# Melbourne Stage Review
> Independent reviews, essays and criticism exploring theatre, performance and the cultural life of Narrm/Melbourne
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## Pages
### About
URL: https://melbournestagereview.com/about/
Last updated: 2026-10-16T05:34:31.000Z
**Melbourne Stage Review is an independent publication devoted to theatre and performance in Narrm/Melbourne**.

We publish reviews, essays, interviews and reflective musings, with particular attention to theatre, contemporary performance, dance and installation art. We're interested in what a work is attempting, how it works, and the embodied alchemy that occurs when performance meets audience.

For us, criticism is an act of serious attention. We aspire to approach each work with curiosity, generosity and intellectual rigour: meeting it on its own terms, remaining open to being surprised and moved, and being precise in our judgements without pretending they are the only ones possible.

We are particularly interested in the second life of performance: the questions a work leaves behind, the ideas it illuminates, and the conversations it invites us to continue. Often, those conversations extend beyond the work itself, into the social, political, cultural and economic conditions from which it emerges and to which it speaks.

Melbourne Stage Review was founded in July 2026 by **Ellen M. Scott** (she/her), a Narrm-based writer and researcher. She writes more fully about her approach to criticism in [Circles in the water: A credo for theatre criticism](https://melbournestagereview.com/circles-in-the-water-a-credo-for-theatre-criticism/).

Melbourne Stage Review is editorially independent. Complimentary tickets and other relevant relationships are disclosed alongside published work. Invitations and complimentary tickets do not guarantee a review or other coverage, and all editorial decisions, including whether to publish, remain at our discretion. Complimentary access does not influence our critical judgements.

**Acknowledgement of Country**   
Melbourne Stage Review acknowledges the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung, Bunurong and Boon Wurrung peoples of the Kulin Nation as the Traditional Owners of the lands on which we live, work and experience performance. We pay our respects to Elders past and present, and recognise the continuing cultures of storytelling and performance on these lands. Sovereignty was never ceded.

**Inclusion**  
Melbourne Stage Review celebrates the diversity of Melbourne's performance community and is committed to respectful and inclusive criticism, including of LGBTQIA+, First Nations, culturally diverse, Deaf and disabled artists and work.

**Contact** 

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### Privacy
URL: https://melbournestagereview.com/privacy/
Last updated: 2026-08-23T02:49:23.000Z
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## Posts
### In their own words: Wrong Way Grow Back
URL: https://melbournestagereview.com/in-their-own-words-wrong-way-grow-back/
Last updated: 2026-10-16T21:23:55.000Z
Ben Grant is having an argument on the phone. Why must audiences be warned about everything they are going to see? What happened to theatrical surprise? He hangs up and offers a list of things his show won't contain, including fat jokes, homophobia and readings from his mother's letters. It soon becomes clear that he intends to deliver the lot.

This is a mischievous beginning to [*Wrong Way Grow Back*](https://www.lamama.com.au/whats-on/melbourne-fringe-festival-2026/wrong-way-grow-back?ref=melbournestagereview.com), a solo show at La Mama HQ in which Grant examines the lives of his late parents through letters discovered after their deaths. His humour is dry, fiercely intelligent, occasionally outrageous and frequently directed at himself. A gay Jewish man who can pass unnoticed as either, he jokes about identity, politics and the peculiar hypocrisies of public morality. There is a false beard and a Louis C.K. impersonation. Thankfully, he is good company, with an easy manner that disarms us even as his jokes rattle our metaphorical cage.

His parents, Joan and Bruce, had what he calls “unstraightforward lives”. Bruce was a journalist and theatre critic, an Australian adventurer who witnessed Ray Lawler's *Summer of the Seventeenth Doll* arriving in London. Joan was an academic from a Jewish family of poets, musicians and scholars, whose history included devastating losses in the Holocaust. She loved to sing Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald and Judy Garland. Their marriage brought love, children, depression, infidelity and eventually divorce. Both later found other partners, and with them, a little more happiness.

The correspondence can be startling in its candour. Passages appear on a small screen, revealing a Bruce capable of expressing tenderness that his son never experienced. Grant wishes he could have known this side of his father. It is a small, painful admission, made without fuss. The letters also disclose Joan's complicated family relationships and the difficulties of a marriage in which affection was not always enough.

Grant imagines himself as an analogue recording of his parents, their separate tracks preserved in him. The hiss and crackle of vinyl recur, while the typewritten letters evoke a time when communication across continents demanded patience and offered considerable privacy. There is a pleasing irony in Grant making these private exchanges public. He also celebrates theatre as a kind of analogue encounter, with performer and audience sharing the same air, close enough, he points out, to smell one another.

The staging is spare, with projected text, shifts in lighting and a microphone used to mark changes in register. Under Christian Leavesley's direction, the shifts between stand-up, family recollection and song are handled with an easy fluency. Bronwyn Pringle's lighting is especially lovely in the musical passages, finding an intimate warmth.

![Ben Grant holds a scarf close to his chest during Wrong Way Grow Back at La Mama HQ, warmly lit against a dark stage.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/10/Wrong_Way_Grow_Back_Darren_Gill-0385.jpg)

Ben Grant in Wrong Way Grow Back at La Mama HQ. Photo: Darren Gill

Then comes the admission that changes the evening. Grant can joke about his father, his relatives and himself, but not, it seems, his mother. Having spent much of the show mocking the rules about what comedians may say, he encounters a restriction of his own. His reluctance is more affecting than any declaration of grief.

Towards the end, Grant turns increasingly to song. He performs music associated with his parents, including a reworking of “Danny Boy” as “Daddy Boy”, with his father's smoking pipe in hand. His singing is modest and touching. Joan's musical inheritance is audible in her son's attempts to recover something of her presence.

The performance grows quieter, though its humour remains. I found my eyes welling through much of the second half, tears accumulating and eventually spilling over during the jokes. Grant's comedy seems to catch me at precisely the moments when I am least prepared for it.

*Wrong Way Grow Back* is a beautifully accomplished piece of autobiographical theatre, funny, exquisitely vulnerable and attentive to the imperfect ways people live and love one another. The letters offer Grant a fuller understanding of his parents, including aspects of their lives that he could scarcely have imagined while they were alive. There is something rather wonderful about being allowed to share in these discoveries. What a privilege to have met them.

---

[*Wrong Way Grow Back*](https://www.lamama.com.au/whats-on/melbourne-fringe-festival-2026/wrong-way-grow-back?ref=melbournestagereview.com) plays at [La Mama](https://www.lamama.com.au/?ref=melbournestagereview.com) HQ until 18 October 2026, as part of [Melbourne Fringe Festival](https://www.melbournefringe.com.au/?ref=melbournestagereview.com).

---

Disclosure: A complimentary ticket to *Wrong Way Grow Back* was provided to Melbourne Stage Review for the purpose of review. Melbourne Stage Review retains full editorial independence.
### Act your age: Prime Time
URL: https://melbournestagereview.com/act-your-age-prime-time/
Last updated: 2026-10-16T13:06:39.000Z
At 93, Carl has discovered a perk of old age: people give him their seats on public transport. At 31, actor Corey has reluctantly accepted that his chances of becoming a teenage heartthrob are now vanishingly slim. Zya, meanwhile, is 51 and rather enjoying herself, despite having reached an age at which women are apparently supposed to become invisible. Ageing, it turns out, is a fairly unreliable business.

Created and directed by Penny Baron for [Born in a Taxi](https://www.borninataxi.com.au/?ref=melbournestagereview.com), with dramaturgy by Fiona Roake, [*Prime Time*](https://www.melbournefringe.com.au/whats-on/events/prime-time?ref=melbournestagereview.com) assembles a cast ranging from small children to nonagenarians at The Substation as part of Melbourne Fringe. Together, they explore the peculiar experience of being whatever age they happen to be. There are questions, confessions, dancing, party games and a surprising quantity of paper chains. Occasionally, it resembles the sort of gathering where somebody's enthusiastic aunt has decided that everyone should get up and participate. By the end, I was rather glad she had.

The audience gets interrogated first. How old are you? How old do you feel? Why? Some people are keen to answer; others are presumably hoping the microphone will pass them by. Recorded interviews follow, with people recalling the years they were born while the performers move forwards and backwards across the stage. Their neat formation becomes increasingly muddled, until they find themselves in two facing lines, pairing off to begin the tango. It's an appealingly peculiar way to introduce a subject that usually comes accompanied by statistics and gloomy predictions about the health system.

Soon everyone is perched on little stools, interviewing one another. Carl's cheerful account of being offered seats gives way to a history of terrible losses: his first wife to cancer, his second wife to an aneurysm, and his son to suicide. A 26-year-old proudly announces that she's bought her first property, having saved since she was 14\. She's the first in her family to own a home. She also speaks about growing up without close relationships with her parents, and the loneliness of learning to manage adulthood alone. An eight-year-old, asked about the best thing in their life, says their dad reads to them every night.

![Three performers in Prime Time: one holds a microphone towards a woman speaking animatedly, while an older man sits beside her against a warm yellow backdrop.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/10/Prime_Time_Born_In_A_Taxi_Image_by_Jacinta_Oaten-4.JPEG)

Personal stories take centre stage in Born in a Taxi's Prime Time. Photo: Jacinta Oaten.

The conversations are uneven, as conversations tend to be. Some stories have the satisfying shape of anecdotes that have been told before; others wander a little before finding their point. The transitions can have a slightly school-assembly quality. Yet there's an appealing lack of self-consciousness about the whole enterprise. A teenager speaks about bullying and suicidal thoughts with the same freedom afforded to a 91-year-old who is fed up with being patronised and still loves to dance. Refreshingly, nobody seems to have been told what they're supposed to say to make a particular point about ageing.

The production looks considerably slicker than its conversational format might suggest. Jenny Hector's design encloses the stage in enormous yellow fabric walls, their colour and faintly scratchy texture recalling the handiwork of someone armed with a crayon the size of a cricket bat. The floor is yellow too. Overhead hangs a modern chandelier-like contraption, which eventually descends for a dance sequence. Hector's lighting is terrific. Green washes turn the space almost otherworldly; blues and reds alter its proportions and atmosphere. With relatively little scenery to move around, she makes the room feel entirely different in an instant.

And then there are the paper chains. While people talk, the rest of the cast have been quietly stapling strips of paper together, accumulating an impressive amount of festive decoration. An 80-year-old woman begins discussing what it means to be an elder, and how little dignity that title necessarily confers in a society governed by economic preoccupations. As she speaks about being dismissed and cancelled, the other performers walk away and turn their backs. Two younger cast members return with the chains and begin winding them around her chair. They keep going until her body, including her face, is entirely obscured. When she finally rises and shuffles off, trailing her paper prison, the image is horribly effective.

Elsewhere, the company appears determined to have as much fun as possible. They play statues and pass the parcel, sending the latter into the audience. They dance in pairs, sometimes gracefully and sometimes with the happy abandon of people who've decided that grace is overrated. A young woman in her twenties is laid across a makeshift platform and covered in flowers, in a scene that resembles a funeral organised by people who have never attended one but are tremendously excited by the possibilities. Somebody puts an apple in her mouth. She then has to answer a question, which proves difficult under the circumstances.

![Performers of different ages gather around a flower-covered platform beneath a large illuminated chandelier, surrounded by the yellow stage design of Prime Time.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/10/Prime_Time_Born_In_A_Taxi_Image_by_Jacinta_Oaten-13.JPEG)

The ensemble gathers beneath Jenny Hector's striking lighting installation in Prime Time. Photo: Jacinta Oaten.

A costume parade follows, with performers of vastly different ages strutting down an imaginary catwalk in increasingly ridiculous outfits. There's clapping, cheering and a great deal of delighted silliness. It's difficult to imagine anyone leaving this particular party because they feel too old for it.

The last sequence is quieter. Everyone pulls on a dark shirt bearing a large number, although the number has little relationship to their actual age. Each performer describes a moment from the past or imagines a future self. An elderly man remembers being a mischievous seven-year-old. A young woman looks forward to being 60, when she plans to take things a little easier.

Then the ensemble gathers in the centre of the stage. They sway gently from side to side, initially in unison, before their movements begin to drift apart. Their arms rise and fall with their breathing, each person gradually finding a slightly different rhythm. A little girl a few rows ahead of me begins lifting her arms with them, caught up in the movement. Nobody has asked her to join in. She's simply moved to do so.

At the end, the performers reach for the numbers on their shirts. They're attached with Velcro. One by one, they peel them off and let them fall to the yellow floor.

---

[*Prime Time*](https://www.melbournefringe.com.au/whats-on/events/prime-time?ref=melbournestagereview.com) plays at [The Substation](https://thesubstation.org.au/?ref=melbournestagereview.com), Newport, until 17 October 2026, as part of [Melbourne Fringe](https://www.melbournefringe.com.au/?ref=melbournestagereview.com).

---

Disclosure: A complimentary ticket to *Prime Time* was provided to Melbourne Stage Review for the purpose of review. Melbourne Stage Review retains full editorial independence.
### The audience takes the hill: An Evening Without Kate Bush
URL: https://melbournestagereview.com/the-audience-takes-the-hill-an-evening-without-kate-bush/
Last updated: 2026-10-15T23:36:38.000Z
My relationship with Kate Bush is cordial but distant. I know *Running Up That Hill*, thanks partly to *Stranger Things*, and a few other songs that have made their way into the general atmosphere. Albums? I couldn't name one if my life depended on it. So when Sarah-Louise Young starts asking the audience at Arts Centre Melbourne to identify themselves as Fish People, I begin to suspect I've wandered into a meeting of a society to which I do not belong. Fish People, for the uninitiated, are Kate Bush's devotees. There are quite a few of them here.

Young knows what to do with a room full of people who have spent decades loving the same woman. More impressively, she knows what to do with the rest of us. Her [*An Evening Without Kate Bush*](https://www.artscentremelbourne.com.au/whats-on/2026/musical/an-evening-without-kate-bush?ref=melbournestagereview.com), co-created with director Russell Lucas, has been touring for years, accumulating stories, wigs and apparently some rather troublesome luggage. It contains a pair of enormous illuminated eyeballs, a singing mop and a Russian rendition of *Babooshka* prompted by a fan's objections to the pronunciation. None of this is especially normal. All of it makes a peculiar sort of sense.

The first image is almost solemn. Young stands in dim blue light beneath a vast veil, a feathered headdress on her head and a red bicycle light blinking on an upraised finger. In the dark, that tiny pulse does an improbable amount of work. Later, the evening becomes considerably less mysterious about its methods. Young changes wigs in plain sight, exposes the little indignities of costume management, and discusses the difficulty of bringing giant eyeballs through Australian customs. She can also sing the living daylights out of Bush's music, taking its extravagant leaps and peculiar vocal shapes in her stride. The trick is that she doesn't confuse vocal impersonation with theatrical transformation. We can see the joins. She wants us to.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/10/Sarah-Louise-Young_0405_photo-by-steve-ullathorne.jpg)

Sarah-Louise Young in costume for An Evening Without Kate Bush. Photo: Steve Ullathorne

And then there's the business of talking to people. Young is almost indecently good at it. One man, a classical pianist, loves *Violin* — an occupational affinity, perhaps. He and his partner explain that they started out as flatmates. Elsewhere, a couple who have shared thirty-six years turn out to be Kate Bush devotees of considerable standing: the husband saw her seven times at Hammersmith and ended up being invited back for the after party. Young is so impressed she asks permission to touch his elbow. She asks questions, picks up details, gets the room laughing. She can find something funny in almost any answer without making the person who gave it wish they'd kept quiet. It's dazzling work, although at this point it looks suspiciously like having a chat.

It isn't.

When *Don't Give Up* comes around, Young needs two volunteers to embrace throughout the song. She seems to have made her choice already, and starts coyly describing people we've met. The former flatmates make their way to the stage. We know something about them now; not much, admittedly, but enough that the sight of them holding each other for six minutes feels different from watching two strangers perform an exercise.

During all this, Young reads comments posted beneath Kate Bush videos: an eight-year-old whose friends find their taste for 80s music peculiar, followed by a reassuring reply from their mother; an adult remembering a father who listened to *Don't Give Up* after losing his job, and wishing they hadn't made fun of him. These are the sorts of intimate disclosures the internet collects by the million and somehow makes easy to overlook. Here they are given time, a song, and two people who have agreed to hold each other and sway. The arrangement is faintly preposterous. The feeling it produces is absolutely not.

By now, something has shifted. The Fish People and the accidental visitors, initially sorted into their respective camps, have acquired a little common history. We know who loves *Violin*. We know who went to Hammersmith. We know how these songs have quietly accompanied people in the midst of sorrow. We know how two men fell in love. Young and Lucas have made an audience out of more than the fact of our having bought tickets.

And what of the mop? It turns out Young once attempted her own Kate Bush performance at high school with a mop head for a wig. A teacher discouraged her. Now the household cleaning equipment has graduated to a singing role in her professional show, while Young herself, at 50, has changed into a red leotard and is throwing herself around the stage to *Running Up That Hill*. Hair flying, limbs flailing, a cartwheel for good measure. After the stillness of *Don't Give Up*, it's a magnificent outbreak of unruliness, and the room goes with her. Not a bad outcome for either Young or the mop. “*This is your time. This is your tribute. This is your comeback*” she calls out. And by now she's earned the right to be quite so presumptuous.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/10/Sarah-Louise-Young_0468_photo-by-steve-ullathorne.jpg)

Sarah-Louise Young in costume for An Evening Without Kate Bush. Photo: Steve Ullathorne

For *Wuthering Heights*, she puts on a wedding dress and prepares to sing. Except our classical pianist from the embrace gets there first. He starts singing from his seat, then calls for the rest of us to join in. Young beams. The microphone turns towards the audience. She's been coaxing us into participating all evening, but here is someone taking matters into his own hands. For most of the song, we do the work.

And there I am, singing Kate Bush with a roomful of Fish People. Somewhere along the way, the distinction between those who came knowing every note and those who barely knew what they'd signed up for has ceased to matter. In a world that seems increasingly determined to sort us into mutually suspicious little groups, Young has managed something rather wonderful. For an hour or so, we've been listening to one another, remembering one another, making something together.

She can sing it better, obviously. That's rather beside the point.

---

[*An Evening Without Kate Bush*](https://www.artscentremelbourne.com.au/whats-on/2026/musical/an-evening-without-kate-bush?ref=melbournestagereview.com) plays at [Arts Centre Melbourne](https://www.artscentremelbourne.com.au/?ref=melbournestagereview.com)’s Fairfax Studio until 18 October 2026.

---

Disclosure: A complimentary ticket to *An Evening Without Kate Bush* was provided to Melbourne Stage Review for the purpose of review. Melbourne Stage Review retains full editorial independence.
### Hitherto: God may have a dramaturg
URL: https://melbournestagereview.com/hitherto-god-may-have-a-dramaturg/
Last updated: 2026-10-14T06:46:54.000Z
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.
### Manifesto of Silences: When silence moves
URL: https://melbournestagereview.com/manifesto-of-silences-when-silence-moves/
Last updated: 2026-10-12T11:50:59.000Z
Before anything happens onstage, something stirs beneath my feet. A low vibration travels through the seating bank, gathering strength, then subsiding. Later, the sensations become lighter, quicker, almost effervescent, like tiny bubbles rising through water. I can hear the music, but I find myself listening with my legs.

This is an opera. Just not one that begins with an audible voice.

Created and directed by Deaf artist Irene Holub, [*Manifesto of Silences*](https://www.artshouse.com.au/events/manifesto-of-silences/?ref=melbournestagereview.com) brings Auslan poetry, Visual Vernacular, dance, sound and projection into an extraordinarily rich theatrical conversation. Presented at Arts House as part of Melbourne Fringe, it traces histories of Deaf language and its suppression while proposing something altogether more expansive: an opera in which the signing body takes centre stage.

\* \* \*

Two figures approach one another across a translucent screen. They are mirror images of the same person, moving from opposite directions until their bodies begin to overlap. They meet, separate, meet again, never quite resolving into one. Behind them, another projection surface creates a strange sense of depth, as though the figures might pass through one another and disappear.

Then Walter Kadiki appears.

His hands move rapidly, then hesitate. His face tightens; his body seems to draw inward before opening again. Small sounds escape him, scarcely more than breath. There is delicacy here, but also fear, frustration, a mounting urgency. His signing seems to gather force until the whole body is caught up in it.

![Walter Kadiki signs expressively onstage, his hands raised and face turned upwards, against a large projection of swirling turquoise ocean water.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/10/Manifesto-of-Silence-_-BIko-Shaka-128-1.jpg)

Walter Kadiki in Manifesto of Silences. Photograph: Biko Shaka.

I don't understand Auslan. I know that Kadiki is communicating something specific, something I cannot fully access. Yet I am absorbed by the shifts in his movement, the way an expression flickers across his face or a gesture changes its weight. The performance seems intensely legible as feeling, even as its linguistic meanings remain beyond me.

There is something operatic about its scale. Not the sound, particularly, but the physical extravagance of expression: the face, hands, shoulders and torso all working together, each movement shaped with an exactness that makes its emotional force seem enormous. Kadiki's performance has the sweep of an aria, its moments of restraint as affecting as its more expansive passages.

The work moves between historical episodes and more elusive, associative sequences. Three figures in period dress advance slowly before a projected celestial diagram. The image changes to a globe. 

![Three performers stand in eighteenth-century-style costumes before a large black-and-white projection of an intricate circular diagram. Two wear long dresses and the third a dark coat with a white cravat.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/10/Manifesto-of-Silence-_-BIko-Shaka-20.jpg)

A historical tableau in Manifesto of Silences. Photograph: Biko Shaka.

They turn around one another, forming and reforming a small circle, their gestures delicate and measured. A French phrase appears on the screen, offering a glimpse of the scene's historical setting: eighteenth-century France, where Abbé Charles-Michel de l'Épée helped establish a tradition of Deaf education using sign language.

At times I watch the signing as I might watch dance, following the direction of a hand or the changing distance between bodies. I know there is more happening, but this knowledge doesn't diminish the experience. It makes me look harder.

A projected word becomes a clue. An archival photograph illuminates an earlier gesture. Meanings arrive late, sometimes several scenes after the moment to which they seem to belong. Others remain uncertain. There is pleasure in this continual adjustment, in watching a work that allows my understanding to be partial and still offers so much to see.

![A darkened stage with two performers positioned on opposite sides of a large projection showing a collage of historical black-and-white photographs, including portraits and classroom scenes.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/10/Manifesto-of-Silence-_-BIko-Shaka-205.jpg)

Archival imagery forms part of Manifesto of Silences' exploration of Deaf history. Photograph: Biko Shaka.

The historical imagery grows more troubling. Children appear in photographs, learning to form sounds through methods that now seem both ingenious and cruel: feeling vibrations in another person's throat, holding mirrors before their mouths, watching the shapes made by lips. Images of the telephone follow. Then the 1880 Milan Conference, whose endorsement of oralist education helped legitimise the suppression of signed languages.

Two men argue. One is sharp and emphatic, his gestures insistent, his body almost rigid with conviction. The other has a more open, expansive manner, seeming to appeal to those around him. Their signing differs not only in tempo but in the way each occupies the stage. One presses his argument forward; the other seems to gather people towards him. The precise exchange escapes me, but the conflict is unmistakable.

![A performer with short light-coloured hair and a large moustache sits onstage in a brown period suit, signing emphatically with both hands against a black background.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/10/Manifesto-of-Silence-_-BIko-Shaka-145.jpg)

A confrontation over Deaf education and language in Manifesto of Silences. Photograph: Biko Shaka.

Rhian Hinkley's projections move between documentary evidence and something more elusive. An ocean returns again and again, sometimes recognisable, sometimes obscured by layers of mist-like distortion. Archival portraits loom behind the performers; bodies multiply and dissolve across the screens. The images have their own rhythm, occasionally clarifying the action, elsewhere drawing it into uncertainty.

Sharyn Brand's sound design works just as restlessly. Deep tones press through the seats. Chords arrive with spaces between them, each separated from the next by a moment of quiet. At other times the sound becomes dense and slightly distorted, almost too much for the ear to contain. The vibrations shift in texture and intensity. I begin to wonder which parts of the score can be felt as distinctly as they can be heard, and how differently the work might unfold for someone whose experience of sound is primarily tactile.

Then Anna Seymour sits down on a chair.

A red light flashes across her body, abruptly illuminating and releasing her. Behind her, a woman's face appears in projected footage. She is demonstrating the formation of sounds, her mouth opening and closing in careful, repetitive movements. The image enlarges. It repeats. The mouth grows bigger, blurrier, until it begins to dominate the space.

Seymour moves.

Her arms sweep outward with startling force. Her fingers spread, rigid and extended, as though dragging across an invisible surface. Her hands fly to her head. She folds, rises, turns. Then she lifts the chair and spins with it, circling again and again before setting it down. Her body drops to the floor, rolls, struggles upwards, falls once more.

![Anna Seymour dances with her arms extended and curly hair flying across her face, illuminated by red and blue light. A large, blurred projection of a mouth fills the background.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/10/Manifesto-of-Silence-_-BIko-Shaka-222.jpg)

Anna Seymour's fiercely physical solo in Manifesto of Silences. Photograph: Biko Shaka.

Behind her, the mouth continues its patient demonstration.

The contrast is almost unbearable. On the screen, the careful repetition of a prescribed action; below it, a body that seems unable, or unwilling, to contain what is happening to it. Seymour's movements are furious, but not indiscriminate. Each sudden change of direction, each contraction and release, has a terrible clarity. At last she lies on the floor, breathing.

