower to bloom. It is a rare Sumatran specimen that flowers once every fifteen years, and Toto is beginning to suspect it may not oblige before she dies of pancreatic cancer. Her son Phillip would like them to spend some meaningful time together. Toto would rather party. Directed by Kate Fryer at La Mama, *Toto's Song* is a glorious piece of theatre, full of laughter, mischief and the peculiar difficulties of loving people who insist on being themselves. Fawcett's writing is exceptionally good, and in Felicity Steele's Toto she has found an actress capable of making even the most outrageous behaviour seem perfectly reasonable. ![Felicity Steele as Toto smiles mischievously and points towards Phillip, played by Alex Duncan, while holding a leafy green plant under blue stage lighting.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/10/Totos-Song_Darren_Gill-0303.jpg) Felicity Steele as Toto and Alex Duncan as Phillip in Toto's Song. Photo: Darren Gill Toto is a small woman with a large appetite for life. She drinks, smokes, dances, welds things and dispenses advice of dubious practical value. She tells her son he could survive, if needed, by eating the warrigal greens growing nearby, although she concedes they taste like shit. When fourteen-year-old Solomon (Indra Liyanaarachchi) asks whether she masturbates, she replies that she does, but only when she's angry. What does she think about? God's face. Steele delivers such exchanges with magnificent composure. There is a dry, almost casual quality to her performance, punctuated by bursts of physical exuberance and sudden irritation. Toto can be affectionate one minute and quite spectacularly unkind the next. Steele gives her a wonderful, unpredictable vitality. You never know quite what she might do, although whatever it is seems entirely in character. Phillip (Alex Duncan) has spent much of his life on the receiving end of chaos. When he was a child, Toto went off to Bali, leaving him to invent an illness to explain her absence to the neighbours. Now, approaching forty, he wants some acknowledgement of the childhood he remembers. He also wants his mother to take her impending death seriously, preferably in a way that includes him. ![Alex Duncan and Felicity Steele dance side by side, their arms raised and faces animated, under vivid red and green stage lighting.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/10/Totos-Song_Darren_Gill-0114.jpg) Alex Duncan and Felicity Steele in Toto's Song. Photo: Darren Gill Duncan is excellent as a man who has learned to be responsible but still longs for his mother's attention. There is something painfully familiar about his attempts to manage Toto, and something equally familiar about her determination not to be managed. When he complains that they have so little time together, she reminds him that she has already given him plenty of hers. Oof. Into this household come Yvonne (Michelle Myers), who wants a baby and has enlisted long-time friend, Phillip as a prospective sperm donor; and Solomon, a neglected teen who climbs over Toto's fence and promptly becomes her accomplice. Both have their own ideas about what they need from other people. Myers is particularly good at finding the humour and discomfort in Yvonne's increasingly complicated arrangement with Phillip, while Liyanaarachchi gives Solomon a lovely mixture of cheek and watchfulness. He has an elaborate story about his father making him strawberry crêpes for his birthday. The more lovingly he describes it, the less we believe him. ![Indra Liyanaarachchi as Solomon wears a straw hat and patterned hoodie, holding a large plush animal over one shoulder and singing with an imaginary microphone.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/10/Totos-Song_Darren_Gill-0411.jpg) Indra Liyanaarachchi as Solomon in Toto's Song. Photo: Darren Gill Fawcett's great achievement is to make these four people so thoroughly themselves. They have desires that collide, histories that remain unresolved and habits that seem to have nothing much to do with the story. For instance, Toto waits for the 10.05 train to pass before she will permit herself to go indoors, growing increasingly agitated when it fails to appear. We never learn why. Such details give the characters lives beyond the immediate demands of the plot. There is no tidy division between their admirable and less admirable qualities, nor any suggestion that impending death will suddenly make them wiser or kinder. Fryer's direction is exceptional, particularly in its handling of moments that might easily tip into melodrama. There are confrontations, painful disclosures and opportunities for reconciliation, but she resists the temptation to underline their significance. The actors don't pause to register every hurt or announce each emotional shift. Often the conversation simply carries on, as it does in life. It takes tremendous precision to make performances feel this unstudied, and Fryer achieves a rare naturalism in which the most affecting moments are often the least conspicuous. Sam Diamond's set is a fabulous jumble of suitcases, drawers, plants and miscellaneous belongings, with a wooden platform on wheels that serves as furniture, transport and several other things besides. The actors move through this clutter with great ease, making a whole domestic world out of a few objects and some ingenious rearrangements. Sidney Millar's sound design is beautifully judged, as is Shane Grant's lighting. The production has a lightness of touch that makes its more painful moments all the more surprising. There is plenty here about motherhood, disappointment and the unequal demands we make on those we love, but Fawcett has no interest in sorting her characters into the deserving and undeserving. Toto describes herself as a one-off event, her life an experiment conducted on herself. It's an apt description, although not everyone has enjoyed participating. Her friendship with Solomon has an ease that Phillip can only envy, and her response to Yvonne's troubles is sometimes more generous than anything she can manage for her own son. ![Alex Duncan as Phillip blows soap bubbles towards Michelle Myers as Yvonne, who smiles and raises one hand. Suitcases and mismatched furniture fill the stage behind them.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/10/Totos-Song_Darren_Gill-0184.jpg) Alex Duncan as Phillip and Michelle Myers as Yvonne in Toto's Song. Photo: Darren Gill All the while, the end of Toto's life is approaching. She has made some rather unconventional arrangements for her body after death, including a steel elephant mask intended to spare visitors at the wake the unpleasantness of making conversation in the presence of a decomposing face. Toto, it seems, has thought of everything. The closing scenes are extraordinarily affecting, partly because Fryer and her actors resist the obvious opportunities for sentiment. There is a beautiful use of an original song by Susan Bamford Caleo, and a simplicity to the final images that is all the more moving for their lack of ceremony. I left La Mama feeling that I had seen something very special. There is not a weak performance in the cast, and Fawcett's play has the richness and unpredictability of life itself. Its humour is wonderfully sharp, its affection hard-won, and its understanding of family both generous and unsparing. *Toto's Song* is, by far, one of the very best productions I've seen this year. --- [Toto’s Song](https://www.lamama.com.au/whats-on/melbourne-fringe-festival-2026/totos-song?ref=melbournestagereview.com) plays at [La Mama](https://www.lamama.com.au/?ref=melbournestagereview.com) HQ, Carlton, until 11 October 2026, as part of [Melbourne Fringe Festival](https://www.melbournefringe.com.au/home?ref=melbournestagereview.com). --- Disclosure: A complimentary ticket to *Toto's Song* was provided to Melbourne Stage Review for the purpose of review. Melbourne Stage Review retains full editorial independence.