Walter Kadiki enters.

He kneels beside her, gathers her gently into his arms and helps her rise. A small sound escapes him. It is perhaps the purest sound of compassion I have ever witnessed. The movement is unhurried, almost ordinary, and after the violence of the preceding dance, extraordinarily tender. For a moment, the space seems to soften around them.

![Walter Kadiki kneels beside Anna Seymour on a dark stage, one arm around her shoulders as their heads lean together. Seymour sits on the floor with her legs extended, illuminated by soft blue and red light.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/10/Manifesto-of-Silence-_-BIko-Shaka-270.jpg)

Walter Kadiki and Anna Seymour in a moment of tenderness in Manifesto of Silences. Photograph: Biko Shaka.

Bronwyn Pringle's lighting becomes especially eloquent in the final ensemble sequence. Six performers stand in silhouette against the returning ocean. One steps forward, then another, their bodies emerging into pale blue and pink. They turn towards us. Their faces register pain; their mouths open in silent screams. Darkness falls, and the figures retreat into shadow.

The sequence begins again, but something has changed. Heads tilt sharply towards shoulders. Shoulders contract. Fingers touch foreheads. The gestures are quick, almost percussive, and increasingly shared. Six bodies moving together, their timing so precise that the smallest deviation seems momentous.

They carry one another, hold one another, return to the line. The light warms towards orange, then cools again. The music seems to shift beneath them, no longer pressing so insistently against the movement but travelling with it. Something has opened. The performers have not escaped the history that preceded them, but their bodies now seem to occupy the stage differently, with a collective assurance.

![Six performers dressed in black stand together on a dark stage, facing the audience. Behind them, a large projection shows turbulent turquoise ocean waves.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/10/Manifesto-of-Silence-_-BIko-Shaka-286-1.jpg)

The ensemble of Manifesto of Silences. Photograph: Biko Shaka.

On the screen, eight figures appear in a grid. Their hands move through repeated sequences, covering and then crossing their faces, stacking one hand over another. The grid expands until dozens of small squares fill the projection. The same gestures recur across different bodies, at once individual and shared.

Then the many become one.

A woman looks out from the screen. She is no longer signing. She blinks, quietly, almost imperceptibly.

The ocean returns. Beneath a wash of pink light, the six performers sit with their backs to us. A curtain moves slowly across the stage, concealing them. There is no final declaration, no image that gathers everything into a single, reassuring meaning. The performers simply remain there, together, as the curtain closes.

\* \* \*

*Manifesto of Silences* is exhilarating, deeply moving and formally adventurous. Its visual and physical language is so richly developed that even when the meaning of a signed passage is unavailable to me, the experience remains absorbing. This is not because Auslan can be reduced to gesture or emotion. It cannot. Rather, Holub and her collaborators have created a work in which language, movement, image, light and sensation operate alongside one another, sometimes converging, sometimes pulling apart.

I leave with questions, and with the distinct feeling that I have witnessed something extraordinary. There are things I would like to understand better, passages I would gladly encounter again.

What stays with me is a body falling, another bending to lift it, and the faint sound that passes between them.

---

[*Manifesto of Silences*](https://www.artshouse.com.au/events/manifesto-of-silences/?ref=melbournestagereview.com) was performed at [Arts House](https://www.artshouse.com.au/?ref=melbournestagereview.com) as part of [Melbourne Fringe Festival 2026](https://www.melbournefringe.com.au/?ref=melbournestagereview.com), from 6 to 11 October.

---

Disclosure: A complimentary ticket to *Manifesto of Silences* was provided to Melbourne Stage Review for the purpose of review. Melbourne Stage Review retains full editorial independence.
### “I'm a one-off event”: Toto's Song
URL: https://melbournestagereview.com/im-a-one-off-event-totos-song/
Last updated: 2026-10-11T01:13:44.000Z
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.
### No still waters: Estuary
URL: https://melbournestagereview.com/no-still-waters-estuary/
Last updated: 2026-10-08T23:40:52.000Z
The dancers are already moving when we enter. Two bodies in a haze-filled room, balancing, folding, collapsing into untidy heaps. They hold a position for what feels like an unusually long time. Then a deep thrum sounds, and something shifts. Another balance, another collapse. They seem to be waiting for something.

Across the floor, and across their bodies, words drift over an image of moving ocean. They belong to Aboriginal writer Abigail Echo-Hawk, whose reflections on dispossession begin with a striking reversal: 

> “*They say the land was stolen from us, but we were also stolen from it*.”

As the dancers move, the words rearrange themselves. *Stolen* falls across one body, *I die* across another. A moment later, *belong*. Perhaps the alignment is accidental. It hardly matters. For an instant, the bodies seem to be carrying the weight of these words.

![One dancer holds a vertical inverted balance above another, who is folded low on the floor. Blue light and projected words cover their bodies and the surrounding stage.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/10/Brooklyn-Bond-and-Jack-Sheppard-in-Ngioka-Bunda-Heath-s-Estuary_Darein-Arts-Speakeasy-and-Melbourne-Fringe_image-by-Luke-Currie-Richardson--3-.jpg)

Jack Sheppard and Brooklyn Bond form a precarious balance in **Estuary*. Photo: Luke Currie Richardson

Ngioka Bunda-Heath's [*Estuary*](https://arts.darebin.vic.gov.au/Programs-and-opportunities/Programs/Speakeasy-presentations/Estuary?ref=melbournestagereview.com) takes its name from the meeting of freshwater and saltwater, a place where different currents mingle without necessarily becoming one. Performed by Jack Sheppard and Brooklyn Bond, it is an absorbing, intricately composed work, moving through states of connection, separation, resistance and return. It is often beautiful. It is rarely restful.

The words disappear. Light moves gently across the floor, like sunlight beneath shallow water, or perhaps through trees. Birdsong enters the soundscape. One dancer sings while the other moves, then they exchange places. Bodies tumble, roll, rise and settle. For a while, the movement has the unhurried quality of something being carried along.

And then the movement seems to seize.

Arms suspend. Bodies twitch, seemingly unable to complete a gesture or escape it. The dancers appear caught inside their own movements, as though some invisible force has interrupted the ordinary business of having a body. The passage is brief, but unnerving. Then it is gone.

![Two dancers beneath blue stage light, their four arms reaching in different directions to create a striking, many-limbed silhouette.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/10/Brooklyn-Bond-and-Jack-Sheppard-in-Ngioka-Bunda-Heath-s-Estuary_Darein-Arts-Speakeasy-and-Melbourne-Fringe_image-by-Luke-Currie-Richardson.jpg)

Jack Sheppard and Brooklyn Bond in Ngioka Bunda-Heath’s **Estuary*. Photo: Luke Currie Richardson

Not every moment in *Estuary* holds the attention equally. Some individual sequences seem slight, their gestures difficult to grasp. But the longer one watches, the more the choreography begins to disclose its structure.

Sheppard and Bond link arms around one another's waists and fold into a low, shared body roll. They separate and walk backwards, slowly, deliberately, their eyes fixed ahead. Then they return, moving into a buoyant, almost hopping step, with a lovely looseness after the formality of the walk.

Much later, the sequence returns. And returns again.

There is pleasure in recognising it, in discovering that what seemed a collection of disparate movements has a memory. Bunda-Heath lets these patterns take their time. A phrase disappears for a minute, perhaps two, before finding its way back, familiar but somehow altered. By the time it returns, the world around it has changed.

There are smaller moments of connection, too. Sheppard and Bond catch one another's eyes and smile. The exchanges are fleeting, almost private, and unexpectedly affecting. They seem wonderfully at ease with one another, even when the movement is anything but. Yet when their attention turns outwards, the feeling changes. During one long backward walk, their gaze meets the audience directly and stays there. It is an oddly intimate confrontation. One becomes suddenly conscious of being watched.

![Close-up of two dancers leaning across one another under blue light. One looks down intently while the other, partly reclined beneath them, smiles upward.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/10/Brooklyn-Bond-and-Jack-Sheppard-in-Ngioka-Bunda-Heath-s-Estuary_Darein-Arts-Speakeasy-and-Melbourne-Fringe_image-by-Luke-Currie-Richardson--5-.jpg)

Jack Sheppard and Brooklyn Bond in **Estuary*. Photo: Luke Currie Richardson

Daniel Nixon's sound design seems to have its own weather. Low frequencies gather somewhere beneath the dancers, sometimes barely perceptible, sometimes swelling into a deep pulse that seems to travel through the floor. Birdsong and quieter textures offer moments of reprieve, but never quite dispel the apprehension. Even at its gentlest, the soundscape seems to be listening for trouble.

Then the landscape begins to move differently. In the hands of lighting designers Rachel Rui Qian Lee and Niklas Pajanti, and projection designer Shiv Geaney, water and earth spin across the floor. The pace quickens. Flashes of light cut through the haze. And slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, the illuminated landscape begins to shrink.

The dancers continue their familiar sequences, but the space in which they can perform them grows smaller. What once unfolded across the floor must now fit within an ever-tightening boundary. The repetition becomes newly urgent. The same movements, under different conditions, are no longer quite the same.

At last, the dancers occupy a patch of light scarcely larger than a beach towel. One supports the other in an inverted hold. There is tenderness in their closeness, and something troubling in how little room remains.

*Estuary* offers no easy way of separating those feelings. Its images suggest relationships to Country, to one another, to histories carried in the body. But their meanings are not always available, and the choreography does not insist on making them so.

I left feeling quietened, though hardly at peace. Certain movements had slipped past me; others had acquired force only in their return. What remained was less a story than a series of sensations: the weight of a gaze, the sudden arrest of a gesture, two bodies finding room for one another as the world around them grew smaller.

And somewhere beneath it all, that low, insistent thrum.

---

[*Estuary*](https://arts.darebin.vic.gov.au/Programs-and-opportunities/Programs/Speakeasy-presentations/Estuary?ref=melbournestagereview.com), presented by [Darebin Arts Speakeasy](https://arts.darebin.vic.gov.au/Programs-and-opportunities/Programs/Speakeasy-presentations?ref=melbournestagereview.com) and [Melbourne Fringe Festival](https://www.melbournefringe.com.au/home?ref=melbournestagereview.com), plays until 10 October 2026, at Northcote Town Hall Arts Centre.

---

Disclosure: A complimentary ticket to *Estuary* was provided to Melbourne Stage Review for the purpose of review. Melbourne Stage Review retains full editorial independence.
### The art of losing all control: The Portrait
URL: https://melbournestagereview.com/the-art-of-losing-all-control-the-portrait/
Last updated: 2026-10-06T06:02:26.000Z
He arrives in Lycra, cleats and a cycling helmet sprouting the little plastic zip ties Melbourne riders use to discourage dive-bombing magpies. He has barely made it down the aisle before he is taking his own pulse. The result worries him. There is some controlled breathing, a pill, another check and, finally, satisfaction, expressed in the smallest possible gesture of triumph.

We already know quite a lot about this chap.

He is Tim Sneddon, one half of the gloriously mismatched pair at the centre of [*The Portrait*](https://www.melbournefringe.com.au/whats-on/events/the-portrait?ref=melbournestagereview.com). Created and directed by Clare Bartholomew, and created and performed by Sneddon and Emilie Bloom, the show is almost entirely wordless, its characters drawn through gesture, expression and meticulously observed physical detail.

Sneddon, in particular, can turn fussiness into an art form. His gallery attendant has the pinched vigilance of a man who takes enormous pride in doing a small job properly. He strokes the gold cord hanging beside the blue velvet curtain that conceals the gallery's new portrait with almost erotic pleasure, delicately tickling its tassel, and seems nearly overcome by the loveliness and anticipation of it all.

Even moving the barriers into position becomes an undertaking. There is a whole routine around correct manual handling, Sneddon bending and lifting with such conscientious attention to workplace procedure that anyone who has ever been instructed by an online training module on the correct way to pick up an object may feel a small shiver of recognition.

![Tim Sneddon, dressed as a gallery attendant in a black suit and staff lanyard, stands with legs apart and one fist clenched, his mouth open in an exaggerated expression of triumph.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/10/Live-4---The-Portrait---Ian-Sutherland.jpg)

Tim Sneddon in **The Portrait*. Photo: Ian Sutherland.

Then Bloom's attendant arrives, and Sneddon's carefully ordered morning doesn't stand a chance.

She comes in from the rain under an umbrella, wearing a poncho and bright red gumboots and carrying so many bags that she seems to have brought most of her possessions with her. She falls over. Then she falls over again. Bloom has a marvellous way of making each tumble seem both entirely avoidable and utterly inevitable, and before long Sneddon's attendant is simply watching her with the appalled expression of a man discovering that his new colleague may be beyond the reach of workplace induction.

He tries anyway.

There is a lovely bit of business in which he teaches her how a gallery attendant stands. The arms come out, the hands are folded and the whole arrangement is drawn neatly back towards the body. Bloom copies him. A minute correction follows. Whole conversations pass between these two through eyebrows.

Each character's style of physical comedy are quite different, which is precisely why they rub together so well. Sneddon is working small, his character's irritation compressed into twitches, glances and ever more strenuous attempts at self-command. Bloom takes up space. Things spill out of her pockets. She coughs, rummages, chews, trips and generally introduces into the gallery all the unruly evidence of having a body.

![Emilie Bloom and Tim Sneddon tussle in front of a bright blue curtain, Bloom holding a red cup while Sneddon recoils with his arms raised.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/10/LIVE-3---The-Portrait---Ian-Sutherland.jpg)

Emilie Bloom and Tim Sneddon in **The Portrait*. Photo: Ian Sutherland.

At one point she smells something unpleasant and, after some determined efforts to catch her colleague's eye, asks through gesture whether he has farted. His horror is magnificent. She finds this so funny that she does it again. What follows involves a shoe and a problem that neither of them solves in quite the way the other would prefer. By the time Bloom ends up in a pair of glittering blue sneakers, Sneddon's surrender to the situation feels almost heroic.

It is in these apparently silly exchanges that *The Portrait* is at its sharpest. Anyone who has suffered through “teamwork” dynamics will recognise something here: the colleague whose habits slowly drive you up the wall, the petty rule that becomes inexplicably important once somebody else breaks it, the strange transformation by which an ordinary person acquires a lanyard and finds themselves defending institutional procedure.

Sneddon's attendant is particularly delicious because his authority is so meagre and means so much to him. He is both the enforcer of the rules and their most devoted subject. When Bloom's attendant misbehaves, the offence seems to enter his bloodstream.

Sometimes it quite literally changes the world around him. Sarah Platts' lighting suddenly burns red and, for a few seconds, the mild gallery attendant appears to be undergoing some terrible internal event. The first time it happens, after all that pulse checking, you wonder whether he might actually be having a heart attack. Then we understand: this is simply what it feels like to him when Bloom does something she shouldn't.

![Tim Sneddon throws his head back and opens his mouth in a silent scream, hands spread beside him as the stage is flooded with intense red light.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/10/Live-2---The-Portrait---Ian-Sutherland.jpg)

Tim Sneddon in **The Portrait*. Photo: Ian Sutherland.

The joke gets funnier with repetition, helped enormously by Sneddon's ability to look as though another person's minor workplace infringement has caused him profound spiritual injury.

Bloom is every bit his match. The looseness is deceptive: there is real precision in the falls and flurries, in the way one small distraction produces another, and in the speed with which innocence turns into mischief. Their relationship has something of the naughty child and the despairing adult about it, except that the roles keep slipping. Sneddon's attendant is tempted too. He just believes curiosity ought to fill out the proper paperwork first.

And there is plenty to be curious about. The portrait itself remains hidden behind that beautiful blue curtain, waiting for its grand unveiling, while protest noises from outside suggest that not everyone is pleased about its arrival. The temptation to peek grows steadily harder to resist.

There is an obvious debt here to Mr Bean, and *The Portrait* wears it happily. It shares Rowan Atkinson's delight in the tiny social humiliation that swells into calamity, and in the terrible ingenuity with which a person can turn a manageable problem into an unmanageable one. Bloom and Sneddon make that familiar comic territory entirely their own.

![Tim Sneddon and Emilie Bloom stand stiffly on either side of a tall blue curtain concealing the portrait, both wearing black suits and blue staff lanyards with anxious expressions.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/10/Live-6---The-Portrait---Ian-Sutherland-1.jpg)

Tim Sneddon and Emilie Bloom in **The Portrait*. Photo: Ian Sutherland.

And Bartholomew keeps the screws turning. A pristine gallery is not the ideal environment for Bloom's particular talents, and as the morning proceeds there are more rules to break, more objects to misbehave and more reasons for Sneddon to look as though his soul has briefly left his body. Earlier bits return unexpectedly; apparently throwaway details prove useful later. The comedy accumulates superbly, without the show ever seeming in a hurry to reach the next gag. 

The result is an hour of physical comedy that is exquisitely observed, beautifully performed and uproariously funny. 

By the end, the audience was roaring.

Perhaps that is because beneath all the expertly executed slapstick there is something horribly familiar about this pair. Workplaces require us to spend our days accommodating and negotiating other people's habits: their noises, their mess, their ways of doing things, their inexplicable failure to understand that there is a correct place to put something and they have put it somewhere else. *The Portrait* takes that everyday irritation and lets it grow wonderfully, disastrously out of proportion.

Eventually, of course, somebody is going to have to open the curtain.

It would be a shame to say what happens when they do.

---

[*The Portrait*](https://www.melbournefringe.com.au/whats-on/events/the-portrait?ref=melbournestagereview.com) was performed at Trades Hall from 30 September to 4 October as part of [Melbourne Fringe Festival](https://www.melbournefringe.com.au/?ref=melbournestagereview.com) 2026.

---

Disclosure: A complimentary ticket to *The Portrait* was provided to Melbourne Stage Review for the purpose of review. Melbourne Stage Review retains full editorial independence.
### A sticky little mess: Fuck Your Funding
URL: https://melbournestagereview.com/a-sticky-little-mess-fuck-your-funding/
Last updated: 2026-10-05T21:25:35.000Z
[*Fuck Your Funding*](https://www.melbournefringe.com.au/whats-on/events/fuck-your-funding?ref=melbournestagereview.com) sounds like it might be 60 minutes of independent artists yelling about arts funding at an audience of independent artists.

To be fair, there is quite a lot of yelling.

There is also an opera singer called Philanthropy Philharmonica, an Arts Minister called Richard Head, a terrorist cell called ACT (Australian Cultural Terrorists), a gun acquired from Chekhov and three hooded figures who eventually reveal themselves as Gina Rinehart, George Brandis and Rupert Murdoch. At one point somebody performs *Macbeth* in order to summon them.

Ryan Hamilton's play is very silly. It is also one of the smartest things I've seen at Melbourne Fringe.

The premise is cheerfully unhinged. Melbourne Fringe needs $75,000\. The arts sector is fucked. So ACT hijack the fictional Melba Awards and take Head (Scott Gooding) and celebrated opera singer Philanthropy (Mon Wing-Yun) hostage until somebody agrees to fix it.

At the centre of the operation are Grant Smith (Oriana Morris-Johnson) and Chase (Cynda Jace Beare). Grant is the more militant of the pair. Chase is warier.

This distinction will not survive the evening.

![Two ACT members face each other on a dark stage lit from behind in red; one holds a gun aloft.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/10/Fuck-Your-Funding---Credit-Jaimi-Houston-1.jpeg)

Cynda Jace Beare and Oriana Morris-Johnson in **Fuck Your Funding*. Photo: Jaimi Houston.

Head initially assumes he's participating in immersive theatre. Gooding is extremely funny here, gamely “yes, and”-ing his way through his own kidnapping. Morris-Johnson's Grant is having none of it. Under Chelsea Jones's direction, their confrontation begins as broad hostage farce and gradually sheds its comic certainty: two people furiously insisting that the other has failed to understand who they are.

Hamilton keeps setting up easy targets and then, rather inconveniently, allowing them to speak.

Head's opening rhetoric about the value of art is almost embarrassingly good. Art contributes to the economy; it nourishes the national soul; monocultures are bad; artists are brilliant. Even his captors admire the spiel. But once the hostage situation settles in, he starts asking less comfortable questions. Who are these artists actually protesting to? Other artists? What does political theatre achieve inside an echo chamber of solidarity? And why, exactly, should the public go see or fund an artist's proposed work about late ADHD diagnosis performed through butoh?

Ouch.

Hamilton is plainly having fun skewering his own sector, of course, with some healthy tongue in cheek. 

Banners demand DEFUND OPERA and BAN AMERICAN MUSICAL THEATRE. Philanthropy (not the character) is accused of funnelling money towards the same ageing recipients while allowing government to retreat from its responsibilities. Artists fight each other for tiny pots of money and then call it politics.

![Protest banners hang from the Trades Hall balcony, including “Land Back”, “Free Uni”, “Free Health Care”, “Free PTV”, “Free Everything”, “Defund Opera” and “Ban American Musical Theatre”.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/10/Fuck-Your-Funding---Credit-Jaimi-Houston-4.jpeg)

ACT makes its demands. Photo: Jaimi Houston.

Wing-Yun's Philanthropy is an inspired creation. They enter lip-synching Gotye's *Somebody That I Used to Know* as opera—bizarre, ridiculous and somehow magnificent—and spend much of the play embodying everything ACT thinks is wrong with the sector: prestige art, old money, philanthropic patronage, the same people getting funded over and over again.

Yet Philanthropy, too, proves irritatingly difficult to dismiss.

That's Hamilton's trick.

He doesn't make Head the sensible centrist who arrives to explain why the angry children are wrong either. The play is much too slippery for that.

Pushed hard enough, Head explodes.

“I am you.”

Gooding suddenly strips the joke out of the room. Head was an artist. He knows the dirty share houses, the hustling, the making-work-with-nothing existence Grant thinks separates them. Eventually, he decided he didn't deserve to be poor anymore. He chose compromise and spent decades working his way towards political power. As a gay man, he has also lived through a form of incremental political change with rather more at stake than a grant round: he has spent his life changing a system sufficiently that he could marry.

![Scott Gooding as Arts Minister Richard Head stands in a dark suit and red tie, arms folded and giving a broad thumbs-up to the audience.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/10/Fuck-Your-Funding---Credit-Jaimi-Houston-11.jpeg)

Scott Gooding as Richard Head. Photo: Jaimi Houston.

Morris-Johnson is excellent here too, because Grant's militancy doesn't collapse into stupidity once Head starts making sense. Their anger remains intelligible even as its certainties become harder to maintain.

Head asks what Grant actually wants. Not the slogans on the banners. Not the funding demands. What do *you* want?

What emerges is something closer to a future in which people like Grant are cared for too.

“You're good at rhetoric too,” Head tells them.

And there, somewhere, *Fuck Your Funding* gets properly interesting.

Hamilton and Jones, working with dramaturg Laura Ozzimo, have built what initially looks like an agitprop farce and then systematically denies us the pleasures of having an uncomplicated villain. Philanthropy has sold their soul, certainly, but they also understand that opera needs audiences, education and an arts ecology if it is to exist after the current generation is dead. Head is part of a government presiding over a broken funding system, but he is also an artist who decided that changing systems from within required stability, compromise and years of profoundly unsexy work. The terrorists have righteous grievances and absolutely no idea what would happen if somebody actually said yes to their demands.

Nobody gets out clean.

Jones directs the whole thing with a gleeful inventiveness that makes a virtue of having very little. The Trades Hall space keeps opening up: performers appear above us on the balcony; banners tumble down; the Arts Centre spire becomes a perch for a fleeing Philanthropy. When an escape by helicopter is required, we get a tiny model dangling along a line.

![Mon Wing-Yun as Philanthropy Philharmonica peers into the distance from the balcony above a handmade depiction of the Arts Centre Melbourne spire.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/10/Fuck-Your-Funding---Credit-Jaimi-Houston-3.jpeg)

Mon Wing-Yun as Philanthropy Philharmonica. Photo: Jaimi Houston.

It is ridiculous. It is delightful.

Jones and Frankie Thorne's set and costumes have the handmade economy of Fringe theatre, but the production doesn't apologise for it. It keeps finding another joke in what can be achieved with almost nothing. Hamilton's AV, Jack Burmeister's sound and Georgie Wolfe's lighting help a political hostage thriller, opera, *Macbeth* and a miniature helicopter coexist in roughly the same theatrical universe.

The performances are similarly broad: slapstick, mugging, revue, people shouting political slogans at one another. Sometimes the broadness works against Hamilton's writing. Jokes are occasionally pushed towards an uproariousness the room on closing night doesn't quite supply, and there are moments when I wanted the production to trust just how funny—and how sophisticated—the text already is.

Then again, I occasionally wanted a more lavishly resourced production of *Fuck Your Funding*.

Well. Quite.

Jones sends Grant and Chase down parallel paths. Grant remains with Head; Chase follows Philanthropy, who is by now perched atop the Arts Centre, and eventually discovers that their interests aren't quite as opposed as either thought.

“We both need each other.”

Unfortunately, obtaining the necessary $75,000 requires supernatural intervention.

Enter the Weird Sisters.

![Two performers appear as the Weird Sisters over Chase's shoulder, under blue stage lighting, wearing an assortment of cloaks and headwear.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/10/Fuck-Your-Funding---Credit-Jaimi-Houston-12.jpeg)

The Weird Sisters are conjured by Chase (Cynda Jace Beare). Photo: Jaimi Houston.

To summon Rinehart, Brandis and Murdoch, Chase must make art. So Beare performs Macbeth's “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” soliloquy—beautifully, as it happens—until the hooded trio appear. It's a wonderfully stupid sequence with a fairly vicious idea inside it: an artist makes art in order to summon wealth and power, then sells their soul to that power in order to secure the funding required to keep art alive.

The $75,000 is duly procured.

And then Hamilton makes the whole thing worse.

Because when the money finally lands, it doesn't belong to Melbourne Fringe. It goes to Grant as the stitched recipient of the Melba Award.

And with novelty cheque in hand, actually Grant wants dental work. A holiday. A deposit on a home. They have spent years being told that artists should accept precarity because art is important, and now they have seventy-five thousand actual dollars. Why should *they* be responsible for saving Melbourne Fringe? Isn't that precisely how government gets let off the hook?

Grant is right.

Chase, who has just sold their soul to obtain the money, is also right.

This is a problem.

And it completes a neat, nasty reversal. Grant began the night as the militant. Chase was the cautious one. Yet scarcity has pushed them past one another. Grant ends by asserting the individual's right to an ordinary material life; Chase has become so committed to collective survival that another artist's refusal to sacrifice for it becomes intolerable.

The Chekhov joke from much earlier—“Where'd you get that gun?” “Chekhov.”—finally pays its debt.

Chase shoots Grant: “Fuck your funding.”

It's the title, finally delivered as the rallying cry we've been waiting for. Except it isn't shouted at government. Or Philanthropy. Or Rupert Murdoch.

It's one artist saying it to another.

![Oriana Morris-Johnson as Grant Smith lies face-down and motionless on the dark stage, one arm extended, after the play’s final confrontation.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/10/Fuck-Your-Funding---Credit-Jaimi-Houston-13.jpeg)

Oriana Morris-Johnson as Grant Smith. Photo: Jaimi Houston.

That sideways movement is the nastiest—and best—thing in Hamilton's play. For all its fury about governments, institutions and wealthy benefactors, *Fuck Your Funding* keeps returning to what scarcity does to the people forced to live inside it. Artists compete for scraps. They police one another's compromises. They turn structural failures into individual moral tests. Eventually, in Hamilton's gleefully grotesque formulation, they shoot each other.

Hamilton's pre-Fringe writing describes wanting to make a play that could “feel our way through the mess that is arts advocacy”. He's done something better than making a case. He has made the case against himself, and then the case against that, and allowed each person inside the argument enough humanity to become inconvenient.

There are no clean hands here. Government can't simply fix it. Philanthropy can sustain art while distorting what gets sustained. Institutional compromise can produce change. Artistic purity doesn't pay the dentist. Collective action requires individual sacrifice, but asking precarious artists to keep making that sacrifice is part of the bloody problem.

Hamilton doesn't tell us which contradiction to solve first.

Instead, he leaves us with a sticky little mess in which almost everyone has a point.

It's brilliant.

---

[*Fuck Your Funding*](https://www.melbournefringe.com.au/whats-on/events/fuck-your-funding?ref=melbournestagereview.com) was performed at Trades Hall from 30 September to 4 October as part of [Melbourne Fringe Festival](https://www.melbournefringe.com.au/?ref=melbournestagereview.com) 2026.

---

Disclosure: A complimentary ticket to *Fuck Your Funding* was provided to Melbourne Stage Review for the purpose of review. Melbourne Stage Review retains full editorial independence.
### The soil atop, the soil beneath: Distillation
URL: https://melbournestagereview.com/the-soil-atop-the-soil-beneath-distillation/
Last updated: 2026-10-05T10:07:03.000Z
There is soil on the table. Twenty of us sit around it. Luke Casserly passes a small pot of coffee beans from hand to hand, saying nothing. A warm nod is enough: smell, pass it on. Then soil, loose in our palms. It takes a little care to transfer a handful of earth to a stranger without spilling it.

The room softens to meet Luke's rhythm.

[*Distillation*](https://www.melbournefringe.com.au/whats-on/events/distillation?ref=melbournestagereview.com) comes from the boglands of the Irish Midlands, where Casserly grew up and where his father worked. It carries that landscape with it: its smells and textures, its industry and ecology, the knowledge accumulated by people who have worked it, and the grief of watching a way of life disappear.

Casserly tells us about having a cyst removed from his face. The scar remains. He turns his head to show us, puts a finger to it and begins to trace: down his neck and body, along his arm, through his hand, until the movement continues into the soil spread across the table.

He takes his time. The gesture becomes strange simply because it goes on longer than expected, part demonstration, part dance. A mark in the body finds its way into the earth.

![Close view of Luke Casserly dressed in white, one hand resting across his abdomen during Distillation.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/10/Distillation-5.jpg)

Luke Casserly in **Distillation*. Photo: Ashley Andres Penin

Much of *Distillation* happens like this, through touch, smell and the odd intimacy of twenty strangers gathered closely around one table.

Sphagnum moss travels from hand to hand. Casserly tells us about its old uses: for wounds, for babies, its extraordinary capacity to hold water. A declared cigarette break sends him under the table, from where an enormous cylinder of smoke eventually emerges, gloriously silly amid all this tenderness. 

And buried in the soil in front of each of us is a tiny bottle of perfume.

It has been made to evoke the scent of the bog. We put it on our wrists. It is startlingly beautiful: round, warm, perhaps with a note of sweet citrus. Then Casserly asks us to offer a wrist to the person beside us, to smell the perfume on another's skin. I ask the man next to me if he's okay with that. He is. I lean towards his skin; someone else leans towards mine.

The perfume has changed, uniquely, on each of us.

There is something delightful about the scale of this. No spectacle. No attempt to manufacture transcendence. Just soil, moss, scent, stories, bodies; Casserly's gentle attention holding them together. He asks what the perfume evokes, and around the table people offer small fragments of memory: brief, unexpectedly poignant glimpses into other lives. 

By the end Casserly speaks about the shared memory we have now made of a bog most of us have never seen, and the proposition doesn't feel fanciful. For an hour, some small sensory knowledge of that place has been held between us.

![Luke Casserly and audience members sit closely around a large circular table covered entirely in bog soil during Distillation.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/10/Distillation-2.jpg)

**Distillation*. Photo: Ashley Andres Penin

But the soil on the table has travelled.

At one point Casserly talks about the romanticisation of wild landscapes, set against the knowledge of those who have actually worked the land. 

Listening, I am reminded of Kev Carmody at WOMADelaide in 2007, where I first encountered a song that has stayed with me ever since. Written with Paul Kelly, *This Land Is Mine* turns on a tiny shift in language. The settler voice says, “This land is mine.” Kev's voice: “This land is me.”

Those lines have stayed with me because they disturb the grammar of possession altogether. They suggest another way of thinking about land, one that doesn't sit easily within a choice between romanticising it and working it.

And today *Distillation* is not in Ireland. We are sitting at a timber table at Abbotsford Convent, handling soil from an Irish bog on Wurundjeri Country. There is a floor beneath our chairs, concrete somewhere beneath that; beneath all of it, earth with its own histories and continuities, its own relationships of memory, care, belonging, dispossession and survival.

That ground began to feel conspicuously present to me.

This is not an argument for making an Irish work less Irish. Its specificity is one of its strengths. This isn't generic earth. Casserly's bog has a history, and he belongs to that history. Nor would grafting an Indigenous perspective onto a touring work necessarily constitute meaningful engagement.

But, for me, a question remains: what happens when a work about place changes place?

What might *Distillation* discover if the ground it arrives on were allowed into the encounter? If, alongside carrying the bog out into the world, it became curious about the earth beneath each new table?

I leave the room slightly dreamy. Outside, Abbotsford Convent is all garden and October air: chilly in the shade, warm when I step into the sun. Birds above me in the trees. I've spent an hour breathing more deeply than usual, smelling soil and moss and perfume and another person's skin.

The bog comes outside with me.

So does the ground beneath my feet.

---

[*Distillation*](https://www.melbournefringe.com.au/whats-on/events/distillation?ref=melbournestagereview.com) was performed 1-4 October 2026 at [Abbotsford Convent](https://abbotsfordconvent.com.au/?ref=melbournestagereview.com), as part of [Melbourne Fringe Festival](https://www.melbournefringe.com.au/?ref=melbournestagereview.com) 2026.

Supplied images are not from the Melbourne Fringe Festival production.

---

Disclosure: A complimentary ticket to *Distillation* was provided to Melbourne Stage Review for the purpose of review. Melbourne Stage Review retains full editorial independence.
### The shape of love has changed: Rhomboid
URL: https://melbournestagereview.com/the-shape-of-love-has-changed-rhomboid/
Last updated: 2026-10-04T01:55:53.000Z
At one point in [*Rhomboid*](https://fortyfivedownstairs.com/event/rhomboid/?ref=melbournestagereview.com), a young man tries to explain how he feels about his best friend. It isn't quite romantic. It isn't quite sexual. Friendship won't cover it either. Drunk, flailing for a comparison, he finally finds one: Toby.

Toby was his dog.

It's the best joke in Eric Jiang's *Rhomboid*, and possibly its best idea. Not because the comparison works. It plainly doesn't. But the failure itself gets us somewhere. The English language is being asked to contain a feeling it wasn't (yet) built for.

\* \* \*

First staged in Sydney in 2023, *Rhomboid* follows Xavier (Ken Paolo) and Sebastian (Lawrence Hawkins) from high school into their twenties. They fooled around at the end of high school. They date other people, including Felix and Lachie (both played by Chad Rosete). They drift apart and back together. There is attraction, jealousy and an intimacy sufficiently charged to trouble their other relationships. Again and again, they try to work out what they are to each other.

![Lawrence Hawkins and Ken Paolo sit pressed closely together on a blue block, arms around each other, against a vivid orange-lit background.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/10/Lawrence-Hawkins--left--and-Ken-Paolo--right-.-Credit_-MOUK.-MEDIA_-1.jpg)

Lawrence Hawkins and Ken Paolo in **Rhomboid*. Photo: MOUK.MEDIA.

There is a specifically queer charge in refusing the inherited architecture of coupledom: romantic partnership at the top, friendship somewhere below, intimacy expected to become exclusive, legible and classifiable. *Rhomboid* knows these categories aren't merely semantic. Family, culture and other relationships exert pressure on how Xavier and Sebastian understand themselves.

In 2026, though, the central proposition feels less provocative than it might once have.

Ideas once largely confined to queer and countercultural communities — relationship anarchy, ethical non-monogamy, non-hierarchical intimacy — have [entered much wider circulation](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-03-13/how-we-can-all-benefit-from-relationship-anarchy/104950720?ref=melbournestagereview.com). The question remains relevant. The interesting edge has shifted.

At times, *Rhomboid* seems ready to follow that edge. Jiang is alert to the slipperiness of the categories themselves. “*The binary: you either love it or you hate it*” goes one joke. It's a throwaway line with a sting in its tail.

![Chad Rosete, Lawrence Hawkins and Ken Paolo sit together on blue blocks onstage, Hawkins gesturing as the three appear to be in animated conversation.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/10/Chad-Rosete--left---Lawrence-Hawkins--middle--and-Ken-Paolo--right-.-Credit_-George-Jefford-1.jpg)

Chad Rosete, Lawrence Hawkins and Ken Paolo in **Rhomboid*. Photo: George Jefford.

Eventually Xavier and Sebastian give their peculiar geometry a name. They are a “rhomboid”. The noun even becomes a verb: they can rhomboid each other.

It's sweet. It's funny. And naming isn't necessarily the problem. Names can be provisional. Playful. Useful. *Rhomboid* itself begins that way: two people reaching for language where the available words have failed them.

The more complicated question is what happens next.

When does a description harden into a definition? When does a definition begin accumulating expectations of its own? Can a relationship remain undefined when other people are asked to organise their lives around it? Does escaping one hierarchy simply create another?

*Rhomboid* opens the door to these questions. I wanted it to walk through.

The play has already achieved — and quite beautifully — the harder, richer thing. It has shown us two people trying and failing to describe something. Friend. Lover. Family. Dog. Each wrong word reveals another facet. *Rhomboid* gives them another word.

I wanted to know what happens when that word starts acquiring edges of its own.

\* \* \*

Jiang has a sharp ear for rapid-fire banter. Paolo has the timing to match it. He fires off Xavier's lines with terrific ease, wit arriving almost before the thought has finished forming. Text messages ricochet across the stage, often with the pair looking anywhere but at each other. Pop-cultural references come thick and fast.

Under Margot Morales' direction, Paolo and Hawkins are terrific together. Hawkins builds drunkenness from tiny shifts in weight, balance and coordination. Their dancing is gloriously awkward. Both actors are acutely alive to the other body onstage. Distance carries charge. So does proximity. Physical intimacy flares, retreats, hangs unresolved.

Here, the ambiguity *Rhomboid* keeps trying to explain is already perfectly legible. Their bodies have told us.

Sound is the production's weak point. A thumping club soundtrack competes with unmiked voices. Turn away from the audience, as the production asks the actors to from time to time, and whole lines disappear. On opening night, I sometimes had to strain to hear.

![Lawrence Hawkins and Ken Paolo dance back-to-back in a haze of blue stage light, each with one arm raised in a loose dance movement.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/10/Lawrence-Hawkins--left--and-Ken-Paolo--right-.-Credit_-George-Jefford-1--1.jpg)

Lawrence Hawkins and Ken Paolo in **Rhomboid*. Photo: George Jefford.

For some audiences, *Rhomboid*'s refusal of the old categories may still feel quietly radical. Three years after its premiere, I wanted it to go further. 

It gets tantalisingly close.

Toby fails as an answer. That's precisely why he tells us so much.

---

[*Rhomboid*](https://fortyfivedownstairs.com/event/rhomboid/?ref=melbournestagereview.com) plays at [fortyfivedownstairs](https://fortyfivedownstairs.com/?ref=melbournestagereview.com) until 11 October as part of [Melbourne Fringe Festival 2026](https://www.melbournefringe.com.au/?ref=melbournestagereview.com).

---

Disclosure: A complimentary ticket to *Rhomboid* was provided to Melbourne Stage Review for the purpose of review. Melbourne Stage Review retains full editorial independence.
### Look again: Exhibit
URL: https://melbournestagereview.com/look-again-exhibit/
Last updated: 2026-10-02T01:02:45.000Z
Early in [*Exhibit*](https://www.lamama.com.au/whats-on/melbourne-fringe-festival-2026/exhibit?ref=melbournestagereview.com), Emma J. Hawkins and Leisa Prowd climb inside boxes.

They are simple plywood structures, barely big enough to contain them. Which, of course, they don’t.

Hawkins prises hers open from the inside. Soon the boxes come apart, and the pair spend the next hour rearranging their pieces: into platforms, a lectern, a long thin stage, a boxing ring. Around them curtains appear, lights dim, woolly landscapes hang. At one point they stuff themselves inside enormous grey beanbags and dance as two lumbering blancmanges. At another they stalk a catwalk swathed in furs, fabulously rich and important, women who know exactly what they are worth.

Everything keeps changing except the fact that we are looking at them.

![Hawkins and Prowd emerge from plywood boxes, tipping and pulling the structures apart on a darkened stage.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/10/Exhibit_Darren_Gill-0056.jpg)

Emma J. Hawkins and Leisa Prowd in **Exhibit*. Photo: Darren Gill

*Exhibit*, created and performed by Hawkins and Prowd with the incisive directorial eye of Susie Dee, is very funny about looking. Until it isn't.

Both performers know what it means to enter a room and have their bodies arrive first. To be noticed, categorised, made remarkable. To have an imagined repertoire waiting for them: the oddity, the elf, the joke. Hawkins and Prowd are actors, and so the cruelty has a professional precision. They don't want not to be seen. They want the leading role.

They want to be beautiful. They want to be sexy. They want to be worth “ten thousand dollars a day”.

Fuck the casting directors. Fuck the leading ladies. Fuck Cate Blanchett and Nicole Kidman and Toni Collette.

There is something exhilarating in the sheer bad manners of it. No graceful gratitude. No requirement to turn exclusion into wisdom. Hawkins and Prowd are allowed envy and vanity and rage. They get to want what they were told belonged to somebody else.

And they are very good at making us laugh.

![Hawkins and Prowd dance inside enormous grey beanbag costumes under vivid stage lighting, with woolly landscape hangings behind them.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/10/Exhibit_Darren_Gill-0140.jpg)

Emma J. Hawkins and Leisa Prowd in **Exhibit*. Photo: Darren Gill

The theatrical machinery is constantly mutating around them. Dan West's sound and Richard Vabre's lighting transform the Courthouse as quickly as Hawkins and Prowd rebuild it. With movement consultant Kyall Shanks, they make exuberant use of their bodies and the space. A boxing ring becomes an audition. Furniture becomes costume. Bodies become exhibits, glamour girls, dancers.

Look at us. No, not like *that*.

The distinction is crushing.

Because a lifetime of being looked at does something more insidious than make a person self-conscious. Other people's eyes can become your own. The gaze follows you into the mirror. You learn to recognise the version of yourself everybody else has already decided to see.

And still *Exhibit* keeps offering spectacle.

Hawkins and Prowd crawl and strut and dance. They make themselves gorgeous. Ridiculous. Their bodies are endlessly inventive. I caught myself being surprised by what they could do with them, and then caught myself being surprised.

There I was, looking.

![Hawkins and Prowd lean and twist through a dance sequence in pools of low light, their shadows stretching across the stage.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/10/Exhibit_Darren_Gill-0254.jpg)

Emma J. Hawkins and Leisa Prowd in **Exhibit*. Photo: Darren Gill

Late in the work, a dance begins to repeat. Again. Again. Faster. Again. The performers push harder. What was funny becomes effort; what was spectacle becomes labour. The pleasure of watching begins to sour.

I found myself thinking: *See what I will do to make you see me.* The thought embarrassed me.

Of course, Hawkins and Prowd have been making themselves visible all night. That is the contract of theatre. They perform and we watch. But *Exhibit* picks at that contract like a scab until the apparently passive act of looking begins to feel anything but passive.

It would be easier if the work simply asked us not to stare. It doesn't.

Look at me. Desire me. Take me seriously. Let me be ordinary. Let me be extraordinary. See my body.

For fuck's sake, see *me*.

By its final moments, the riotous transformations have fallen away. What remains is unexpectedly tender, and I found a lump rising in my throat.

---

[*Exhibit*](https://www.lamama.com.au/whats-on/melbourne-fringe-festival-2026/exhibit?ref=melbournestagereview.com) plays at [La Mama](https://www.lamama.com.au/?ref=melbournestagereview.com) Courthouse until 4 October as part of [Melbourne Fringe Festival](https://www.melbournefringe.com.au/?ref=melbournestagereview.com).

---

Disclosure: A complimentary ticket to *Exhibit* was provided to Melbourne Stage Review for the purpose of review. Melbourne Stage Review retains full editorial independence.
### The possible versions of you: QFWFQ
URL: https://melbournestagereview.com/the-possible-versions-of-you-qfwfq/
Last updated: 2026-09-30T13:36:15.000Z
Early in *QFWFQ*, Gregory Nussen asks if anyone needs the toilet.

The show has not begun, although of course it has. Nussen is still settling us, talking about beginnings, making sure we are comfortable. They ask a man sitting on the aisle if he needs to go.

He has a strong bladder.

A tiny pause. This is clearly the wrong answer.

Nussen looks across the aisle at me.

Sure. I need the toilet.

I am escorted outside and told, in hushed tones, to make my way back in. Much later I discover that I may have used this absence to report the performance to the Institute for the Posterity of Everything. I have become, without knowing it, part of the fiction.

This is the territory of *QFWFQ*: unstable, playful, full of trapdoors. Stories open onto other stories or stop altogether. Fiction wears the clothes of autobiography. Autobiography is attributed to someone else’s play. An event changes meaning retrospectively. Nussen keeps hovering at the edges of the performance, apparently trying to work out what kind of show they are making while performing it.

Ten years in the making, *QFWFQ* grew from Nussen’s fascination with Italo Calvino, especially *If on a winter’s night a traveler*. I read Calvino’s novel as a teenager and remember the delicious disturbance of finding myself, the reader, dragged into its machinery. Here, twenty-odd years later, I am sitting inside the machine again. This time it has sent me to the toilet.

One story begins in a snowy forest. A young man finds a church and inside, impossibly, a woman playing the piano. The image gathers around us.

![Gregory Nussen smiles in profile, with a large projected image and blue stage lighting behind them.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/09/QFWFWQ-Gregory-Nussen-4.jpg)

Gregory Nussen in **QFWFQ*. Photo: Andrew Max Levy

Then the story breaks. Wrong script. A problem with the Institute. A phone call might be required.

The disorder has its own precision, shaped with director Hannah Pilkes. Nussen is expansive, mischievous, vulnerable, forever seeming a breath away from losing the thread. They never do. Their stories proliferate. A Jewish summer camp. Queerness. Family. The Holocaust. Israel. Palestine. The absurdity of making theatre now, among Fringe shows excruciatingly concerned with the state of the world and Fringe shows excruciatingly unconcerned with it.

For years, Nussen tried to get closer to Calvino. They read and researched, contemplated learning Italian, pushed further into the work. Eventually, they tell us, the forest became too dense for the light to come through.

The sentence stays with me.

So does another. Life can feel already written, yet we are expected to improvise.

As *QFWFQ* gathers its fragments, this begins to sting. Nussen speaks of growing up queer and Jewish, of standing with Palestine, of the rupture this has caused within their family. The theatrical problem and the personal one begin to rhyme: the script exists; improvisation is demanded; depart too far from what has already been written and the boundaries reveal themselves.

> “*You are always a possible you.*”

I write that down too.

The beauty of *QFWFQ* lies somewhere among these unfinished things. The snowy church remains unfinished. Other plays surface and dissolve. Jokes return carrying different meanings. Nothing quite settles into its proper category. Even Nussen flickers between performer, character and subject.

At one point they describe our contemporary attention spans as dust: scattered into particles.

Yet dust settles. It gathers.

![Gregory Nussen lies on the floor surrounded by scattered books, papers and notebooks.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/09/QFWFWQ-Gregory-Nussen-1.jpg)

Gregory Nussen. Photo: Sonya Katarina

By the end, *QFWFQ* has gathered inside me in much the same way: piano, snow, summer camp, ash, Calvino, Palestine, family, an imaginary Institute, a man with a strong bladder, my own brief disappearance through a theatre door. Fragments touching fragments until they begin to carry the weight of one another.

I leave with the peculiar tenderness of pressing a bruise: an ache you find yourself returning to because there is something almost pleasurable in feeling precisely where it hurts.

The forest is dense. The light comes through.

---

[*QFWFQ*](https://www.melbournefringe.com.au/whats-on/events/qfwfq?ref=melbournestagereview.com) plays at Trades Hall – Meeting Room as part of [Melbourne Fringe Festival](https://www.melbournefringe.com.au/?ref=melbournestagereview.com), 30 September–4 October 2026.

---

Disclosure: A complimentary ticket to *QFWFQ* was provided to Melbourne Stage Review for the purpose of review. Melbourne Stage Review retains full editorial independence.
### Worth the wait: Waiting for Godot
URL: https://melbournestagereview.com/worth-the-wait-waiting-for-godot/
Last updated: 2026-09-27T00:57:59.000Z
Dare a critic admit that this is the first time they have seen *Waiting for Godot*? Sacrilege, surely?

For those who have perused [our credo](https://melbournestagereview.com/circles-in-the-water-a-credo-for-theatre-criticism/), this will not be a startling revelation. I come from the arts, but I am a relative newcomer to theatre. I have never trodden the boards, directed a rehearsal room or studied the theatrical canon. My credentials for pronouncing upon Samuel Beckett are, frankly, dubious.

*Waiting for Godot*, though, is difficult to remain completely ignorant of for long. I knew the tree. I knew the waiting. I knew, in broad strokes, the two men beside the road and the man who never arrives. A theatremaker I knew very well had, over years of conversation, filled in considerably more of the detail. But I had never actually sat in a theatre and watched Vladimir and Estragon wait.

Beckett himself is another matter. I have fallen asleep during Samuel Beckett twice.

This sounds like an insult. It isn't.

My first encounter with his work was [*Worstward Ho*](https://www.theatreworks.org.au/2023/worstward-ho?ref=melbournestagereview.com), directed by Richard Murphet and performed by Robert Meldrum at Theatre Works' Explosives Factory in 2023\. It was, in retrospect, a rather peculiar entry point. A late prose work adapted for the stage, *Worstward Ho* is almost gibberish. The words are recognisable, but Beckett assembles them into fractured sentences that refuse to behave as sentences should. And yet the gibberish is delicious: rhythmic, repetitive, strangely poetic.

I slipped into a strange liminal space between sleep and waking. My head lolled forward, but I could still hear the words. I wasn't bored, and I hadn't stopped listening. If anything, the opposite was true. I was drinking in the language while somehow relinquishing the ordinary effort to make sense of it. It was like being hypnotised.

Not long afterwards, I saw Melbourne Theatre Company's 2023 production of [*Happy Days*](https://www.mtc.com.au/plays-and-tickets/whats-on/production-archive/2020-2024/season-2023/happy-days?ref=melbournestagereview.com), starring Judith Lucy as Winnie. It happened again.

[*Krapp's Last Tape*](https://2025.adelaidefestival.com.au/events/krapps-last-tape/?ref=melbournestagereview.com), at Adelaide Festival in 2025, was different. I suppose its stronger narrative thread gave my waking mind something to grasp: a life excavated through recordings, memory and regret. That, and who could close their eyes to Stephen Rea? But I don't value that encounter more than the others. There was something extraordinary in surrendering ordinary consciousness to Beckett's language, in receiving it somewhere between comprehension and dream.

So, driving to Castlemaine to finally see [*Waiting for Godot*](https://theravenstheatrecompany.org/news/announcing-waiting-for-godot?ref=melbournestagereview.com), my own wait for *Godot* was nearly over. I wondered less whether I would like it than how I would experience it.

The answer, this time, was wide awake and laughing.

Janice Muller's production for The Ravens Theatre Company is extraordinarily funny, its comedy keeping me tethered to every moment even as Vladimir (Tim Heath) and Estragon (Gus Read-Hill) struggle to find ways to fill theirs.

Heath and Read-Hill allow Vladimir and Estragon to be gloriously outsized. Faces stretch and crumple; postures sharpen and sag. Vladimir is bright-eyed and buoyant, while Estragon seems perpetually on the verge of drooping under the weight of some new indignity. At times, they resemble a pair of particularly bedraggled Muppets. Yet there is remarkable precision beneath the exaggeration: every grimace, pause and small adjustment of a bowler hat becomes material.

The comedy thrives on the problem Beckett has set them: how to fill time when the thing that matters is always going to happen later. Heath and Read-Hill find seemingly endless variations on this predicament. Even suicide can be contemplated as a way to pass the time.

I kept catching a glimpse of sorrow underneath the laughter. The possibility of hanging themselves is funny until, suddenly, it isn't. The same is true of their waiting. Beneath all the comic business is the creeping recognition that these men have surrendered their lives to the future. Happiness, purpose, action: everything deferred until Godot comes.

Pozzo (Tim Rogers) and Lucky (Luke Lennox) complicate the picture. Until their appearance, Vladimir and Estragon can seem close to the bottom of things: shabby suits, failing boots, little to their names and nowhere in particular to go. Lucky, tethered by the neck and burdened with Pozzo's possessions, casts their predicament in a different light.

![Lucky stands exhausted at left holding a suitcase and basket, tethered by a long white rope to Pozzo, who sits at right in a fur-trimmed cape and bowler hat. Estragon stands between them beneath the bare tree.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/09/pennyryan_TRTC_WaitingforGodot_Print-2051.jpg)

Luke Lennox as Lucky, Gus Read-Hill as Estragon and Tim Rogers as Pozzo in **Waiting for Godot*. Photo: Penny Ryan.

In fact, I found Lucky's arrival a little horrifying. Rogers gives Pozzo's authority a wonderfully pompous theatricality. He swells into the space, luxuriating in his own importance; even the business of being helped into his cape becomes an event. Rogers pitches the extravagance beautifully, finding the comedy in Pozzo's self-regard while making the power beneath it entirely credible.

Lennox's Lucky bears the material cost. The rope between them makes that power brutally concrete.

And then Lucky speaks.

Lennox's monologue hits like a punch to the face. Language comes in a torrent: fragments of argument and apparent sense accumulating, colliding and disintegrating almost faster than they can be apprehended. After Lucky's long silence, its force is startling. Lennox does not simply recite the famous verbal avalanche; he seems overtaken by it. The effect is potent, frightening and strangely exhilarating.

Against this, Vladimir and Estragon's apparently meagre existence begins to look different. They may be waiting, but at least they are free to leave. Except, of course, they don't.

By the second act, the relationship between power and dependence has shifted again. But it was the play's treatment of time and memory that began to get under my skin. Again and again, certainty about what has already happened dissolves. Repetition offers no reassurance; it seems instead to make one day less distinguishable from another. I found myself wondering what becomes of a life when the past cannot quite be held onto and the future is always where meaning is expected to arrive.

Then Vladimir names something I had been feeling for much of the play: “But habit is a great deadener”.

The line landed hard in my stomach. Habit gets them through. It also makes getting through enough. There is something frightening in the ease with which repetition can become existence: not choosing unhappiness exactly, but becoming sufficiently accustomed to it that tomorrow can continue to carry the promise of something different.

Perhaps this was what disturbed me most about their waiting. Godot began to matter less to me than the conviction that whatever might make life meaningful was somewhere other than here.

![Estragon and Vladimir stand together beneath the bare tree. Estragon, in a dark rumpled suit and bowler hat, looks wearily ahead while Vladimir leans forward beside him with an intent expression.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/09/pennyryan_TRTC_WaitingforGodot_Print-2540.jpg)

Gus Read-Hill as Estragon and Tim Heath as Vladimir in **Waiting for Godot*. Photo: Penny Ryan.

Muller's visual world is spare. A bare tree rises over the landscape; a rock provides somewhere to sit, sleep and wrestle with recalcitrant boots. Tall, blue-grey panels frame the space with indistinct organic forms. By the second act, the tree has produced a single, almost comically inadequate leaf. Night arrives with equal economy: a moon appears, suddenly and unapologetically theatrical.

Yet the waiting itself is full of activity. Between Heath and Read-Hill, irritation slips into tenderness; separation is repeatedly imagined and companionship repeatedly resumed. They bicker, clown, care for one another and contemplate leaving, only to remain together. For all my unease at lives spent waiting for something outside themselves, I kept thinking: I suppose this is a life too.

Perhaps that is what made their waiting so painful to me. Not that nothing is happening, but that what *is* happening seems insufficient to them. I wanted them to recognise what was already there: to stop treating meaning as something that might arrive tomorrow and claim whatever could be made from today.

For someone arriving very late to *Waiting for Godot*, I could hardly have asked for a better introduction. Muller, Heath and Read-Hill find all the immediacy in Beckett's strange rhythms: the jokes land, the silences hold, and the repetitions gather weight as the evening wears on. Rogers and Lennox bring real force to the darker world that presses in around them. The result is exquisitely performed: funny, painful and completely absorbing.

There are worse things, it turns out, than waiting a long time for *Godot*.

---

[*Waiting for Godot*](https://events.humanitix.com/waiting-for-godot-by-the-ravens-theatre-company?ref=melbournestagereview.com) plays at Phee Broadway Theatre, Castlemaine, until 3 October 2026.

---

Disclosure: A complimentary ticket to *Waiting for Godot* was provided to Melbourne Stage Review for the purpose of review. Melbourne Stage Review retains full editorial independence.
### The strange pleasure of being starved of light: Triptych
URL: https://melbournestagereview.com/the-strange-pleasure-of-being-starved-of-light-triptych/
Last updated: 2026-09-24T09:55:43.000Z
I could not read my notes during [*Triptych*](https://www.artscentremelbourne.com.au/whats-on/2026/dance/triptych?ref=melbournestagereview.com).

This was not only during the dancing. Between the three works, the lights came up and I could barely distinguish my handwriting from the white page. By the end of the hour, I had filled, completely by feel, eleven tiny wayward pages.

This scarcity of light is central to the uncanny delight of Lewis Major’s *Triptych*. Choreography and sound combine with the remarkable lighting and visual design of Fausto Brusamolino and Frankie Clarke to keep withholding visual information. Bodies are there, but we are not necessarily allowed to see them whole.

Sometimes a thin horizontal line scans across an otherwise dark stage. It catches a fraction of an arm, a shoulder, a torso. The eye knows these fragments belong to bodies and begins assembling what it cannot see. Elsewhere, three dancers occupy shifting squares of light, their athletic bodies flattened into line, shape and plane. In these moments, *Triptych* looks less like dance than an exquisitely art-directed magazine spread set in motion.

Those bodies belong to Alexander Abbot, Elsi Auricht-Faulks, Felicity Chadwick and Tahlia Russell, four superbly expressive dancers whose physical range allows Major to shift constantly between body as image and body as flesh. They can be graphic material one moment and emphatically human the next: muscular, tender, precariously balanced. In one extraordinary duet, Auricht-Faulks seems never to touch the floor, Abbot’s body becoming the ground beneath her.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/09/AYO_Triptych_2026_credit_Mark_Gambino-6822.JPG)

Alexander Abbot and Elsi Auricht-Faulks in **Triptych*. Photo: Mark Gambino.

The deprivation also does peculiar things to perception. Light becomes waves, cells, webs. Dancers spin inside a geometric configuration of fine lines while James Peter Brown’s score builds through deep electronic thrum, strings and synth distortion. Stare long enough and your eyes begin to betray you: it becomes difficult to tell whether the image is moving strangely or your own vision has begun to wobble.

Then the work begins to withdraw. The web breaks into finer and finer points of light. Low to the floor, two dancers are cocooned in a soft tangle, curled around one another within a cosmic field of light. Eventually another pair takes their place; the light takes on a gentle terracotta glow, then slowly fades to almost nothing. I can only just see them receding from the stage.

After all this deprivation, simply being allowed to see a body feels sublime. In the final solo, Auricht-Faulks slowly emerges into warm light. Where bodies have previously been fragmented, flattened or swallowed by darkness, hers is suddenly sculptural: muscular, curved and unusually available to the eye. Against Dane Yates's piano arrangement after Debussy, fine flour falls from her hair, skin and costume, dusting the black floor beneath her. Her movements accumulate in circles, footprints, sweeps and smudges. Having spent so much of *Triptych* constructing bodies from traces, we now watch a body create its own.

![A dancer in a nude-toned costume arches backwards as flour falls from her hair and hands, gathering in sweeping circular traces on the black floor.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/09/AYO_Triptych_2026_credit_Mark_Gambino-7459.jpg)

Elsi Auricht-Faulks in **Triptych*. Photo: Mark Gambino.

Perhaps the most peculiar measure of the work’s control comes when nobody is dancing. Between sections, the same low light reaches into the auditorium. We were told that we may talk during these interludes but must remain in our seats. Before the performance, several hundred people produced the familiar roar of an audience in anticipation. Now there is only a sweet hum.

Nothing requires this. There are few physical changes to conceal and no elaborate sets to shift into place. Yet with this small device, *Triptych* invites us within the work itself. We remain together: talking quietly, pupils widened, waiting for another movement to materialise from the dark. When it does, we hush before the music has even begun.

It is difficult to overstate how completely *Triptych* holds a room. Major and his collaborators make darkness sumptuous, light thrilling and four extraordinary bodies utterly hypnotic.

For an hour, *Triptych* makes looking feel new again.

---

[*Triptych*](https://www.artscentremelbourne.com.au/whats-on/2026/dance/triptych?ref=melbournestagereview.com) performs at [Arts Centre Melbourne](https://www.artscentremelbourne.com.au/?ref=melbournestagereview.com), Fairfax Studio, until 26 September 2026.
### You can take the boys out of Great Britain: Lord of the Flies
URL: https://melbournestagereview.com/you-can-take-the-boys-out-of-great-britain-lord-of-the-flies/
Last updated: 2026-09-23T07:10:28.000Z
I thought I knew what *Lord of the Flies* was about.

I first encountered William Golding’s story as a kid, maybe twelve years old, watching the film with my family. I read the novel perhaps a decade later. In the nearly twenty years since, I have carried around what I suspect is a fairly conventional understanding of it: remove a group of boys from the structures of civilisation and civilisation begins to fall away. Rules become harder to enforce. Violence becomes possible. Eventually, something supposedly more primitive emerges.

Steven Mitchell Wright’s production of Nigel Williams’s stage adaptation made me wonder whether I had it backwards.

\* \* \*

The boys are already onstage as we enter Theatre Works, playing a version of “keepy-uppy” with a small red ball. They count together, jostle, compete, recover the ball and begin again. While we wait for the lights to dim, they gradually become passengers on a plane, perched in pairs on old brown suitcases along the narrow ledge at the top of the steeply raked stage. The crash unfolds in spectacular slow motion, bodies pitching through the cabin. It is the first of many moments of masterful ensemble work.

That rake becomes the production’s essential landscape. Hierarchy is marked spatially. In a quieter moment, a projection of a full moon slowly travels across it as the boys sleep. Later, live video is projected over the same surface, immersing us in the immediacy and horrific intimacy of brutal acts.

Indeed, the stage design is doing some *very* heavy lifting: deceptively spare, but capable of producing an astonishing complexity of levels, relationships and images. Wright makes full use of it, bodies continually reorganising themselves across its height and depth. The production’s sound and lighting are similarly muscular. At key moments, the stage floods with saturated red as a sonic impact seems almost to strike the boys down: reality hits, and their bodies take the blow.

Ralph, superbly played by Angus Leighton, emerges easily as a leader. There is something footy-captain-like about him: athletic, handsome, socially confident, capable of making authority look natural. He gains status partly through physical competition and, very early, strips to a pair of startling yellow briefs. For most of the first half, while the other boys remain substantially dressed, Ralph strides around nearly naked and entirely at home in his body.

![Performers face one another on the brightly lit raked stage. Sean Yuen Halley and Oliver Cowen reach towards Angus Leighton, who stands apart in yellow briefs, holding an AFL football.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/09/Lord-of-the-Flies---Image-2-1.jpg)

Sean Yuen Halley, Oliver Cowen and Angus Leighton (holding an AFL football) in **Lord of the Flies* at Theatre Works. Photo: Matthew Chen

It would be easy to mistake that ease for innocence. Ralph is certainly no Jack. But neither is he outside the hierarchies forming around him. Early on, he takes Piggy’s glasses and joins in the joke at his expense. Piggy cannot see without them: his humiliation does not begin with the collapse of social order. It begins while everybody is still playing nicely.

The distinction is useful to draw, because Wright makes power more complicated than a contest between a good leader and a bad one.

Jack’s power is spectacular. Sean Yuen Halley finds true ferocity in the role, particularly as the production accelerates towards its end. Ralph’s increasingly prosaic concerns with shelters, fires and survival cannot compete theatrically with what Jack offers. Jack has ritual, danger, belonging. There’s part of me that understands why the boys follow Jack because, to an uncomfortable degree, there is something compelling about the sinewy spectacle of his power.

![Sean Yuen Halley faces Angus Leighton at close range, raising one finger towards him as Leighton holds a red football against his chest under blue stage lighting.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/09/Lord-of-the-Flies---Image-5.jpg)

Sean Yuen Halley and Angus Leighton in **Lord of the Flies* at Theatre Works. Photo: Matthew Chen

The island, meanwhile, is not abstracted as some remote, timeless place of imagined primitivism. A conch painted an improbable bright red is later replaced by an AFL football. Shelters are assembled from plastic and industrial tape. Plastic aprons and disposable gloves appear around the preparation of the pig. Music and movement draw on contemporary club culture; the boys dance with an exuberance that is sometimes camp, sometimes menacing.

And they film themselves.

A handheld camera circulates among the group, its images projected onto the rake beneath them. As the boys begin to turn it upon their blood- and pigment-covered bodies, its logic becomes apparent. They seem to be documenting their acts, recalling the peculiarly contemporary tendency to record and circulate criminal behaviour as a kind of experiential trophy.

At times there is almost too much to see. Wright fills the rake, and the scaffold behind, with simultaneous movement, images and competing centres of attention, and there were moments when I was uncertain where to look. Most significantly, Simon’s death did not initially register clearly for me. The boys are dancing — club lights, music, moving together — and somewhere within that frenzy Simon is killed. I understood fully what had happened only once his body remained still.

What follows is unmistakable, however. Rain falls across the upper part of the rake. Ralph and Jack stand beneath it while water begins travelling down the slope towards Simon’s body. Around them, the other boys face the audience in stunned silence.

And then, having spoken until now in impeccable, class-stratified British accents, the boys start speaking with Australian accents. Jack, though, remains conspicuously British.

It is an audacious intervention into the text. Rather than updating Golding and Williams through dialogue (which, I gather, the copyright holders did not permit), Wright works through bodies, objects, sound, image and voice. The accent shift resists a single explanation, but something theatrical has unmistakably slipped. Britishness, which had seemed simply to belong to these characters, suddenly becomes visible as something that can be *performed*.

I think it is this intervention that made something shift in my understanding of the story.

Golding’s 1954 novel was written partly against R. M. Ballantyne’s *The Coral Island*, an imperial adventure in which shipwrecked British boys reproduce the supposed virtues of British civilisation abroad. Watching Wright’s production, the familiar opposition between civilisation and savagery began to look like a considerably dumbed-down narrative.

These boys have not arrived culturally empty. They bring hierarchy with them. They bring class, masculinity, competition and ideas about who is entitled to lead. They bring a language in which the imagined “native” can stand for whatever exists outside “civilisation”. Even their attempts at becoming something supposedly more primitive are constructed from the social materials they already possess.

![Sean Yuen Halley stands centre stage, bare-chested with both arms raised, surrounded by the Lord of the Flies ensemble across the rake. Several performers hold long red poles beneath stark blue-white lighting.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/09/Lord-of-the-Flies---Image-3.jpg)

Blaise Tindale, Oliver Cowen, Charlie Veitch, Sean Yuen Halley, Oliver Gorringe, Declan Magee, Darcy Crawford and William Bastow in *Lord of the Flies* at Theatre Works. Photo: Matthew Chen

Perhaps the island does not reveal what remains once civilisation has been stripped away. Perhaps it shows how readily civilisation reproduces its own violence under altered conditions.

Even the feared beast resists easy separation from the world the boys supposedly left behind. When it appears, it wears the unmistakable form of a military gas mask. The thing imagined as existing beyond civilisation carries the visual history of modern industrial warfare: barbarism seen closer to the Western home.

Piggy, meanwhile, remains painfully himself. There is dignity in the performance without sanding away the qualities that make him irritating to the others. His commitment to rules does not make him socially fluent, and the production allows us to understand the irritation directed towards him without confusing that understanding with justification. His glasses become one of the production’s most potent objects. An aid he requires to see becomes a technology for making fire, something to steal and eventually a possession Jack carries tucked into his briefs.

![Oliver Cowen kneels at the front of the raked stage while Angus Leighton crouches closely behind him with one arm around his shoulder, speaking towards him under warm amber lighting.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/09/Lord-of-the-Flies---Image-1-1.jpg)

Oliver Cowen and Angus Leighton in *Lord of the Flies* at Theatre Works. Photo: Matthew Chen

By the time Piggy dies, we know it is coming. That knowledge does little to prevent the stomach from dropping. And yet, there is another transformation still to come. The actor who played Piggy returns as their British saviour. He appears at the back of the audience, carrying a torch, and descends through the seating bank towards the stage. Now dressed in an officer’s coat and hat, he carries an authority Piggy could never command. He shines his torch across the filthy, near-naked children and regards what they have done with incredulity. Surely this was a game. Surely British boys should have managed better.

Hierarchy has not disappeared. It has simply become larger again. And the officer has not arrived from a world without violence. He comes from war. The British accents return. Jack gives Piggy’s glasses back to Ralph. Ralph takes them and collapses into grief.

\* \* \*

There are ideas in Wright’s *Lord of the Flies* that I am still not sure I can resolve. I am not convinced every image lands cleanly, and its profusion of theatrical languages occasionally overwhelms the action it is trying to illuminate. But its strongest interventions do something far more interesting than modernise a familiar parable. It is in their accumulation — the accents, the objects, the bodies, the hierarchies, the traces of contemporary and military culture — that another reading can float to consciousness.

I walked into *Lord of the Flies* thinking I knew the experiment: take civilisation away and see what human beings become. I walked away with a much more complicated reading.

You can take the boys out of Great Britain, but can you take “Great” Britain out of the boys?

---

[*Lord of the Flies*](https://www.theatreworks.org.au/2026/lord-of-the-flies?ref=melbournestagereview.com) plays at Theatre Works, 14 Acland Street St Kilda, until 2 October 2026.

---

Disclosure: A complimentary ticket to *Lord of the Flies* was provided to Melbourne Stage Review for the purpose of review. Melbourne Stage Review retains full editorial independence.
### The trouble with the telling: LUKE
URL: https://melbournestagereview.com/the-trouble-with-the-telling-luke/
Last updated: 2026-10-12T11:51:39.000Z
In about 2006, perhaps 2007, I attended a guest lecture by Robert Dessaix at the Tasmanian School of Art where I was studying. There were a couple of hundred of us in the theatre. I remember the expression *you could hear a pin drop* ceasing, for once, to feel metaphorical.

Dessaix was talking about Eros.

I remember him speaking about the erotic as something far larger than sex: an intensity of attention, a way of being absorbed in experience. I recall him vividly saying that drinking a cup of tea could contain it. I was in my early twenties, and the philosophical lineage he was drawing on was completely new to me. I was enthralled. It was also before I had discovered meditation. The idea that seemingly banal experiences could become completely alive had me transfixed.

I scurried off and read as many of his books as I could get my hands on. *Night Letters* remains a particular favourite, despite the shocking scenes of sexual brutality.

Twenty years later, sitting inside Red Stitch, I found myself inhabiting an uncanny echo of that afternoon lecture.

![Dion Mills and Will Lonsdale stand very close together in the warm, patterned living room set, Mills leaning back playfully while holding a drink as Lonsdale watches him.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/09/DION-MILLS-WILL-LONSDALE_PNC7051_Parenthesy-112_LR.jpg)

Dion Mills as Damon and Will Lonsdale as Chris in **LUKE*. Photo: Cameron Grant (Parenthesy)

It is 2007 in Angus Cameron’s [*LUKE*](https://www.redstitch.net/luke-2026?ref=melbournestagereview.com). Damon (Dion Mills), a regional Victorian English teacher is arguing that education contains an erotic dimension. His nineteen-year-old former student Chris (Will Lonsdale) is sitting nearby. They have been drinking. Not long before, Chris removed his shirt, slipped into the dress Damon had been wearing, and danced with him. The attraction is perceptible but not exactly simple to assign.

So when Damon begins talking about Eros, I recognise what he means. 

I am both completely captivated and deeply uneasy. Discussing the erotic in a lecture theatre full of adults is one thing. A high school teacher placing Eros within the bounds of the school ground, quite another. The philosophy remains recognisable; the circumstances alter its temperature completely.

*LUKE* lives in that gap. In the space between the deliciously complicated and deeply fraught.

Affection can coexist with power. Desire can be reciprocal while a relationship remains ethically asymmetrical. Memory can be sincerely held and also inaccurate. A story can illuminate an experience while deforming it. Someone can cause harm without recognising himself in the story of the harm.

Continually, *LUKE* made me reconsider what I thought I had just witnessed.

\* \* \*

Cameron's play begins somewhere more playful. We are at fellow school teacher Olena’s house, which is bursting with life: books, records, booze, patterned wallpaper, crochet blankets, accumulated objects. Damon is wearing a dress, almost smock-like. Olena (Olga Makeeva), Russian-born and gloriously committed to the bit, is swaddled in an enormous coat and hat. Saint-Saëns’ *Danse Macabre* accompanies an absurd home-made pageant in which a doll becomes Anastasia Romanov, the last tsar’s daughter, and a hairdryer becomes a weapon.

![Olga Makeeva stands centre stage in an oversized dark military-style coat and large black fur hat, surrounded by patterned wallpaper, mismatched chairs and colourful crochet blankets.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/09/OLGA-MAKEEVA_PNC7051_Parenthesy-4_LR.jpg)

Olga Makeeva as Olena in **LUKE*. Photo: Cameron Grant (Parenthesy)

I spent the opening minutes wondering what on earth I was watching. Then I stopped wondering and my attention dissolved into the game.

That mischief extends well beyond the opening pantomime. Damon and Olena have the ease of people who have entertained one another for years: teasing, performing, quoting, drinking, turning conversation into little scenes. When Chris arrives, announced through an elaborate pattern of knocks at the front door, he enters a world whose private language he already seems to know.

Chris is leaving soon. He plans to travel through South America before moving to Melbourne for university, where he hopes to become a writer. Damon has been one of the adults who took that ambition seriously. The affection between them is obvious, as is the pleasure Chris takes in being truly seen by Damon. They spar over literature, quote *The Great Gatsby*, talk about sex, careers, homosexuality and the compromises of adult life.

![Dion Mills sits dramatically on the floor in a pale dress while Will Lonsdale gestures behind him and Olga Makeeva stands near the drinks cabinet. A large doll lies across an armchair beside them.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/09/OLGA-MAKEEVA-DION-MILLS-WILL-LONSDALE_PNC7051_Parenthesy-62_LR.jpg)

Olga Makeeva, Dion Mills and Will Lonsdale in **LUKE*. Photo: Cameron Grant (Parenthesy)

Cameron lets this intimacy become complicated gradually. Chris talks about flirting online, about the person he becomes in chat rooms, about coming out. He removes his shirt during one of their games and slips into the dress Damon had been wearing during the earlier pageantry. They flirt a little. They dance.

Then Chris asks about Luke.

Luke, a younger student, is leaving the school amid rumours that a male staff member has made him uncomfortable. Chris wants to know what Damon knows. Damon says very little. The question catches at something between them anyway. Their dance breaks apart; the evening briefly loses its ease.

It recovers. That is part of the pleasure of Cameron’s writing. These people know how to return to one another through jokes, quotations, another drink, another game. Olena reappears after going out to get something nice to celebrate with: a bottle from the shed. Soon Damon is playfully lecturing again, this time on the topic of teaching.

![Will Lonsdale gestures animatedly beside a wooden record player in the richly patterned 2007 living room, with records stacked on the shelf below.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/09/WILL-LONSDALE_PNC7051_Parenthesy-106_LR.jpg)

Will Lonsdale as Chris in **LUKE*. Photo: Cameron Grant (Parenthesy)

And now we arrive at Eros.

Watching this conversation after Chris has asked about Luke changes its charge completely. Damon speaks expansively about the intimacy of education, about the fascination a teacher can inspire, about love between teacher and student. He reaches towards queer history too: the absence of useful sex education, the ways gay men have historically had to learn from one another, the old and vicious association between homosexuality and paedophilia.

Some of what he says is persuasive. Some of it is reckless. Occasionally the same sentence seems suspended between the two.

Mills is extraordinary. Damon’s intellectual confidence never quite tips into caricature. He enjoys provocation, enjoys the force of his own argument, enjoys Chris’s attention. Yet there is tenderness there too, and a genuine belief in teaching as an intimate act of recognition. I could understand why Chris had been drawn to him. I could also understand why Olena, sitting a few feet away, kept trying to pull the conversation back from the edge.

Cameron gives us no comfortable vantage point from which to judge the room. Damon’s argument does not become meaningless because the circumstances are fraught. The circumstances do not become harmless because the argument is intellectually coherent. And Chris is hardly passive within the exchange. He pushes, flirts, tests.

Act I ends with Damon retreating for a cigarette and Chris recalling an encounter from his school days in which being watched by his former teacher became intensely charged. Cameron leaves the memory unresolved, held somewhere between desire, attention and the responsibility attached to Damon's influence, power and role.

\* \* \*

A decade later, Chris has become the writer Damon once encouraged him to be. The past has become creative material. What follows is perhaps best left largely undescribed. *LUKE* is a play that continually revises the terms on which we understand what we have already seen, and several of its most powerful turns depend upon the audience encountering those revisions for themselves.

What can be said is that Cameron becomes increasingly interested in the distance between an event and the story later made from it. Memory selects. Writing arranges. Patterns emerge because somebody decides which details belong beside one another. The resulting story may reveal something previously invisible; it may also acquire a certainty the underlying events never possessed.

![The three performers occupy a stark, mostly white version of the room, framed by tall pale scenic panels. Will Lonsdale sits at left, Dion Mills stands near the centre doorway and Olga Makeeva stands at right.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/09/WILL-LONSDALE-DION-MILLS-OLGA-MAKEEVA_PNC7051_Parenthesy-213_LR.jpg)

Will Lonsdale, Dion Mills and Olga Makeeva in **LUKE*. Photo: Cameron Grant (Parenthesy)

Cameron also complicates our own position as witnesses. Characters return to the night we have just watched and remember it differently. Sometimes our recollection of Act I appears to support one person; elsewhere, someone confidently denies something we saw happen. Having shown us the past, Cameron might have allowed us the comfortable authority of knowing what “really” occurred. Instead, he makes that authority increasingly difficult to sustain.

The question becomes sharper once memory passes into art. Chris has learned to do exactly what Damon once encouraged: to write, to shape, to be *ruthless*. His work takes fragments of experience and gives them perspective, motive and dramatic coherence. In doing so, he enters other people’s consciousnesses. He imagines what they thought, what they wanted, what a gesture meant. And then he releases all of that to the world, to be digested as near-fact. 

Here, Cameron probes the contemporary appetite for moral legibility: the speed with which ambiguous histories can be sorted into victims, perpetrators and enablers, then circulated as settled accounts.

Olena keeps pressing on the places where Chris’s version becomes too clean. Olga Makeeva brings a compact, kinetic intensity to the role, her wit landing as sharply as her arguments. Olena's scepticism carries no claim to objectivity; her own recollections are imperfect. She keeps returning Chris to the stubborn difference between interpretation and evidence. A writer can make an account persuasive. Persuasiveness does not settle whether it happened that way.

![Olga Makeeva stands over a seated Will Lonsdale in a dark, exposed version of the set, with the backs of scenic structures and an open backstage doorway visible around them.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/09/OLGA-MAKEEVA-WILL-LONSDALE_PNC7051_Parenthesy-309_LR.jpg)

Olga Makeeva as Olena and Will Lonsdale as Chris in **LUKE*. Photo: Cameron Grant (Parenthesy)

Here Cameron’s interest in storytelling folds back onto theatre itself. Every night at Red Stitch, actors make imagined interior lives persuasive in front of us. A pause, a look, the distance between two bodies can give a line an implication nowhere contained in the words alone. *LUKE* prompts us to begin noticing how readily those choices begin to feel solid.

Indeed, Iain Sinclair directs with remarkable tonal agility. The production can be ridiculous, intimate, intellectually combative and quietly menacing within the same stretch of conversation, yet the transitions flow masterfully. Most impressively, Sinclair refuses to telegraph Cameron’s reversals. We discover them alongside the characters, and sometimes only after we have already committed ourselves emotionally to what we think we are seeing.

Nathan Burmeister’s design develops the same idea spatially. The warm, cluttered room of 2007 changes as the decades pass. In Act II colour drains away. Surfaces become cleaner, whiter, more controlled; but also increasingly lifeless. Eventually, the wiring and mechanics of the set itself begin to show: the reverse sides of scenic pieces, equipment, the architecture behind the stage usually kept beyond the fiction.

I initially found that final set transformation oddly stark and a little baffling. As *LUKE* becomes increasingly candid about the construction of memory and story, the production also becomes candid about its own construction. The room that once seemed so abundantly real begins to disclose how it was made.

That formal intelligence would be satisfying on its own. But what keeps *LUKE* from landing as merely an elaborate intellectual puzzle is the grief running underneath it. These are people who once delighted in one another. The early games, quotations, ridiculous costumes and endless drinks establish a deep sense of affection and belonging before Cameron begins showing us its weaknesses. Decades later, the losses accumulated around that first night cannot be reasoned away. 

Perhaps this is where *LUKE* circles most beautifully back to Eros. We return to certain memories because, in them, we were intensely alive: seen, desired, absorbed, frightened, changed. The relationships themselves may be gone. The aliveness remains.

Storytelling becomes the means of returning to that aliveness. And in *LUKE*, that return carries danger. Stories simplify, accuse, obscure, consolidate a version of the past until its edges become difficult to see. By the final movement, Cameron allows storytelling another capacity too: it can return us to conversations that life has already closed.

That was where the play really grabbed me. Beneath all its arguments about sex, power, memory and authorship sits something terribly ordinary: the wish to go back and speak differently, to understand more, to repair what can no longer be repaired.

Perhaps that is why *LUKE* begins with Anastasia. Damon and Olena start the night by playing with a story whose ending is already fixed, entertaining for a moment the old fantasy that history might have turned out otherwise.

Twenty years later, in Act III, Cameron returns to the same temptation.

We know how it ends. We tell it again anyway.

---

The world premiere season of [*LUKE*](https://www.redstitch.net/luke-2026?ref=melbournestagereview.com) plays at [Red Stitch Actors’ Theatre](https://www.redstitch.net/?ref=melbournestagereview.com), St Kilda, until 11 October 2026.

---

Disclosure: A complimentary ticket to *LUKE* was provided to Melbourne Stage Review for the purpose of review. Melbourne Stage Review retains full editorial independence.
### A tender ecology: 7 Dances for 7 People
URL: https://melbournestagereview.com/a-tender-ecology-7-dances-for-7-people/
Last updated: 2026-10-12T11:51:32.000Z
I usually arrive at a performance ready to meet it. On Wednesday night, I arrived at [*7 Dances for 7 People*](https://arts.darebin.vic.gov.au/Programs-and-opportunities/Programs/Speakeasy-presentations/7-Dances-for-7-People?ref=melbournestagereview.com) tired and a little bound up in the world. It had been a long day; a long week. My shoulders carried its small stresses — some part of me might have happily stayed home and climbed into bed.

Fifty-five minutes later, I felt myself floating out of Northcote Town Hall.

Trà Mi Dinh's *7 Dances for 7 People* had worked on me almost imperceptibly. Seven bodies emerging from haze; light gathering and receding; the knock of timber, birdsong, water, voice; movement finding unison and then gently abandoning it. Somewhere along the way, the day's little knots had loosened.

The performance space is already thick with haze when we enter. Against the black, two figures emerge from somewhere at the rear, hand in hand. Their first movements are recognisably balletic: pointed feet, turned-out legs, mirrored bends. Another pair appears. Bodies accumulate. Tilman Robinson's sound shifts beneath them, from something atmospheric into a mechanical pulse, then firmer beats that might have been made by pieces of timber struck together.

![Trà Mi Dinh and Rachel Coulson dance side by side, arms raised and bodies leaning in mirrored movement against a dark, hazy stage.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/09/7-Dances-for-7-People-by-Tr---Mi-Dinh_Darebin-Arts-Speakeasy_Tr---Mi-Dinh-and-Rachel-Coulson--L-R-_Darren-Gill--2-.jpg)

Trà Mi Dinh and Rachel Coulson in **7 Dances for 7 People* at Darebin Arts Speakeasy. Photo: Darren Gill

Gradually, the formal symmetry loosens. The seven dancers find one another and drift apart. Sometimes all move in unison, but only briefly, before the pattern dissolves again. At other times three share one phrase and four another, interspersed across the space rather than separated into groups. Or all seven inhabit the same movement sequence at different points within it, one body moving ahead while another lingers behind.

Dinh's seven bodies begin to feel less like a unit than an ecosystem. Difference does not disturb their coherence. Even when their movements diverge, they seem to belong to the same grammar.

There is something environmental, too, in the movement itself. Much of it is graceful, rounded and extraordinarily fluid, but sudden angular gestures punctuate the flow: a wrist flicks, an arm changes direction, something fast and birdlike darts through an otherwise expansive phrase. The distinction between angular and organic begins to seem false. Trees turn corners. Branches grow around obstacles. Birds make abrupt adjustments in flight. A tiny motif flickers through the movement: wrists meet and hands open like little seed pods after fire.

Light belongs to this tender ecology too. Rachel Lee's finely controlled palette rarely strays far from warm tungsten, daylight and occasional blue. A dancer can be isolated under a delicate downlight while the remaining world disappears gently into blackness. One stays close to the floor, moving as though emerging from some dark swamp, slowly rising until she looks towards the light.

![Rachel Coulson curls low to the floor, isolated in a pool of light against the darkened stage in 7 Dances for 7 People.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/09/7-Dances-for-7-People-by-Tr---Mi-Dinh_Darebin-Arts-Speakeasy_Rachel-Coulson_image-by-Darren-Gill--2-.jpg)

Rachel Coulson in **7 Dances for 7 People* at Darebin Arts Speakeasy. Photo: Darren Gill

Robinson, meanwhile, gives us sounds that seem elemental without remaining pristinely so. Birds enter the soundscape and warp into more electronic textures. There are allusions to wind, water, the knocking together of small wooden things; later, something like water dripping onto wet fabric. Natural and manufactured sounds bleed together.

In one sequence the dancers begin to move faster and more forcefully, running and dancing through the space with a muscularity that carries flashes of anger. Maybe need. Perhaps desire. A female voice enters the soundscape. For the first time in some while, I become acutely aware of their humanity: these are human bodies again — fallible, wanting, seeking power, comfort, safety. The recognition is brief. Soon they recede again into something harder to name.

Seven itself becomes a pulse running through the work. The performers count, their voices layered and slightly out of sequence, turning enumeration into something closer to the repetitions of ritual. Later the counting returns through the soundscape, increasingly distorted until numbers become fragments, like the remnants of a transmission.

Among this exceptional ensemble, my eye keeps finding Marni Green. I had the same experience watching Green in Stephanie Lake's VISTA earlier this year: wherever she appears, there is a potency to her presence that pulls my attention, as if we are joined by a long piece of string. Her movement lacks economy in the most beautiful way. Nothing seems abbreviated. A gesture travels fully through her, its emotional register so completely embodied that it seems to travel down that imaginary string and land cleanly in my own body: nameless, but somehow understood.

Eventually, incense appears. Dancers enter incrementally carrying smoking sticks, each finding an idiosyncratic relationship with them. Movement travels more expansively across the stage now, seven bodies traversing the space before each leaves their incense burning in the large rock at the stage's edge.

![Trà Mi Dinh dances at centre stage under deep blue light, with other dancers visible through the haze behind her and a large rock in the foreground.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/09/7-Dances-for-7-People-by-Tr---Mi-Dinh_Darebin-Arts-Speakeasy_Tr---Mi-Dinh--centre-front-_image-by-Darren-Gill.jpg)

Trà Mi Dinh (centre) in **7 Dances for 7 People* at Darebin Arts Speakeasy. Photo: Darren Gill

Near the end, the seven gather tightly at centre stage. Again, they share a grammar without becoming identical: different phrases echo through bodies interspersed within the cluster. Robinson's sound opens into a great atmospheric swell, rising through the register like the curve of a mountain. Together, the dancers sync.

Then they begin to leave.

With their backs towards us, the seven slowly recede again into the blackness. They don't so much exit as disappear into the haze from which they first emerged, becoming less distinct until the space fully engulfs them. It feels less like an ending than a continuation, as though the dance has simply moved elsewhere. I think of wallabies gathering in a paddock, staying for a while, then disappearing back into the bush.

What remains is the rock, holding seven sticks of burning incense. A warm light settles upon it. The music continues. Dinh lets the image remain, giving it — and us — time to breathe.

I arrived bound up in a world of “to dos” and small urgencies. I leave seduced by a more elemental world: breath, scent, water, smoke and light.

---

[*7 Dances for 7 People*](https://arts.darebin.vic.gov.au/Programs-and-opportunities/Programs/Speakeasy-presentations/7-Dances-for-7-People?ref=melbournestagereview.com) is performed at Northcote Town Hall Arts Centre until 19 September 2026, presented by [Darebin Arts Speakeasy](https://arts.darebin.vic.gov.au/Programs-and-opportunities/Programs/Speakeasy-presentations?ref=melbournestagereview.com).

---

Disclosure: A complimentary ticket to 7 Dances for 7 People was provided to Melbourne Stage Review for the purpose of review. Melbourne Stage Review retains full editorial independence.
### The invisible labour in imagining peace: The Return
URL: https://melbournestagereview.com/the-invisible-labour-in-imagining-peace-the-return/
Last updated: 2026-10-02T01:26:42.000Z
[*The Future Is Peace*: *A Shared Journey Across the Holy Land*](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/786169/the-future-is-peace-by-aziz-abu-sarah-and-maoz-inon/?ref=melbournestagereview.com), a new book by Palestinian peacebuilder Aziz Abu Sarah and Israeli peace activist Maoz Inon, begins from losses that might seem to place its authors irreconcilably apart. Abu Sarah’s brother died following torture in Israeli custody. Inon’s parents were killed on 7 October 2023\. From these profoundly different experiences, the two men have made a shared project: to imagine peace.

I thought about them while watching Ala’a Al Qaisi’s [*The Return*](https://www.thereturnproject.com.au/?ref=melbournestagereview.com).

Al Qaisi’s play begins from another devastatingly particular grief. It is evoked from the experience of Palestinian father Marwan Abu Samra, whose daughter Rozan was killed and her sister Nagham critically injured in an Israeli air strike on Gaza in December 2023\. Nagham later died from her injuries. But bearing witness is not the endpoint of *The Return*. Through magical realism, poetry, music and spiritual reflection, Al Qaisi reaches towards understanding and hope.

These are enormous ideas to place inside a theatre. Perhaps more extraordinary still is the position from which she attempts to approach them.

Speaking after the performance, Al Qaisi described writing the play after long periods in meditation, attempting to loosen the hold of her pain and approach the story from something resembling a God’s-eye view. None of us encounters violence as a *tabula rasa*: we inevitably carry history, identity, belonging, knowledge and the scars of injustice and grief. What is remarkable about *The Return* is not that it escapes these conditions, but the seriousness with which it attempts to move beyond them.

![Mohammed El Kesm as Aviv, dressed in military uniform, looks at a framed photograph of Anne Frank under red stage lighting in The Return.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/09/_JJM2687.jpg-1.webp)

Mohammed El Kesm as Israeli soldier Aviv holds and looks at a framed photograph of Anne Frank, under red stage lighting in **The Return*. Photo: John Janson-Moore.

Indeed, this is a work born from the deep well of Palestinian experience – of dispossession, violence and survival – and it makes no pretence otherwise. Yet Al Qaisi’s imaginative project keeps reaching outward from the particular towards something larger: an inquiry into what violence does to human beings – both those who survive it and those who perpetrate it – what might interrupt its repetition, and whether it remains possible to recognise the humanity of the other from within injustice and immense loss.

That reaching is not without cost.

Speaking at the Q&A after the performance, Mohammed El Kesm, who plays the Israeli soldier Aviv, described the moral injury he experiences in stepping into the character each night. The phrase stayed with me. Here is a performer choosing to inhabit a position that causes him genuine moral discomfort, because the larger imaginative project requires somebody to step across that distance.

> “*When each side believes that the other is a threat to its existence, talk of peace can feel like a betrayal of one’s people*” Abu Sarah writes in *The Future Is Peace*.

Perhaps this is part of the difficult work shared by *The Return* and Abu Sarah and Inon’s project: not the erasure of difference, nor the pretence that suffering, power or responsibility can be made equivalent, but a willingness to expend something of ourselves in imagining a future beyond violence.

Al Qaisi gives that work its most affecting expression in Rozan. As an apparition, Rozan is extraordinarily patient with Aviv, the soldier who killed her. She stays curious about the person beneath the uniform. At one point, Aviv holds a photograph of Anne Frank. The image reaches backwards into a history of Jewish persecution and the Holocaust, and the fear inherited from both. Rozan neither dismisses that history nor allows it to excuse the violence he has enacted against her. She sees the cost of Aviv’s place within that history, and his own need for healing.

For all the enormity of its ideas, *The Return* is often at its most affecting in its delicacy. Al Qaisi’s writing handles material so raw with remarkable care, moving readily between the intimate and metaphysical. Her performance as Rozan carries the same quality, finding tenderness and curiosity in the face of the unimaginable. Mohammed El Kesm is particularly strong as Aviv, bringing emotional and physical force to a role that demands considerable shifts in register.

Ahlam Hijazi gives Sarah, Aviv's grandmother, an uncompromising rigidity, embodying the calcified certainties that *The Return* is attempting to reach beyond. As Marwan, Rashid Taki brings a beautiful sense of wonder to the production; his openness to the impossible provides an entry point into its metaphysical world. Around them, Fairuz Hussaini, aka El Moe, creates a soundscape that shapes the strange, suspended space in which the living and dead can encounter and reunite.

![Ala’a Al Qaisi as Rozan, dressed in white, pours water from a metal vessel over the hands of Rashid Taki as Marwan, who bends over a large metal bowl in The Return.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/09/_JJM2471.jpg-2.webp)

Ala’a Al Qaisi as Rozan and Rashid Taki as Marwan in **The Return*. Photo: John Janson-Moore.

*The Return* arrives on stage at a time when such reaching feels desperately necessary. Across Gaza and far beyond it, violence is repeatedly sustained by our capacity to reduce other people to categories and abstractions: enemy, threat, casualty, collateral. Al Qaisi remains curious about what lies beneath those categories: the origins of fear, the histories through which it is inherited, and the socialisation through which it can harden into certainty.

The theatre cannot give us a God’s-eye view. Perhaps nothing can. But it can make the imaginative movement towards another person possible. It can hold us there, for a while, in the difficult work of trying to heal, to understand, to move beyond searing pain and fear and into the vulnerability of choosing a different way.

The epilogue of [*The Future Is Peace*](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/786169/the-future-is-peace-by-aziz-abu-sarah-and-maoz-inon/?ref=melbournestagereview.com), penned by both Abu Sarah and Inon, renders the possibility in vivid detail:

> "*Our journey comes to an end many years into the future. We are older and grayer, but our people have finally achieved a lasting peace. Instead of interminable warfare, we now live in a land of freedom and equality. There is no grasping for more, as everyone has enough. There is no yearning for home, for all the exiled have returned. There are no fences, no watchtowers, no checkpoints. Everyone has the same rights, the same privileges. The battlegrounds have reverted to fields and pastures. Instead of raising memorials and monuments to the dead, we have gardens and parks and playgrounds for the living. A generation of Palestinian and Israeli children have grown up never having known the misery of war or hunger or insecurity.*"

At this moment, Al Qaisi’s courageous appeal to believe another future possible, and to collectively reach towards it, feels profoundly important.

---

[The Return](https://events.humanitix.com/the-return-play-melbourne?ref=melbournestagereview.com) plays at Ballarat Performing Arts Centre on 18 September, Chandler Community Centre, Keysborough, on 19 September; Next Wave - Brunswick Mechanic's Institute until 20 September 2026; and The Phee Broadway Theatre Castlemaine on 22 September 2026.
### A world in the balance: Behind the Veil
URL: https://melbournestagereview.com/a-world-in-the-balance-behind-the-veil/
Last updated: 2026-10-02T01:26:33.000Z
For much of *Behind the Veil*, one exceptionally tall circus artist wears an exceptionally large pair of trousers. They are plaid, held up by braces and reach, I can only assume, somewhere near his nipples. Elsewhere, another performer wanders about in a jacket so enormous that it nearly consumes her. Both are funny in their own right. It is only much later that the production lets us in on the joke: she climbs onto his shoulders. The jacket falls over them both, swallowing his head and meeting those enormous trousers. Suddenly, two running visual gags become one giant, improbable person.

It is a wonderfully satisfying reveal, and characteristic of director Kate Fryer’s clever production. *Behind the Veil*, performed by the National Institute of Circus Arts’ second-year ensemble, is packed with ideas that are planted, revisited and transformed. For all its extraordinary feats of circus (and they *are* extraordinary), this is not simply a succession of specialist acts. It has been made, with considerable care, into a show.

The world that Fryer has fashioned for us seems preoccupied with hierarchy. The production’s stated concern is with a society in which perfection and productivity are demanded and individuality suppressed, but in performance its most insistent language is one of class: who has money, who has power, who labours, and who gets to stand — sometimes quite literally — on everybody else.

![Eliza Denlay balances high above James Wilson during an acrobatic ensemble sequence.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/09/NICA_BehindTheVeil_SecondYearStudents_ElizaDenlay_and_JamesWIlson.jpg)

Eliza Denlay and James Wilson's acrobatics in NICA's **Behind the Veil*. Photo: Rob Blackburn.

One magnificently dressed woman moves through this world with the imperiousness of someone accustomed to being obeyed. At one point, the ensemble crouches before her, backs arranged into a human staircase. She ascends them. They rearrange themselves ahead of her. She keeps walking. Then, as she descends, they do it all again. The image hardly requires interpretation: her elevation depends upon the bodies doing the work beneath her.

Elsewhere she appears with great fistfuls of cash, luxuriantly fanning herself. There is also a clownish artist begging for money, hungry and poor. The aesthetic might gesture backwards in time — tailoring, braces, hats and plaids give the world a vaguely interwar quality — but the jokes land firmly in the present. In a cost-of-living crisis, and in an art form whose practitioners know something about economic precarity, the distance between those with plenty and those asking for scraps feels rather close to home.

Yet *Behind the Veil* resists labouring its social argument. Instead, it toys with these themes, mischievously.

A peculiar black hat, topped by a tiny flower, becomes another running joke. Put it on somebody’s head and they become helpless with laughter. Again and again it passes through the production, disrupting its hierarchies and solemnities. Eventually it reaches the wealthy woman with the cash. Even she succumbs. The tightly controlled figure breaks into laughter. It is a superb recurring device: silly, infectious and gently subversive.

Fryer and assistant director Felicia (Flee) O’Brien keep fifteen developing circus artists moving through this world, each bringing a different set of specialties. And what they can do is frequently astonishing.

The range alone is formidable. Elise Poulton takes to the rope and Kiera Fitzgerald the lyra; Tarnee Doye climbs a chair stack for handstands, Holly Muir works on canes and Kelsea Blackburn moves through a contortion sequence. Eliza Denlay and James Wilson pair for acrobatics, before Wilson later takes us frighteningly high above the floor on slackwire. Lara Elliot and Nina Smith spin hypnotically on the Cyr wheel, while Capri Palmer, Daniel Scrofani and Shayla Ashton take to the swinging pole. The trapeze work is wonderful, from Blackburn and Ashton on swinging trapeze to Jaran Latona-Phasuk and Doye on trapeze and tissu. Muir, Elliot and Scrofani return for a straps trio, while Nina and Imogen Smith’s flying silks are especially beautiful — one of several sequences I could happily have watched for much longer.

![Lara Elliot performs an aerial split on straps high above the floor against vivid pink lighting.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/09/NICA_BehindTheVeil_SecondYearStudent_LaraElliot_Photography_RobBlackburn.jpg)

Lara Elliot on straps in NICA's **Behind the Veil*. Photo: Rob Blackburn.

The technical accomplishment across the ensemble is truly excellent. At several points, as performers climb improbably high or suspend themselves far above the floor, the experience becomes intensely physical for those of us watching below. *Behind the Veil* gets you in the knees. Your stomach drops while you remain perfectly safe in your seat.

![Capri Palmer and Shayla Ashton perform high above the circus floor on the swinging pole under blue lighting.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/09/NICA_BehindTheVeil_SecondYearStudents_CapriPalmer_and_ShaylaAshton_Photography_RobBlackburn.jpg)

Capri Palmer and Shayla Ashton on the swinging pole in NICA's **Behind the Veil*. Photo: Rob Blackburn.

And then it is on to the next feat. Apparatus must come and go, performers must prepare for radically different acts, and *Behind the Veil* barely loses momentum in the process. Clowning, ensemble choreography and recurring characters turn the transitions into a rather delicious part of the performance. Laiken Jackson is a particular delight here. First appearing as the production’s “outsider” in a vintage pilot’s cap, Jackson keeps resurfacing, her clowning threading its way through the evening and into a wonderfully eccentric hat-juggling act.

Christopher Lewis’s excellent sound design is instrumental in this. Its textures keep changing beneath the action: at times propulsive and dance-like, elsewhere dirtier and more industrial, full of metallic grit. Eduard Inglés’s lighting similarly allows the cavernous vertical possibilities of the National Circus Centre to become alternately exhilarating, strange and precarious.

![Lara Elliot and Nina Smith perform together inside a Cyr wheel under pink stage lighting.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/09/NICA_BehindTheVeil_SecondYearStudents_LaraElliot_and_NinaSmith_Photography_RobBlackburnjpg.jpg)

Lara Elliot and Nina Smith on Cyr wheel in NICA's **Behind the Veil*. Photo: Rob Blackburn.

Reuben James’s costumes, created with wardrobe assistance from Melbourne Polytechnic Costume Design students, are truly exceptional. Plaids recur across sharply different silhouettes: neat tailoring and eccentric workwear, enormous trousers and engulfing jackets. They give *Behind the Veil* much of its visual character, carrying distinctions of wealth and status while embracing the bodily absurdity of clowning.

\* \* \*

Circus thrills in the immediate: this body, this height, this impossible balance, this moment in which something could go wrong and does not. *Behind the Veil* delivers all of that visceral pleasure with tremendous skill. Just as excitingly, Fryer and her ensemble understand that virtuosity becomes richer when it belongs to a world.

*Behind the Veil* is exceptionally accomplished contemporary circus: funny, strange, beautifully designed, technically thrilling and put together with enormous confidence. And if my greatest frustration is that again and again I desperately wanted a performer to keep going — what a wonderful thing to take with me out of the theatre.

---

[*Behind the Veil*](https://www.nica.com.au/BEHIND-THE-VEIL?ref=melbournestagereview.com) performs at [The National Institute of Circus Arts](https://www.nica.com.au/?ref=melbournestagereview.com), 39-59 Green Street, Prahran, until 19 September 2026.

---

Disclosure: A complimentary ticket to *Behind the Veil* was provided to Melbourne Stage Review for the purpose of review. Melbourne Stage Review retains full editorial independence.
### The abundance of almost nothing: Holy Fool
URL: https://melbournestagereview.com/the-abundance-of-almost-nothing-holy-fool/
Last updated: 2026-10-02T01:26:24.000Z
I feel the need to rave about [*Holy Fool*](https://www.theatreworks.org.au/2026/holy-fool?ref=melbournestagereview.com). A bit like the “ugly cry”, I think I’d go so far as to say, I need to “ugly rave”. The “oops, did I just accidentally spit on you?” sort of rave. Hands gesticulating wildly in absolute rapture. That kind of rave.

Because *Holy Fool* is very, very (dare I add another very?) good. Superb even.

For much of it, Fabio Motta is also *very* funny.

Early on, in complete mimed silence, he rides an imaginary horse into battle. The horse dies. Its head comes off. Motta attempts to put it back on and administers increasingly hopeless mouth-to-mouth, only for the force of his breath to send the body skidding away. Eventually, he abandons it and finds another horse — unfortunately, a teeny tiny one. 

Later, imprisoned and strung up by invisible shackles, he backs up his rear end towards the front row and recruits members of the audience into his “torture”. Presented with a bowl of imaginary gruel, he plunges his fingers into something we cannot see, supplying the wet, revolting sound effects himself. Around me, the audience groans.

Motta needs almost nothing to make any of this happen. A few pieces of coarse, pale fabric constitute Em Jevons’ beautifully sparse set. Costumes appear and disappear. Max Woods’ lighting moves us between worlds. Jack Burmeister’s sound design punctuates them. But mostly there is Motta’s body: astonishingly precise, perfectly timed, extravagantly expressive, already dripping with sweat while the show is young.

![Fabio Motta in Holy Fool, dressed as a medieval soldier and standing centre stage beneath vivid red lighting.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/09/Holy_Fool_Darren_Gill-0207.jpg)

Fabio Motta in **Holy Fool* at Theatre Works. Photo: Darren Gill

Then, somewhere near the centre of *Holy Fool*, the exceptional physical comedy opens into a spiritual reckoning. We are asked:

> *Who would we be if we were no longer afraid of losing everything?*

Until this point, Motta’s spiritual physical-comedy, inspired by the life of Saint Francis of Assisi, has largely given us the fool. Francis has gone to war, been captured, suffered imprisonment and returned to the exasperation of his father. Showing us his extraordinary comedic range, Motta conjures the latter by collapsing and compressing his body, becoming short, squat and crotchety. Outrage travels through him in tiny, tightly controlled jumps, like bodily exclamation marks.

But Francis has encountered something his father cannot understand. He begins to shed the world he has inherited: status, possessions, the fear of poverty itself.

And through the fool, Motta begins to show us the holy.

It happens first through wonder. Francis encounters the world as though seeing it for the first time: sun, rain, wind, soil, the tiny life moving through it. He lowers himself to the floor to marvel at a caterpillar, joining the dance and slinking alongside it. He scoops up imaginary earth and luxuriates in it, rubbing it over his face, blissful — then spits bits from his mouth. The joke survives. So does the ecstasy.

![Fabio Motta in Holy Fool, lying on his stomach onstage, feet raised behind him as he gazes at something held closely in his hands.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/09/Holy_Fool_Darren_Gill-0067.jpg)

Fabio Motta in **Holy Fool* at Theatre Works. Photo: Darren Gill

This is one of *Holy Fool*’s immense achievements. Motta never asks comedy to step aside so that profundity can enter the room. The ridiculous and the sacred share the same breath.

Directed by Giovanni Fusetti, the performance is extraordinarily controlled, but somehow its precision never hardens into containment. Motta is continuously attentive to the room and allows the audience to change what happens within it. His crowd work begins as comic play and gradually becomes something far more consequential.

We are torturers, paupers or subjects required to kiss the Pope’s ring. Sometimes we are Francis himself. We are the congregation attempting medieval chant, badly — until one audience member responds with an unexpectedly magnificent operatic voice and the joke temporarily escapes Motta’s hands. And he delights in that escape, riding it like a wave until it breaks.

As Pope, Motta turns obedience into a gleefully vicious game. Kiss the ring correctly and receive the appropriate blessing; hesitate or resist and the punishments escalate. At one point he produces an imaginary chainsaw and dispatches a recalcitrant subject with movements that retain the shape of the cross. Ecclesiastical ritual and violence merge in ironic perfection.

The satire matters. *Holy Fool* is not offering gratitude as an easy wellness practice, nor Francis as an eccentric medieval mascot for appreciating the little things. Motta seems fascinated by what happens when spiritual wonder becomes an economic and political proposition. What if abundance has very little to do with what we have materially? What if our terror of losing what we do possess is precisely what prevents us from discovering what is already here?

The Church, inevitably, has a problem with this.

So does Francis’s father. His compact, clenched physicality becomes a counterpoint to the increasingly open body of his son. One contracts around possession; the other becomes porous to the world, ecstatic in response to its every change.

![Fabio Motta in Holy Fool, standing barefoot before a pale fabric backdrop, poised to make the sign of the cross.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/09/Holy_Fool_Darren_Gill-0532.jpg)

Fabio Motta in **Holy Fool* at Theatre Works. Photo: Darren Gill

Motta brings that proposition directly to us. He invites us to think about what matters. What are we grateful for? The perfectly off-the-cuff answers tell us something about how closely we are following Motta through this delicious journey: someone says their breath; someone else, their children. He takes these offerings and makes a song from them, dividing the room, conducting us, coaxing strangers into singing together.

Then he asks whether anyone is lonely.

With exquisite vulnerability, someone says yes.

This could be unbearable. In another performance, perhaps, it would be. But Motta has spent the evening earning the sincerity of this moment through foolishness. He does not make a joke of the answer, nor inflate himself into someone capable of solving it. Instead, he asks us to do something extraordinarily simple. Hold hands. Look to the person beside you. Look the other way. Notice the people who are here.

> *Do you feel more connected?*

By now, the question lands because Motta’s audience participation has never simply meant forcing spectators to perform. His attention is unusually tender. When he selects one woman for an embrace, he quietly checks whether she is comfortable, then checks again as he comes closer. When a man sits alone at the back of the room, apparently reluctant to be drawn into the action, Motta finds another way to acknowledge him: a moment of contact, a head briefly rested against a shoulder, and then he moves on.

This level of care is incredibly important. *Holy Fool* does not merely break the fourth wall. It spends 90 minutes making the wall increasingly irrelevant.

Woods’ lighting understands this movement. Blackouts give the performance its punctuation, while small shifts create whole new environments: the greenish, broken light of Francis’s imprisonment suggests confinement without crudely illustrating it. The warm light during Francis's discovery of soil holds us in his wonder. Just as importantly, the audience itself is illuminated when it becomes the site of the action. The visual field expands. We are no longer only watching him. We can see one another.

The theatrical economy of the production begins to look increasingly like its argument. *Holy Fool* is materially sparse and imaginatively abundant. Horses, prisons, battles, fathers, Popes, earth and entire landscapes appear from almost nothing. Motta provides a body, a sound, a gesture; we complete the world.

He then asks far more of us:

> *Who will join me?*

![Fabio Motta in Holy Fool, wearing a dark brown robe and reaching one hand out into the darkness.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/09/Holy_Fool_Darren_Gill-0580.jpg)

Fabio Motta in **Holy Fool* at Theatre Works. Photo: Darren Gill

The question belongs to Francis's material modesty, but it does not remain merely historical. Contemporary references — including the cost-of-living pressures that make the idea of relinquishing material security feel particularly preposterous — keep intruding on any comfortable fantasy that voluntary poverty is merely the strange business of medieval saints.

Near the end, Motta brings the entire audience onto the stage.

We crowd around Francis as he prepares to die. Some sit on the floor. Others stand behind them. Small biscuits are passed around, prompting jokes about gluten and nuts that somehow do not rupture the solemnity of what is happening. We have moved from spectators, to participants, to something resembling a temporary community gathered around a beloved body.

Francis speaks of finding love in creation and creation in love; of an abundance that has become available only after he ceases to organise his life around the fear of its loss.

Then Motta takes us out of the theatre altogether.

We collect our belongings and follow him down the stairs of Theatre Works Explosives Factory into the laneway outside. He returns to one of his comic characters and then, finally, to Francis. The institutional Church, he suggests, knew what to do with a man like this: make him a saint. Sanctify him. Turn a radical way of living into something exceptional enough to admire from a safe distance.

![Fabio Motta in Holy Fool, barefoot with his arms spread wide and face lifted upwards in bliss, beneath blue and amber stage lighting.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/09/Holy_Fool_Darren_Gill-0432.jpg)

Fabio Motta in **Holy Fool* at Theatre Works. Photo: Darren Gill

And then Motta gets onto a scooter.

Delightfully, two tiny wings spring up from its handlebars. He rides away down the laneway, briefly doubling back with the impeccable timing of a cartoon character, and disappears.

We applaud. And keep applauding.

He does not return.

Eventually, producer Tim Sneddon comes downstairs to let us know that, yes, the show really is over. We can go back upstairs for a drink or leave from here.

There will be no bow to restore the normal order of things: performer here, audience there; theatre finished, proposition discharged. Motta has gone.

What remains, burning inside me, is Motta's question:

> *Who would we be if we were no longer afraid of losing everything?*

---

[*Holy Fool*](https://www.theatreworks.org.au/2026/holy-fool?ref=melbournestagereview.com) plays at [Theatre Works](https://www.theatreworks.org.au/?ref=melbournestagereview.com) Explosives Factory until 19 September 2026.

---

Disclosure: A complimentary ticket to *Holy Fool* was provided to Melbourne Stage Review for the purpose of review. Melbourne Stage Review retains full editorial independence.
### Learning to see: The Memory Mirror
URL: https://melbournestagereview.com/learning-to-see-the-memory-mirror/
Last updated: 2026-09-13T22:41:41.000Z
There is a lot going on at the Blue Mountains Mind, Body and Spirit Festival. Meditation, a poetry slam, tarot readings, candle-making, creative cooking, bicycle-powered smoothies — and an annual memory competition whose reigning champion, Mr Munro (Jim Daly), has held the title for thirteen years. Somewhere among the trees is also a mysterious mirror said to return a lost memory, though only once in a person’s lifetime.

Writer Georgina Luck lets us enjoy the eccentricity of this world before asking very much of us.

Paramedic Daniel (Gabriel Partington) has somehow avoided working the festival for years, though he has history here. As a trainee, he formed an easy connection with Mrs Munro (Margot Knight), who helped him prepare for his final exams by transforming clinical facts into elaborate mnemonic stories. Fifteen milligrams become fifteen red roses; imagined lovers dance their way through the information he needs to remember. The act of remembering is playful, imaginative, and something co-created between people.

Around them bustles Banjo (Don Bridges), the festival’s indefatigable organiser, forever rushing off to roll up yoga mats, do a shift at the bicycle-powered smoothie demonstration or appease sponsors. Bridges is an absolute delight: lithe, flashing past in rainbow trousers, part dogsbody, part fairy godfather. He carries much of the festival’s quirkiness — and its great big communal heart.

![Anthea Davis sits at left, Don Bridges as Banjo sits centre in a red jacket and rainbow trousers, and Christine Husband stands at right in paramedic uniform on a stage scattered with paper leaves.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/09/DSC08529-Enhanced-NR-Edit-1.jpg)

Anthea Davis as Myra, Don Bridges as Banjo and Christine Husband as Pip in **The Memory Mirror*. Photo: Julia Broad (42 Studios)

For Daniel, though, this is not simply a return to a familiar place. There is something here he has spent years *not* remembering.

Luck lets this negative space emerge slowly, through repetitions whose significance changes as the play deepens. Daniel is now an assured clinician, but his confidence can sometimes calcify into subtle intimidation. When paramedic intern Pip (Christine Husband) blanks under his questioning, he takes the hesitation as evidence that she has not studied enough. Moments later, the answer comes. Pip knew it all along, but Daniel’s sharp manner had rendered the knowledge temporarily unavailable.

This same pattern becomes more troubling with the Munros. Mrs Munro is herself an accomplished mnemonist, yet under her husband’s scrutiny she falters. Daly gives Mr Munro both the vulnerability of emerging dementia and an unmistakable capacity to dominate, while Knight makes visible how his judgement reorganises the space around his wife.

Although we won't know it until deeper into the play, beneath both sits a far more horrifying encounter from Daniel’s past: a young woman with a burn, a controlling man beside her, and something in her expression Daniel noticed without fully understanding. He treated the injury presented to him. He accepted the explanation her partner offered. She died the next day, we gather, at his hands.

These situations are not equivalent, and Luck never attempts to make them so. What she layers instead is their relational architecture. At different levels of intensity, a man’s authority begins to occupy the available space, and a woman’s access to what she knows — to speech, confidence, action, even her own interpretation of events — narrows in response.

*The Memory Mirror* understands something crucial about power: it does not only act upon the person subjected to it; it also warps the perception of the person wielding it. Daniel’s certainty makes him less curious. His idea of competence blinds him to Pip’s considerable relational intelligence: while he has been worrying about what she knows clinically, she has been learning the community, its people and the things they do not always say outright. And so much of her capacity to help people rests on the trust she has built by paying attention to who they are, not simply what is wrong with them.

Such is the production’s nuance that the cost of Daniel’s failure to see clearly is present from the beginning of Partington’s performance. Anxiety registers in minute shifts of face and body, in tension held and tears that gather without becoming a display of grief. In the intimacy of Brunswick Mechanics Institute, we can watch that burden working on him throughout the play, before he can fully make sense of it himself.

![Gabriel Partington as Daniel stands in paramedic uniform under blue stage lighting in The Memory Mirror.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/09/DSC08401-Enhanced-NR.jpg)

Gabriel Partington as Daniel in **The Memory Mirror*. Photo: Julia Broad (42 Studios)

Luck places these acutely human dynamics inside a world willing to hold space for the mysterious. Black cockatoos become Huginn and Muninn, named for Odin’s ravens of thought and memory. Scout McDonald’s puppet design, realised by Charlie Whiter, conjures them through shadow, fabric and bodies moving behind hanging sheets. Director Drew Tingwell lets this surreal register sit lightly beside the everyday. The production is materially modest but imaginatively expansive: paper leaves, birdsong, silhouettes and handmade magic.

The mirror, too, is allowed to keep its secrets. Myra (Anthea Davis), Daniel’s older colleague, once used it to recover an obscured memory of the baby taken from her through forced adoption when she was seventeen. When Daniel responds carelessly to that intimate disclosure, the usually gentle Myra erupts. Davis makes the sudden ferocity electric. Again, Daniel is forced to confront what his own manner prevents him from seeing.

By now, Luck has laid enough echoes around Daniel that the past is becoming harder to keep beyond reach. When he follows a distressed Mrs Munro to the Memory Mirror, those echoes start to converge.

Here, the production slows almost to stillness. 

Behind Daniel and Mrs Munro, the puppetry traces the outline of the mirror against the hanging sheets. In front, a warm pool of light catches their faces as they stand looking out towards us, as though the auditorium itself has become the glass. This is the moment Daniel’s buried memory finally returns. In flashes, he sees the young woman who died in his arms the day after he had seen her fear, treated her burn and failed to understand what she was trying to tell him.

Recognition does not arrive as a single beat but travels through his body: his face tightens, folds, almost crumples as the old scene returns and he understands, finally, whose daughter he held as she died. Mrs Munro does not mirror his distress. She gazes into the light with an almost sculptural composure, her face nearly emptied of expression — not vacant, but marked by the persistent weight of a profound grief carried for years.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/09/The-Memory-Mirror---Gabriel-Partington---Margot-Knight---credit-Julia-Broad-42-Studios.jpg)

Gabriel Partington & Margot Knight in **The Memory Mirror*. Photo: Julia Broad (42 Studios)

I felt this contrast deeply in my own body, before all the pieces had quite fallen into place: a heavy lump rose in my throat.

And then another detail returns to his mind: the expression on her daughter’s face as Daniel carried her dying body, something he remembers as almost resembling forgiveness. The discovery lands with force: the forgiveness another person may offer can still remain beyond the reach of the self.

Remembering, though, cannot repair the past. What Daniel *can* do is act differently in the present.

The opportunity comes almost immediately. When Mrs Munro again falters under her husband’s scrutiny, Daniel and Pip help alter the conditions around her. At first, she needs support. Then she does not. Freed from the pressure to prove herself, Mrs Munro begins to trust her own capacity. And she shines.

\* \* \*

In the final moments of the play, Daniel and Mrs Munro return to the movement that first connected them. This time, they complete it: they dance.

The dance does not absolve him. Nor does it undo what has been lost. What it offers is something quieter and, for me, more moving: the possibility that once we recognise the patterns of power shaping our relationships — and the ways they can blind us from within — we might learn not to reproduce them.

Luck’s mirrors, burns, blank minds and recovered memories accumulate with remarkable control in *The Memory Mirror*. Each recurrence deepens what came before, allowing the play to move from workplace intimidation, through the subtler coercions of a marriage, to the devastating consequences of intimate partner violence. Tingwell’s direction trusts those layers to emerge gradually; the extraordinary ensemble give them emotional and relational precision; and the play’s strange, handmade theatrical language allows memory, grief and guilt to hover at the edges of the recognisably everyday.

I so admire the simple challenge that *The Memory Mirror* gifts us, and offered with such tenderness: to see more clearly what power can obscure, and to make room for one another to think, speak, remember and act with freedom.

---

[*The Memory Mirror*’s](https://events.humanitix.com/the-memory-mirror?ref=melbournestagereview.com) world premiere season plays at Brunswick Mechanics Institute, 270 Sydney Rd, Brunswick, until 13 September 2026.
### Stop: How to Eat Rabbit
URL: https://melbournestagereview.com/stop-how-to-eat-rabbit/
Last updated: 2026-10-02T01:26:10.000Z
Near the end of *How to Eat Rabbit*, Jamila Main stops the play.

Not metaphorically. Cam is bleeding heavily. Alex is trying to reassure them that it is only menstruation; Cam knows that it is not. A call to an emergency health line offers the dwindling possibility of help. The scene has gathered the momentum of tragedy: a body in crisis, a failing world, someone who may be about to die.

Then Main, who wrote the play and performs Cam, looks out of the fiction and says “stop.” 

The interruption landed before I entirely understood it. The gear change is almost a slap in the face: the fiction drops away and, for a moment, there is the disorientation of not quite knowing what kind of encounter this has become. Main moves close to the audience and peers into our eyes. 

There is that small charge of adrenaline that comes when the comfortable distance between performer and spectator suddenly crumbles. We are no longer watching Cam bleed from safely outside the frame of fiction. We are being looked at, and implicated in what it means to sit here and watch.

\* \* \*

Before this startling encounter, Main's play has spent most of its 80 minutes underground. Best friends Cam and Alex (played by Nory) are sheltering in a cave-like burrow after an unspecified social and environmental collapse. Whatever has already happened is bad; whatever is still coming, we have been led to understand, will be worse. Resources are scarce and the world above is dangerous enough that survival has become the way of life.

![Nory as Alex photographs their meal with an analog camera, surrounded by tins of food in the burrow.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/09/How_To_Eat_Rabbit_Darren_Gill-0736.jpg)

Nory as Alex, and Jamilla Main as Cam, in **How to Eat Rabbit*. Photo: Darren Gill.

For Alex, survival requires discipline. Their days are divided into cycles: exercise, work, rest, power conservation. Supplies must be rationed and tins of food properly ordered. When Alex brings home a two-headed rabbit, another calculation brews. They need protein. Food is food. The no-meat commitments of the old world may no longer be relevant.

Cam is appalled. 

The question in the play's title is therefore presented early and viscerally: when circumstances become sufficiently extreme, which values are you prepared to surrender to stay alive? And Main doesn't leave that question at the level of an ethical thought experiment. Between them, our two characters describe, in uncomfortable detail, what preparing and eating the rabbit would involve: the twist of a neck; the entry point of a knife; the removal of entrails.

Later, despite Cam's refusal, Alex secretly mixes rabbit into their food and lets them eat it without knowing. It is one of two betrayals that puncture the uneasy intimacy the pair have built inside the burrow. 

Cam has betrayed Alex too. While Alex is on a supply run, Cam uses precious electricity to post, via phone, an advertisement for a new burrow-mate. At first the act seems almost casually cruel: Cam secretly making plans to bring a third person into their carefully contained world — their “family” of two. But Alex does not know what the audience knows.

Cam is sick.

Again and again, when Alex leaves the burrow, Cam folds over in pain. In one of the production's stranger and more effective surreal gestures, the stacked tins begin speaking to Cam, mocking them, voicing thoughts that grow increasingly hostile and despairing. We learn that the advertisement is not about Cam's future at all, but Alex's: someone will need to be there when Cam no longer is.

![Jamila Main as Cam doubles over in pain among stacks of tins, one hand braced against the floor.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/09/How_To_Eat_Rabbit_Darren_Gill-0586.jpg)

Jamila Main as Cam in **How to Eat Rabbit*. Photo: Darren Gill

The betrayals consequently begin to mirror one another. Cam decides, without Alex, what Alex will need to survive their death. Alex decides, without Cam, what Cam's body needs to survive now. Both override the other's wishes while believing themselves to be acting from care.

That tension — between care and control — gives *How to Eat Rabbit* a rich emotional and ethical complexity, each new compromise making the distinction harder to hold.

Nory's Alex is the architect of survival, relentlessly organising the conditions in which these two people might continue. Yet private moments disclose the vulnerability behind that competence. Alone with the rabbit, Alex is not untouched by what killing it means. The certainty Alex presents to Cam vanishes when nobody is watching.

Cam pushes in the opposite direction. They want chocolate. Candles. To paint. To play. Small pleasures which look ridiculous measured against dwindling supplies, and become increasingly necessary the longer the play continues. In one particularly absurd image, the pair undertake a “relaxation cycle” wearing moisturising face masks, cucumber slices over their eyes: wellness culture surviving, apparently, even the end of civilisation. 

Director, Lilah Benetti, lets these tonal shifts breathe, finding space for joy and silliness without releasing the pressure building underneath. But the wellness cycles also establish the limits of Alex's approach. Repeated often enough, they build the impression that survival can be made manageable: anticipate what is coming, prepare for it, put a system around it. Food, power, exercise, rest. Even in preparation for Cam's coming menstruation, Alex has stolen period underwear.

What the system cannot plan for or manage is the whole of Cam's body. The audience has been watching Cam's pain escalate for some time before Alex finally becomes aware of it. When the bleeding begins, Alex reaches first for reassurance: it is a period; it is normal; it will be all right.

There is something particularly forceful in this progression, in a work developed by queer and disabled theatre-makers and explicitly concerned with disability's proximity to danger. Catastrophe is not evenly distributed. Alex can travel above ground, acquire supplies, hunt and return. As Cam becomes sicker, the forms of care they need become harder to access as the surrounding social order deteriorates. The survivalist fantasy begins to expose the assumption that survival can be secured through individual resourcefulness and self-sufficiency.

And then the play approaches the ending its world appears to have already prepared for Cam: death.

Except Main will not let it.

\* \* \*

Only afterwards, walking home, did I properly start piecing together what Main and Benetti had done. The interruption challenges more than the fate of a character. It challenges the contract under which we have been watching the play: the expectation that Cam's increasing vulnerability will supply the play with its tragic climax, and that we will sit together in La Mama's Courthouse and watch it happen.

There is something deeply affecting about watching a playwright refuse the ending they have, themselves, constructed. *How to Eat Rabbit* doesn't grab for a last-minute mechanism by which Cam can be rescued. It simply declines to complete the familiar equation in which precarity plus disability plus catastrophe must culminate in death.

That refusal reaches back through the play. Survival has repeatedly been used to justify the suspension of other claims. Alex can kill the rabbit because survival demands it. Alex can feed Cam meat without their consent because survival demands it. Bodies, principles and choices become negotiable when the alternative is death. At the last, Main refuses to let theatrical inevitability make the same move. Cam's suffering does not have to become another thing for an audience to consume simply because tragedy appears to demand it. Main doesn't argue their way out of the ending. They withdraw consent from it.

And then, at curtain call, Main returns wearing a different T-shirt: “Save a rabbit. Eat a pussy.”

It is gloriously silly, queer and, after everything that has preceded it, unexpectedly apt. But the final refusal seems, to me, to be about more than refusing death.

If *How to Eat Rabbit* begins by challenging us to think about what we must give up to survive, its last gesture turns us towards what might be kept: pleasure, humour, sex, companionship, care, absurdity. Maybe these are not luxuries postponed until after survival has been secured.

They may be part of what survival is for.

---

[*How to Eat Rabbit*](https://www.lamama.com.au/whats-on/la-mama-hope-punk-climate-festival/how-to-eat-rabbit?ref=melbournestagereview.com) plays at [La Mama Courthouse](https://www.lamama.com.au/?ref=melbournestagereview.com) until 11 September 2026.

---

Disclosure: A complimentary ticket to *How to Eat Rabbit* was provided to Melbourne Stage Review for the purpose of review. Melbourne Stage Review retains full editorial independence.
### Hidden a little longer: Beneath the Surface
URL: https://melbournestagereview.com/hidden-a-little-longer-beneath-the-surface/
Last updated: 2026-09-09T06:04:51.000Z
Tensions and social undercurrents animate [*Beneath the Surface*](https://onborrowedtime.my.canva.site/beneaththesurface?ref=melbournestagereview.com), a collection of four new Australian short plays from Edge of the Heart Productions. Moving through strained relationships, family resentments, corporate misconduct and dissatisfaction with an ordinary life, the evening is at its most interesting when it leaves room for uncertainty.

In Adèle Shelley’s *Coffee in the Time of Coronavirus*, two neighbours encounter one another across adjoining balconies during Melbourne’s lockdown. Their relationship is already underway as the audience enters: One is attempting to work, laptop open and headphones on, while the other practises guitar, each registering the other's presence and intrusion. It is a quietly effective beginning — before we have witnessed them speak to one another, we have already watched them negotiate proximity, irritation and perhaps a little curiosity. The play progresses from irritation to eventual conversation and connection, though I found the careful establishment of their relationship the more interesting part of their journey.

Mazz Ryan’s *Mine* turns our attention to two sisters brought together by their mother’s death and the boxes of possessions she has left behind. Objects become provocations and reopen a simmering sibling rivalry as the sisters circle questions of what their mother gave each of them — materially and otherwise. There is something recognisable in the impossibility of settling such an account: neither sister can quite make the other see her life, or their shared history, as she does. I appreciated the resistance of a neat resolution.

The evening gathers considerable force with Carissa McPherson’s *An Internal Matter*. An allegation of workplace sexual harassment sets executives, HR and legal advisers into motion as an organisation confronts the collision between its proclaimed values, its internal loyalties and its exposure to risk. And, almost as an afterthought, the harm done to women. The procedural and legal detail is persuasive, and some assured performances make the corporate manoeuvring unsettlingly credible. The play is strongest when it trusts this specificity. For me, the interspersed video sequences contrasting corporate rhetoric about integrity with the conduct unfolding before us underline a hypocrisy that the boardroom exchanges have already made clear. I would have welcomed more room to sit with the discomfort those exchanges produce before the production moved to explain them.

Shelley’s *The Trading Place* is the most theatrically playful of the four works, finding rich territory in an impossible bargain. A woman exhausted by the demands of husband, children and ordinary life encounters a mysterious trader who holds the power to return twenty-five years to her. The price, however, must be something worth trading. As the bargaining escalates, the premise begins to complicate the dissatisfaction with which the woman arrived: the children whose demands overwhelm her become intolerable to contemplate losing. The cosmic trader reminds her that other people are waiting to trade years of their lives to save someone they love, throwing her own desire to escape into uncomfortable relief. For a time, the play resists choosing between those truths, allowing us to recognise her privilege without dismissing her discontent.

![Nadia Andary stands behind a vine-covered counter facing Carissa McPherson, who wears a green-and-white patterned dress.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/09/B00027213FR1788771224_denoised_p-2.jpg)

Nadia Andary and Carissa McPherson in **The Trading Place* as part of **Beneath the Surface,* by Edge of the Heart Productions and *performed at The Motley Bauhaus.* Photo: Moira Callegari.

Eventually, *The Trading Place* moves towards a gentler revelation: perhaps another life is not required so much as a different relationship with this one. It is a neat resolution for a premise that briefly opens onto something stranger, but I enjoyed the playfulness with which the work gets us there, and the space its improbable bargain creates for competing truths.

Across the four plays, *Beneath the Surface* moves warmly between comedy and drama, with several particularly assured performances within its ensemble. Nadia Andary and Paul Canlan were especially compelling, with strong work also from Ian Rooney, Carissa McPherson and Fi Scarlett. The production's humour found many receptive listeners in the room, even where it did not always find me. 

I was most engaged in those moments when the plays trusted their conflicts enough not to resolve their meanings for us — when what lay beneath the surface was allowed to remain there long enough for us to discover and make sense of it ourselves.

---

[*Beneath the Surface*](https://www.eventfinda.com.au/2026/beneath-the-surface/melbourne/carlton?ref=melbournestagereview.com) plays at [The Motley Bauhaus](https://www.themotley.com.au/?ref=melbournestagereview.com), 118 Elgin Street, Carlton, until 12 September 2026\. Full production credits are available in the [digital program](https://onborrowedtime.my.canva.site/beneaththesurface?ref=melbournestagereview.com).

---

Disclosure: A complimentary ticket to *Beneath the Surface* was provided to Melbourne Stage Review for the purpose of review. Melbourne Stage Review retains full editorial independence.
### The making of the pack: Savages
URL: https://melbournestagereview.com/the-making-of-the-pack-savages/
Last updated: 2026-10-02T01:25:58.000Z
Before they become men, they are bodies.

Four performers move low across the stage, flesh-toned crops and shorts barely distinguishable from their bodies, limbs spread wide, prowling and circling one another in the half-light. There is something predatory in the movement, though its species remains uncertain: panther, arachnid, perhaps simply animal. Jess Keeffe’s sound bears down on the scene with an imposing physicality. The bodies we are looking at are unmistakably female-presenting, but the image precedes any straightforward account of gender.

Then comes femininity in exuberant costume: floral dresses, broad hats, oversized sunglasses, four holidaymakers ready for a cruise. The dialogue is already rubbing strangely against the image. 

![Four performers in colourful floral dresses, broad-brimmed hats and sunglasses pose together against a vivid blue backdrop.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/09/Savages-Production-Image-2---Photog-Pia-Johnson.jpg)

Zoe Boesen, Laila Thaker, Nicci Wilks, and AYA in Patricia Cornelius’s **Savages* at Theatre Works. Photo: Pia Johnson

Soon the performers begin shedding these clothes while the characters describe what they intend to shed of themselves before boarding. Runt will leave behind being a short man; each will discard some humiliation, inadequacy or disappointment. Dresses and hats are stuffed into a bag. Shorts, wife-beaters and thongs emerge. Somewhere in the process, four individuals become *the boys*.

It is an extraordinarily deft introduction to Patricia Cornelius’s [*Savages*](https://www.theatreworks.org.au/2026/savages?ref=melbournestagereview.com), first produced in 2013 and now directed at Theatre Works by Kitan Petkovski. Petkovski’s casting of women and non-binary performers does considerably more than reverse the gender of the original roles. Gender is made conspicuously performative, certainly, but so too is the social construction of the pack. Masculinity is not simply something these men possess. We watch them make it together.

Craze is its obvious leader and its bully. Manipulative, aggrieved and capable of repeatedly reshaping reality to suit himself, he talks of an estranged wife who has an intervention order against him, then insists she still loves him; castigates her for taking the house and half his superannuation; dismisses the labour of raising their children; and eventually fantasises out loud about killing the kids as revenge. He swindles Runt and then persuades him that the swindle was somehow performed in his interests. The other men are in no way his innocents, but Craze establishes the terms.

Cornelius gives each of them enough history to make those terms intelligible without ever making them excusable. Their grievances accumulate around rejection, humiliation, inadequacy and disappointment. One recalls deliberately teaching his six-year-old son not to cry, brutalising vulnerability out of the next generation as, we gather, it was once brutalised out of him. Another resists the group’s increasingly predatory pursuit of women, but only while sustained by the belief that he is loved. When that belief collapses, so does the resistance.

Again and again, hurt calcifies into grievance rather than self-reflection.

Cornelius writes this process with a language that is unmistakably her own. Boasts become verse. Repetitions accumulate. Lines ricochet between the men until speech itself binds them together. They do not merely agree with one another; rhythm and rhyme make them speak as a unit.

There is plenty of comedy inside this. The men swallow Viagra before there is even any prospect of ‘success’. They karaoke their way through “When a Man Loves a Woman”. They strut, dance, compete and talk shit. They are recognisable enough that their early vulgarity can invite an eye-roll rather than immediate alarm. The escalation occurs by increments. Wanting to get laid becomes entitlement. Entitlement becomes desperation. Women become bodies to be appraised, ranked and acquired.

![Four performers stand together on the white deck of a cruise ship against a vivid blue backdrop, dressed in casual men’s clothing.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/09/Savages-Production-Image-1---Photog-Pia-Johnson.jpg)

Zoe Boesen, AYA, Nicci Wilks, and Laila Thaker in Patricia Cornelius’s **Savages* at Theatre Works. Photo: Pia Johnson

Nicci Wilks is particularly astonishing within this physical vocabulary. Her performance seems to have a line of force running continuously through it: energy seated deep in the hips, then transmitted through posture, face and gesture with extraordinary control. Nothing appears casually placed. AYA, too, is superb, shifting between comic precision, profound sadness, and menace without ever flattening the character into caricature. Across the ensemble, the awareness that we are watching women and non-binary performers playing men comes and goes: sometimes disappearing almost entirely, sometimes flickering insistently back into view.

Bianca Pardo’s set and costumes, Harrie Hogan’s lighting and Keeffe’s sound, work in unusually close conversation with that instability. The ship initially sits inside rich oceanic blues, its raised deck framed against layered translucent surfaces that give Hogan’s light remarkable depth. As the men move further into the night and further into the hunt for sex, the visual world changes state with them. Blues give way to murkier bronze and brown; the stage becomes more overtly club-like; music and light propel the men forward. There are moments of genuine visual beauty, which make the ugliness gathering inside the image all the more uncomfortable.

Women, meanwhile, remain curiously difficult for these men to imagine as people.

There is a stark shift when they speak of their mothers, women briefly elevated out of the relentless economy of sexual judgement into something closer to reverence. But even this category does not remain untouched by the gaze. George admires his mother because she “takes care of herself”: high heels, lipstick, not a hair out of place. The Madonna is still being appraised.

And when the men attempt to speak about romantic love and intimacy, they return almost compulsively to female bodies. Desire offers no escape from objectification. Women may be revered, desired or despised, but they remain bodies to be judged.

By the final scene, in the short minutes before dawn, the remaining women aboard the ship are being sorted from among what the men regard as the dregs: too fat, too old, too ugly, women these men claim they would never otherwise touch. It is precisely this supposed undesirability that becomes the rationale for violating them. Craze proposes drugging them. The others assent.

And while they do, the men begin to undress.

The male clothes are shed. Three of the performers are left bare-chested. At the exact moment the characters reduce women most completely to bodies available for use, the production places the performers’ own bodies unmistakably before us. Both perpetrator and object of the misogynistic gaze occupy the same image. 

Blackout.

The play does not show us the assault, but it offers no reason to believe it will not occur. The agreement is made, the target is chosen, the violence is imminent. Cornelius halts us at intention, and gives us no aftermath through which tension might resolve into grief, outrage or the catharsis of justice or revenge.

Walking out, I felt all this lodged high in my chest: tight, heavy, still waiting for the breath the play had refused to let me finish.

\* \* \*

Thirteen years after *Savages* was first staged, its provocations remain uncomfortably immediate. Petkovski’s sensational direction meets the ferocity of Cornelius’s text without softening its ugliness or simplifying its contradictions. His production is playful, funny and visually seductive; it is also extraordinarily controlled in the slow tightening of its grip.

By the time those bodies re-emerge in the final minutes, the distance between Cornelius’s men and the world that made them feels frighteningly small.

---

[*Savages*](https://www.theatreworks.org.au/2026/savages?ref=melbournestagereview.com) plays at [Theatre Works](https://www.theatreworks.org.au/?ref=melbournestagereview.com), 14 Acland Street, St Kilda, until 12 September.
### Smile, we are watching you:  Cold War 2.0
URL: https://melbournestagereview.com/smile-we-are-watching-you-cold-war-2-0/
Last updated: 2026-10-02T01:25:42.000Z
My mother would not have liked [*Cold War 2.0*](https://www.lamama.com.au/whats-on/la-mama-hope-punk-climate-festival/cold-war-20?ref=melbournestagereview.com). For an anarcho-punk performance by a company that calls itself [Doppelgangster](https://doppelgangster.com/about/?ref=melbournestagereview.com), this seems less like criticism than a mark of success.

The more difficult question is whether I liked it. I’m still figuring that out.

*Cold War 2.0* begins with a small act of theatrical menace. Our phones are collected into a suitcase. One is drawn out — recognisably belonging to an audience member — before being spared in favour of another, apparently sacrificial device, which is promptly smashed. The blinds come down. Has someone locked the door? Yes. Someone has locked the door.

It is all too knowingly theatrical to be genuinely threatening, and this is characteristic of the strange compact Doppelgangster establishes with its audience. We are being menaced, but we are also in on the joke.

What follows is a barrage. Tobias Manderson-Galvin and Aquilla Sorensen ricochet through personal anecdotes, political history, philosophy, surveillance, technology and popular culture, punctuated by bursts of live punk and enormous hand-painted slogans. Their conversation has the rhythm of a rapid-fire rally, yet often seems to occur on two slightly different planes. It is like a warped game of tennis: one serves a ball, the other returns a pineapple in a balaclava.

This fragmentation is not incidental. *Cold War 2.0* is concerned with social atomisation, alienation and misinformation, and there is something formally apt about experiencing a world in which information arrives faster than it can be organised into meaning. But intentional incoherence is still incoherence. While some references landed — Adorno, Aristotle, Hitler, ASIO, *No Country for Old Men* — many passed me by, and too little accumulated between them for me to find a way through. 

That is, a performance can reproduce the experience of information overload without necessarily illuminating it.

![A flesh-coloured theatrical mask lies on white fabric under a spotlight in Cold War 2.0.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/09/Cold_War_2.0_Darren_Gill-0375.jpg)

**Cold War 2.0*. Photo: Darren Gill.

Curiously, the evening becomes most alive when the distance between performers and audience begins to collapse. We are invited to dance. I am handed a microphone during a punk interlude while the performers change costume in front of us, and find myself sing-shouting a refrain. By the end, our phones have been returned and two audience members, disguised beneath masks and extravagant false beards, are enlisted to perform a fraternal kiss — a callback to an earlier riff on Cold War espionage — while the rest of us are encouraged to take photographs.

One banner reads SMILE / WE ARE WATCHING YOU. I *was* smiling for much of *Cold War 2.0*. But seated onstage in two facing banks, with the rest of the audience as visible as the performers, I sometimes caught myself wondering whose benefit my smile was for. In a work preoccupied with watching and being watched, perhaps that self-consciousness is not entirely accidental.

*Cold War 2.0* appears as part of [La Mama’s HOPE PUNK Climate Festival](https://www.lamama.com.au/news/2026/launching-la-mama-hope-punk-climate-festival/?ref=melbournestagereview.com), which embraces "HOPE as a verb and PUNK as a culture": an attempt to resist the apathy and despair that can shut down conversations about climate change. 

Perhaps *Cold War 2.0* locates that hope in participation, in collective noise, in the stubborn DIY act of continuing to create something together amid technological, political and social disarray.

But I left wishing that impulse had emerged more legibly from the glorious mess.

My mother still wouldn’t have liked it. Punk can claim that victory, at least.

---

[*Cold War 2.0*](https://www.lamama.com.au/whats-on/la-mama-hope-punk-climate-festival/cold-war-20?ref=melbournestagereview.com) plays at [La Mama](https://www.lamama.com.au/?ref=melbournestagereview.com) Courthouse until 6 September 2026.

---

Disclosure: A complimentary ticket to *Cold War 2.0* was provided to Melbourne Stage Review for the purpose of review. Melbourne Stage Review retains full editorial independence.
### No safe distance: The Jungle and the Sea
URL: https://melbournestagereview.com/no-safe-distance-the-jungle-and-the-sea/
Last updated: 2026-09-18T01:34:11.000Z
There are plays that invite themselves to be taken apart. [*The Jungle and the Sea*](https://www.mtc.com.au/plays-and-tickets/whats-on/season-2026/the-jungle-and-the-sea?ref=melbournestagereview.com), written and directed by S. Shakthidharan and Eamon Flack, makes me reluctant to even try.

It isn't that there is little to say about this immense work. There is almost too much. Across nearly three hours with two intervals, a Tamil family is scattered by the Sri Lankan Civil War, and an intimate family story expands to hold displacement, faith, political violence, atrocity, migration, justice and grief. The play can be harrowing. It can also be funny.

Perhaps it is the range that makes analysis feel strangely inadequate. *The Jungle and the Sea* moves between registers with the capaciousness of an epic tale: from the ferocity of war to the gentle squabbles of family life; from bodily suffering to exchanges that play out almost like intellectual chess, turning questions of justice, duty and moral responsibility over and over with a deep tolerance for nuance.

And somehow, it holds. 

So rather than pull its many parts too far apart in interpretation, I want to stay close to the work, if I can. In the notes I wrote immediately after the performance — a sort of frenzied activity I call my ‘harvest’ — I find the same impulse expressed more instinctively: ‘better to nestle closer to the whole…’

The immediacy of this scrappy note tells my next-day writerly self something important about what this production achieved: the horrors of conflict were made intimate. The story had made these fictional people sufficiently present for me to grieve them, while their imagined lives brought me closer to the countless real people who lived through this war — individual lives so easily obscured by its statistics.

\* \* \*

Before history scatters them, *The Jungle and the Sea* gives us a family.

They are loving, pluralistic and charmingly witty. Gowrie (Anandavalli), a Hindu, and Siva (Prakash Belawadi), a Christian, raise four children who grow into beliefs and lives of their own: Abi (Kalieaswari Srinivasan), Madhu (Nadie Kammallaweera), Ahilan (Shiv Palekar) and their youngest, Lakshmi (Emma Harvie). There is a fullness to the life the play establishes before war intrudes. Its characters have aspirations and vocations, faiths and romances, idiosyncrasies and hobbies. They dance, feed one another and delight in each other's company. Early in the play, the four siblings expend their energy almost frivolously, chasing one another around the stage.

War arrives first as information. Leaflets fall from above, warning civilians to seek safety. Siva has been assured by a friend in government that places of worship will be protected, and he gathers family and friends in a Christian church. The assurance proves catastrophically wrong. The church is bombed. People are killed. Siva is blinded; his daughter Madhu loses all the fingers on her left hand, and with them her hopes of joining the Sri Lankan women's cricket team.

After this, their son Ahilan is drawn into the Tamil Tigers and disappears from their lives. Siva and his youngest daughter, Lakshmi, make their way to Australia, while Gowrie remains in Sri Lanka with her other daughters, Abi and Madhu, searching for the son they have lost. 

Gowrie responds to this fragmentation with an extraordinary act of conviction: she binds her eyes, vowing that until she can see all of her children together, she will not see at all. Grief and injustice become a kind of embodied protest. She cannot prevent the war from tearing her family apart, but she can refuse to make peace with its rupture. For decades, the blindfold stays on.

What began as a family moving freely through the world becomes a family moving because the world will no longer let them remain where they are. It is a story of displacement and forced migration, tragically familiar across wars, borders and eras. Even, and especially, our own. 

Yet the enormous scale of such displacement almost slips from view as I become absorbed in the fortunes of this one family.

![Three women embrace at one side of the revolve as another group gathers across the stage beneath a darkened blue set.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/08/Nadie-Kammallaweera--Anandavalli-and-Kalieaswari-Srinivasan.-Photo-by-Pia-Johnson.jpg)

Nadie Kammallaweera, Anandavalli and Kalieaswari Srinivasan in The Jungle and the Sea. Photo: Pia Johnson

Dale Ferguson’s deceptively simple set design gives this loss of freedom a physical form. He has constricted the broad Sumner stage into a suffocatingly narrow triangular playing space. Almost its entire floor is occupied by a revolve, which continues to turn for most of the production. 

The choreography is an absolute marvel to watch, with the actors continually adjusting to, travelling with and working against its motion. At first, it carries the family’s exuberance. As war closes in, walking becomes travelling, then displacement, then flight. Small, toy-like buses and trucks trundle alongside the actors; a plane passes overhead on a stick. The scale is playful, almost childlike, while the journeys grow increasingly gruelling.

As the war progresses, the family walks and walks: towards safety, towards one another, away from danger, carrying the exhaustion of displacement in their bodies. In one sequence, a fellow traveller can go no further. He remains by the roadside, surrendering his water to those who can continue. Later, the revolve accelerates beneath the family already exhausted by their journey. They keep walking forward. The stage carries them backwards.

The effect is used once. The cruelty of it lands.

There is masterful economy to this theatrical language. Even Ferguson's strangely unfinished-looking walls seem to change under Damien Cooper's lighting: by lamplight, the mottled industrial surfaces almost become landscape: white blotches become distant lights on the horizon below an open sky. Arjunan Puveendran's live Carnatic score works its own transformations: veena, mridangam and voice conjure celebration and ritual, then turn the strike of a drum into bombardment, distant and overhead. Later, a torrent of rain seems to materialise from little more than fragments falling through the light.

That economy extends to the performances, matched by the fluidity of the ensemble work. The actors continually form and reform as a collective while remaining vividly individual. We are held within the family, certainly, but also within the communities that gather around them and among the strangers who join them on the road — across political, religious and ethnic lines. 

And for a play touched so heavily by violence, anger, sorrow and injustice, few voices are raised. When a truly guttural shout finally tears through the production, deep into the work, it lands with startling force. This underlines the deft hand of directors S. Shakthidharan and Eamon Flack: a theatrical world of immense emotional range, held with remarkable restraint.

The potency of these choices only accumulates.

By the second interval, something has shifted in the auditorium. Usually an interval releases an audience: conversation rises, laughter breaks out, the ordinary social world rushes back in. Here, I became aware of how little I could hear. Around me, people spoke quietly, or sat in silence. I seemed to be one of many who could do little else but stare, dazed and a little transfixed, as a stage manager quietly swept the remnants of the storm from the floor.

The room was intensely sober.

\* \* \*

The final act provides a beautiful complication to the violence we have so far experienced as something done *to* people. For much of *The Jungle and the Sea*, war has arrived in the family's lives as a vast external force: borders close, bombs fall, armies advance, laws change. Gowrie and her family are forced to survive the many decisions made elsewhere by people they will never meet.

Now, morality becomes personal.

The war may be ending, but its aftermath presents choices. What will each person concede to secure another's safety? What principles can survive contact with consequence? What does one owe the dead when honouring them may endanger the living? Peace itself begins to demand sacrifices, testing what each person is prepared to relinquish — and at what cost.

At the centre of this is Abi, whose response to the war's final cruelties takes on a moral force of its own. Faced with a conflict between pragmatism and a deeply held conviction about what dignity requires, she refuses the easier path. Her insistence carries consequences, for herself and for those around her.

There is something of her mother in this. Gowrie has spent fifteen years wearing her own refusal across her eyes. She could not stop the forces that scattered her children, but she could refuse to accommodate herself to their separation. Abi's conviction takes a different form, but carries the same steel. Neither woman possesses much power over the political forces around her. But that does not foreclose their capacity to choose what they feel is right.

And still, beneath all this moral complexity, the family's original longing remains painfully simple: to be together.

![Gowrie stands under warm amber light with her hands raised to her face.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/08/Anandavalli.-Photo-by-Pia-Johson.jpg)

Anandavalli as Gowrie in The Jungle and the Sea. Photo: Pia Johnson

And then the play returns to an image from its beginning. I don't want to describe what happens. Its power lies partly in the long journey back to something we have already seen without yet understanding. But for Gowrie, who has spent so many years refusing to see a world in which her children are separated, the production permits a moment of impossible wholeness. Tragedy and exquisite beauty seem to occupy the same breath.

Anandavalli has us utterly in her hands. Her performance is sublime.

Tears streamed down my cheeks.

At curtain call, I was still crying.

The audience rose in standing ovation. The company returned for a second bow, and then a third. As the performers finally jogged from the stage, a man in the audience called after them, his voice carrying what sounded to me like a South Asian accent:

> “And when will you be performing for Benjamin Netanyahu?”

It landed like a punch to the gut.

For almost three hours, *The Jungle and the Sea* had held us inside the tyranny of war, and the particular obscenity of asymmetrical war. Then, just as the theatre seemed to offer some small possibility of resolution within tragedy, the present day pierces our cocoon.

There was nothing safely 'historical' about this story anymore.

---

[*The Jungle and the Sea*](https://www.mtc.com.au/plays-and-tickets/whats-on/season-2026/the-jungle-and-the-sea?ref=melbournestagereview.com) plays at [Melbourne Theatre Company's](https://www.mtc.com.au/?ref=melbournestagereview.com) Sumner Theatre until 12 September 2026.
### The choreography of attention: Chunky Move’s Time Remaining
URL: https://melbournestagereview.com/the-choreography-of-attention-chunky-moves-time-remaining/
Last updated: 2026-09-18T01:34:01.000Z
By the time we enter, [*Time Remaining*](https://chunkymove.com/works/time-remaining/?ref=melbournestagereview.com) has already begun.

Four lines of laser light scan the vast timber floor of Melbourne Town Hall.

Forward. Back.

Forward. Back.

They move with an almost tidal rhythm, though with cutting precision. Where light meets floor it looks improbably hot, as though it will scorch. Alongside this, Antony Hamilton’s sound design sits low beneath the recurring movement, atmospheric and textural, until every so often the laser apparatus re-announces itself with a great inorganic crack: an uncanny kind of thunder.

We take our seats but keep talking.

It isn’t yet clear that we shouldn’t.

Only gradually do I notice that, far away beneath the great Town Hall organ, six figures are already moving. Or perhaps I should say: only gradually do I realise that I have not been watching the whole performance.

They have been there all along, moving slowly and independently on the dimly lit stage, apparently indifferent to whether we have noticed them.

From high above the floor, Paula Levis’s elaborate costumes register before faces: a Rococo-inflected body in grey-green, with a vast ruffled skirt and extravagant headdress; a Harlequin in diamond motley; a Pierrot figure almost swallowed by voluminous white; another performer carrying an enormous, misshapen papier-mâché head. Two more figures are black-clad, out of some goth-glam, New Romantic past, their costumes flashing with chains, metallic trim and jewelled gloves. The ensemble’s white-painted faces are smudged with heavy black around the eyes.

![A dancer in an elaborate green ruffled costume and white-painted face stands alone in a pool of light on the darkened Melbourne Town Hall stage during Chunky Move’s Time Remaining.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/08/2026.08.18_NowOrNever_ChunkyMove_TimeRemaining_Dress_Rehersal-22.jpg)

Chunky Move’s **Time Remaining* at Melbourne Town Hall. Photo: William Hamilton-Coates

Melbourne Town Hall makes a strange theatre. *Time Remaining* — Antony Hamilton’s new work for [Chunky Move](https://chunkymove.com/?ref=melbournestagereview.com), commissioned by [Now or Never](https://nowornever.melbourne.vic.gov.au/homepage?ref=melbournestagereview.com) and receiving its world premiere here — occupies both its conventional stage and the enormous floor in front of it.

It is difficult to imagine a more apt architecture for a work concerned with bodies encountering systems far larger than themselves, whether technological or social, or a strange mix of the two.

Hamilton’s performers begin in a loose, almost pre-social disorder, each seemingly caught within a small rockpool of their own movement. Each body follows its own peculiar rhythm: slow, loose, sometimes ungainly, rarely conventionally beautiful or virtuosic. The six performers — Madeleine Bowman, Melissa Pham, Lee Serle, Samakshi Sidhu, Jayden Wall and Jareen Wee — share a stage without yet appearing obliged to share a language.

They begin to find one another through the layers that clothe them: garments pass between bodies, gloves come off and reappear elsewhere, pieces accumulate on the floor and are picked up again.

Desire arrives abruptly, with a strange matter-of-factness. A man and woman find one another. They kiss, undress each other, and end up entangled on the floor: he is naked from the waist down, she from the waist up. It is carnal without being especially romantic or voyeuristic. For a moment, sex is simply something bodies do.

Then they descend. The performers leave the small world of the organ stage, and enter the vast floor beneath us: the territory the lasers have been quietly surveying all along.

Something begins to change.

The idiosyncrasy of clothing and colour disappears. Movement becomes smaller, sharper. Freeform particularity gives way to counted patterns: pairs form, phrases recur, one body echoes another.

At one point they arrange themselves in a tight line, one behind another, bent at the knees. Then a shudder travels through them from front to back, like electricity.

It is exquisite.

By now, I realise I am hungry for this kind of pattern. The work has offered so much dispersal — six bodies following private logics, lasers tracing their own immaculate courses — that each brief convergence feels like a reward. A phrase catches. Bodies agree. For a few seconds, something coheres.

My own pleasure in this gives me pause. Synchrony is not synonymous with hierarchy; it is also one of the ways bodies make connection possible. Moving together reduces the bewildering number of things another person might do. It creates predictability, relation, sometimes even the felt sense of shared agency. 

The work’s increasing order is seductive before it is troubling.

![Performers move across the vast timber floor of Melbourne Town Hall as blue and violet laser beams cut through the space between them in Chunky Move’s Time Remaining.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/08/GRPhoto_CM-TimeRemaining_Socials-17.jpg)

Chunky Move’s **Time Remaining* at Melbourne Town Hall. Photo: Gianna Rizzo

*Time Remaining* could easily give us a familiar story. Another fable preoccupied with technology disciplining human beings. Its own promotional language flirts with such a reading, casting the performer as an endangered figure in an escalating contest with technology. 

But the lasers have not commanded these dancers to synchronise. They seem to do that all by themselves. There is pleasure in it. Relief, even. Through coordination, six unruly bodies briefly become more legible to one another; complexity narrows as a shared rhythm takes hold. 

There is a small thrill in disparate bodies becoming, momentarily, one.

But the experiment in finding order does not last. Soon, there is a rebellious eruption. Bodies run feverishly through the hall, loose and exposed, several dancers now wearing very little. Movement expands. Mischief rules. The group remains collective in this fever, without becoming uniform. There is joy in it, or something very close: an exhilarating release into amplitude, speed, flesh.

Hamilton seems to be imagining bodies exceeding the pattern, but he stubbornly refuses to let the work settle there. *Time Remaining* is less interested in humans breaking free from a top-down force, and far more absorbed in charting the shifting terms of relation: when coordination feels connective, when it becomes constraining, and when collectivity can loosen without necessarily dissolving a sense of belonging.

The Town Hall complicates my own relationship to all this as spectator. From the balcony, I can read Hamilton’s structures almost diagrammatically: lines, pairings, trajectories, bodies moving through a field. But there is much less acuity in my perception of faces, breath and the sinew of movement.

![Six performers are dispersed across the vast timber floor of Melbourne Town Hall beneath suspended lighting equipment, with a single bright laser beam cutting diagonally through the space in Chunky Move’s Time Remaining.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/08/2026.08.19_NowOrNever_ChunkyMove_TimeRemaining_Dress-36-1.jpg)

Chunky Move’s **Time Remaining* at Melbourne Town Hall. Photo: William Hamilton-Coates

The vantage point calls up one of my earliest memories. I am perhaps three years old, standing over an immaculate model railway at a friend’s house, transfixed by the discovery that a whole world could be seen in miniature. I remember thinking, with the peculiar grandiosity of a small child who had somehow heard about such things: *so this is what God sees*. What astonished me was not power over that world so much as the sudden legibility of the collective: detail, relation, route and pattern made available all at once.

It strikes me that although the viewing distance in *Time Remaining* deprives me of one kind of spectatorship, it makes another unusually available. To describe it, I find myself wanting to use *fascinate* as a verb. 

I begin to fascinate: to follow patterns, test relations, watch structures form and dissolve, let one question proliferate into another. And perhaps that altered attention is also why the dancers no longer seem automatically entitled to be the centre of this work.

If Hamilton wanted *Time Remaining* to hit me in the gut or the heart, he largely misses. What he hits, with considerable force, is the head. I leave mentally detonated, the thinking space still widening as I step back into the heart of this great Melbourne metropolis. 

That is not necessarily the encounter everyone will want. The ten-year-old beside me begins sighing audibly somewhere around halfway; afterwards, my companion tells me that within ten minutes he had lost the thread completely (though I don't believe that was meant as a critique). *Time Remaining* does not necessarily make its conceptual architecture easy to read from inside it. But difficulty is not the same thing as vacancy.

![A silhouetted dancer stands on the timber floor of Melbourne Town Hall holding a trailing costume piece, while other performers move in the distance beneath bright crossing laser beams in Chunky Move’s Time Remaining.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/08/2026.08.18_NowOrNever_ChunkyMove_TimeRemaining_Dress_Rehersal-47.jpg)

Chunky Move’s **Time Remaining* at Melbourne Town Hall. Photo: William Hamilton-Coates

In one of the work's strangest passages, the dancers move shoulder to shoulder through the room. Travelling back towards the organ they sob; moving away again they laugh, wildly, almost hysterically.

Back: grief.

Away: laughter.

Again.

It reads as somewhat insincere: feeling becomes performance, reproducible on command.

Around this point, another figure enters from the small bank of spectators seated downstairs. From my angle it is briefly unclear whether she belongs to the work at all. The performers pull her into their world, strip and recostume her: black tights, a flesh-coloured crop, a large dark wig, white cap, an absurdly long prosthetic nose.

Then they abandon her.

For a moment she appears almost overwhelmed by the exposure. But rather than crumple, she dances. I hesitate to make her mean too much. From elsewhere in the hall, even the circumstances of her arrival may have been invisible. But her movement thereafter retains an unsettled quality: sometimes incorporated, sometimes peripheral, sometimes echoing movement from the edges of this unstable world.

She is not the only body learning how to fit itself to the conditions around it. The whole group performs a gesture so familiar that its strangeness almost passes unnoticed. Again, lined up shoulder to shoulder, they face outward as though posing for a group photo. There is no photographer waiting. No flash. No visible reason for moving bodies to suddenly flatten themselves into an image.

And yet we know the pose.

There is a bodily intelligence involved in becoming photographable: the minute adjustment of posture, face and proximity; the knowledge that movement must resolve into something another person can capture. The body anticipates the image before the apparatus arrives.

And then, a few minutes after the group pose had dissolved back to dance, the apparatus does appear. 

At first, it is one photographer. He enters while two dancers continue a tight, mechanical phrase. They do not immediately stop. A body turns slightly towards him. A movement becomes a little more available to the lens. A pause holds.

Another photographer arrives.

Then another.

The transition is gradual.

Joining the fray, two dancers sit slumped at opposite ends of a desk on wheeled chairs, absorbed in laptops while the desk, chairs and bodies spin slowly around the floor. I think they yawn. Eventually, after they have joined the spectacle of photography, one dancer stands on the desk with the screen held absurdly close to his face.

Across the hall, bodies are being organised by things that do not need to touch them to have power over them. They don't need to oppress to exercise influence. A screen can hold a person almost motionless. A camera can redirect movement without issuing an instruction. The possibility of being seen can alter a body before anyone is visibly looking.

And this is where the reach of *Time Remaining* extends unmistakably beyond the Town Hall. Human beings have always adjusted themselves for audiences; there is no pristine, unperformed self hiding beneath social life. But networked technologies have radically changed the architecture of the exchange. We increasingly present ourselves within systems that determine whether and how we become visible.

Researchers Kristen Barta and Nazanin Andalibi describe tech platforms and algorithms as “[visibility agents](https://dl.acm.org/doi/full/10.1145/3660337?ref=melbournestagereview.com)”. That is, because their operations are partly opaque, users infer what is rewarded from the signals that come back — engagement, reach, recommendations — and adapt themselves accordingly.

The rules do not need to be written down, or even fully known or agreed with, to become effective.

And the presence of photographers in *Time Remaining* renders this idea recognisably *bodily*.

![Six dancers with pale theatrical makeup cluster together in the darkened Melbourne Town Hall, their bodies caught mid-movement beneath bright diagonal laser beams in Chunky Move’s Time Remaining.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/08/GRPhoto_CM-TimeRemaining_Socials-26-1.jpg)

Chunky Move’s **Time Remaining* at Melbourne Town Hall. Photo: Gianna Rizzo

Soon there are perhaps ten or twelve photographers circulating through the dancers, cameras raised. Shutters accumulate in the soundscape. Flashes erupt across the floor. The dancers turn, extend, hold, reposition. Movement resolves into pose. Pose transforms into another. Again. Again.

It is an ecstatic feedback loop, as they begin organising themselves around the conditions of being seen. 

The cameras offer something the lasers never did: recognition.

A laser can structure space, illuminate or obscure, even appear to threaten a body. A camera carries the promise that somebody is interested. Human beings are not foolish for wanting that. Visibility can mean surveillance, but it can also mean participation, recognition, evidence that someone has noticed we are here. 

But this frenzied participation makes the sequence more troubling than a simple warning against technology. Digital systems did not invent the desire to be recognised any more than machines invented our desire to move together.

And this is what I admire so much about the work. *Time Remaining* reflects back a peculiarly contemporary anxiety: the possibility of being engulfed by systems of our own making, seduced into them by appetites that are genuinely our own. Dance is an almost perfect medium for describing this collective terror. Text does not intervene to assign motive or blame; bodies simply show us relation becoming habit, pleasure becoming pattern, participation becoming capture.

It's as if the act of photography gradually becomes less like documentation of choreography than choreography's replacement. Bodies that once took slow, eccentric routes through space become extraordinarily efficient at producing versions of themselves.

And just as the heap of bodies performing for the lens reaches the pinnacle of its orgy — performers climbing over one another to occupy its centre for just one more delicious moment — the photographers leave.

The dancers are not liberated. They are bereft. Bodies slacken. Faces contort. They seem strung out.

They retreat towards the great organ, their point of origin. Fragments of their earlier theatrical selves seem to gather around them. There is something circular in it, but nothing has been restored. As if the costumes can return, but the conditions under which those bodies first inhabited them cannot.

And below, the lasers continue to move. 

Earlier I watched those lines of light as apparatus: beautifully engineered, potentially dangerous, unmistakably inorganic. But as humans recede, the lasers start swinging through the room at an oddly bodily scale, tracing something like the action of human feet: leaping, landing, springing away again.

For a moment, I could swear the lasers are dancing. The system learning. The system alive. 

Kudos to Nicholas Moloney, Nick Roux and Joli Boardman: through their design and execution, the system seems suddenly animate, capable of occupying the full range of the space — and of our attention.

Two days later, the same Town Hall space is open again for a free laser exhibit: Robin Fox's [PRESENCE](https://nowornever.melbourne.vic.gov.au/event/presence?ref=melbournestagereview.com). 

The human performers have gone home. The machines remain: untired, repeatable, still drawing an audience.

It strikes me that *Time Remaining* starts to feel less like a title than a question.

---

[*Time Remaining*](https://nowornever.melbourne.vic.gov.au/event/time-remaining?ref=melbournestagereview.com) was presented at Melbourne Town Hall as part of [Now or Never ](https://nowornever.melbourne.vic.gov.au/?ref=melbournestagereview.com)festival, 19–20 August 2026.
### Circles in the water: A credo for theatre criticism
URL: https://melbournestagereview.com/circles-in-the-water-a-credo-for-theatre-criticism/
Last updated: 2026-08-23T08:13:49.000Z
## **Water**

Years ago, on an aeroplane, I asked for a cup of tea. The flight attendant handed me one of those paper cups of hot water and a tea bag. I put the cup down on the tray table, but before I dropped the tea bag in, I noticed the water.

The aircraft was vibrating. Not dramatically; just the constant, almost imperceptible movement of a machine hurtling through the air at 38,000 feet. And that vibration was passing through the little plastic tray table, through the paper cup, into the water. Tiny pulsations moved across its surface.

I watched them. I don't know how long I sat there looking into this cup of water, but apparently it was long enough to become conspicuous. The flight attendant came back and looked at me.

“Is everything okay?”

Everything was superbly okay. I wasn't upset. I wasn't frozen or distracted. I hadn't forgotten what I was doing. I was completely absorbed. There was something exquisite about those tiny movements in the water. I suppose for a moment, I was inside them. Eventually, I made the tea.

I have been thinking about that cup of water lately because I have started writing about theatre.

## **Criticism**

There is currently a public conversation unfolding about what critics owe theatre and artists. It has raised old and difficult questions about critical generosity and severity, expertise and responsibility, and what criticism is for. But listening to the discussion, I have found myself preoccupied by a different question.

*What do I owe myself when I go to the theatre?*

I don't mean *owe myself* in the consumer sense. I mean something closer to the quality of attention I bring with me. I want to arrive curious, interested in what is actually happening before deciding what kind of thing I think is happening.

I want to learn, too. I'm greedy for all the knowledge I can gather about theatre—its histories, forms, techniques and arguments.

But there is a tension in that desire. I don’t want knowing more to make me less available to experience. I want to remain capable of being surprised. Or moved. Delighted, irritated, bored, unsettled. Perhaps even changed. None of those responses can be demanded from a work, and I don't think openness means manufacturing them. I don't want to arrive requiring an experience. I want to remain capable of having one.

That responsibility begins with me, but it doesn't end there. Theatre is made between people. Whatever I bring into the room becomes, however minutely, part of what happens there: my attention, my laughter, my restlessness, my stillness, my breathing. And if I later write about the work, something of that encounter travels further still.

Perhaps this has been occupying me because I know what can happen when I am open enough to let a performance really get under my skin.

## **Cracked**

A few years ago, I went to see Back to Back Theatre’s *Multiple Bad Things*, at Malthouse Theatre.

It wasn't the first time theatre had moved me deeply, and it certainly wasn't the last. I have cried in theatres plenty of times. I have laughed until I hurt. I have felt disturbed and completely alive. But what happened to me during *Multiple Bad Things* was peculiar. It remains one of the most profound experiences I have had in a theatre, and I still can't fully explain it.

The work takes place in a workplace of sorts, where three people have been assembled to perform an apparently pointless task. Power shifts. One worker is bossed around, bullied, made vulnerable. Eventually another worker, who has repeatedly struggled to get help from the people around her, turns elsewhere for support.

She calls a helpline.

What follows is very funny.

She waits on the phone while a recorded voice delivers the kind of institutional language that promises care while making actual care almost impossible to reach. The longer she waits, the more absurd it becomes. The recording keeps talking. Its assurances become increasingly useless, then grotesque.

I was losing my mind laughing.

It wasn't polite laughter. It was full-bodied, helpless laughter, the kind that takes over breathing. The recording would continue and somehow become more absurd, and the laughter would come again. My diaphragm was already caught in its rhythm: breath, contraction, release; breath, contraction, release.

And then, abruptly, she got through.

I can't now remember exactly what she said. I remember what happened to me when she said it. Suddenly there was a frightened person where the joke had been. She was scared. Sad. Alone, asking for help. And somehow, without a moment of transition, I began to sob.

Even now, what strikes me is that my body barely had to change what it was doing. Laughter and crying are physiologically strange neighbours. My breathing was already broken up; my body was already contracting and releasing; I was already surrendered to something I wasn't consciously controlling. The laughter didn't finish and then make way politely for grief. The crying merged with it, seamlessly.

And something inside of me cracked open.

![Glowing orange lava flowing through cracks in a dark volcanic surface in Iceland.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/08/pexels-tomas-malik-793526-27245747-1.jpg)

Photo: Tomáš Malík ([Pexels](https://www.pexels.com/photo/layers-of-lava-in-a-volcano-27245747/?ref=melbournestagereview.com))

Tears poured down my face for the rest of the performance. Not noisily after that initial rupture, but continuously, like the flow of a persistent stream. They were still coming twenty minutes after the performance ended. I remember leaving the theatre still somehow inside whatever had happened to me.

I don't think everyone else in the audience experienced what I did. I may have been the only person in the room having quite that experience.

It would be easy to say that *Multiple Bad Things* made me sob, or that Back to Back engineered an extraordinarily effective transition from comedy to pathos. There is truth in both. The work had constructed the conditions of that moment with exacting precision. But neither quite accounts for what happened. Something in the work met something in me.

I brought something to it. I don't entirely know what. I arrive with a body, a history, a temperament, whatever happened to me that day, whatever I am carrying without knowing that I am carrying it. Other people arrive differently. We sit together and something happens—or doesn't.

I don't want every performance to do to me what *Multiple Bad Things* did. God, no. I would be a wreck. Nor do I think the intensity of my response proves that it was a great work, or that somebody who remained dry-eyed failed to understand it. My response isn't a verdict.

But it tells me something about what I am capable of bringing to a theatrical encounter.

And I don't want to lose that.

## **Intimacy**

I had been thinking about all of this on a dog walk when I arrived home to find a book waiting on my doorstep.

It was Alison Croggon's *Remembered Presences*, a collection of her theatre criticism. I had ordered it some time earlier. The timing of its arrival was ridiculous.

At the beginning of the book, before the collected criticism begins, Croggon offers a short credo on what it means to think like a theatre critic. Her first instruction is startlingly simple:

> *First, you mustn't think… you watch and listen and feel… you open your body to the rhythms of the performance.*

I had spent much of the walk trying to find words for almost exactly that.

Croggon describes the moment before a performance begins as one of uncertainty. However much you know, however familiar the work, you do not yet know what is about to happen. The performance itself is made not only from everything the artists have prepared but from its meeting with what Croggon calls “*the unknown, which is the audience.*”

Then, afterwards, something changes.

You remember. You research. You think. You bring knowledge, experience and history to bear upon what you encountered. You begin the different labour of making criticism.

I found the distinction clarifying. To argue for the body in criticism is not to argue that an intense feeling constitutes a critical judgement. I sobbed through *Multiple Bad Things*. Someone else didn't. Neither response tells us, by itself, whether the work was good.

My body is not an instrument that measures artistic quality. But neither is it irrelevant. Something happened there.

Before I could explain it, before I could place it within an aesthetic tradition or analyse how the dramaturgy had produced it, I had experienced it. Perhaps the thinking comes later because the experience gives us something to think about.

Of course, the distinction is not quite so clean in practice. I cannot leave everything I know in the foyer. Knowledge and recognition are already at work while I am watching. Nor would I want it otherwise. I want that knowledge. I want much more of it. 

But I want it to make me more attentive, not less.

Theatre gives this problem a particular intensity because the thing being attended to is happening while we attend to it. Bodies share a room. Performers respond to one another, to the space, to an audience whose attention is itself perceptible. Laughter moves through a room. So do stillness and unease. One person's response becomes part of what another—performer or spectator—encounters.

![A black-and-white long-exposure photograph of a dancer, their body and sweeping arms appearing in multiple overlapping positions.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/08/pexels-andersonportella-10154711.jpg)

Photo: Anderson Portella ([Pexels](https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-person-on-a-stage-10154711/?ref=melbournestagereview.com))

This is where Erika Fischer-Lichte's account of performance becomes useful to me. Her notion of the *autopoietic feedback loop* describes performance as something generated through the ongoing interaction between performers and spectators. The audience does not simply receive a finished artwork. Our presence becomes part of the event.

That complicates artistic intention too. Intention is extremely relevant: it helps me understand the choices artists have made and what they may have been reaching towards. But once those choices meet bodies, space and an audience, they can produce meanings and effects that no one person planned.

Back to Back made that moment with extraordinary precision, but my response was not simply contained within the work, waiting to be delivered. Something emerged inside the encounter.

The word I kept circling on that dog walk was *intimacy*.

A performer may be costumed, speaking somebody else's words, inhabiting a history entirely unlike their own. There may be layers of theatrical artifice between performer and audience. But the material of performance remains stubbornly human. A body. A voice. Breath. Weight. Timing. Attention.

Breathing, especially, seems important.

We hear it, sometimes. We see its effects. It supports speech, movement, effort, stillness. And our own breathing changes in response. We hold it. Release it. Laugh with it. Sometimes, as I discovered in *Multiple Bad Things*, it gets completely rearranged for us, beyond our own volition.

There is an intimacy in allowing another person's presence to alter your own.

Perhaps this is what I mean by openness. Not simply paying attention, but permitting some degree of permeability: allowing what is happening in front of me to get close enough that I cannot entirely determine in advance what I will make of it. What it will do to me.

And I think that requires a kind of trust.

Not trust that the artists will be ‘good’ or that I will agree with them, or admire what they have made, or even enjoy the experience. Certainly not trust that they will take care of me. The trust is in the encounter itself. Something can be offered without knowing exactly what will happen when it is received.

Like falling in love.

![Black-and-white multiple-exposure photograph of hands and arms overlapping in a series of reaching gestures.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/08/pexels-saulo-hernandez-489940852-20455586.jpg)

Photo: Saulo Hernandez ([Pexels](https://www.pexels.com/photo/palms-of-hands-and-their-shadows-in-black-and-white-20455586/?ref=melbournestagereview.com))

You cannot force yourself to fall in love. Nor, maddeningly, can you demand that another person make you fall in love and judge them a failure when it doesn’t arrive. The experience cannot be summoned by wanting it badly enough. But it *is* possible to make yourself unavailable to it.

You can arrive defended. Fear can stifle it. So can expectation. You can hold another person against an image already formed in your mind, looking for confirmation or disappointment. You can become so occupied with assessing the encounter that you leave no space for the falling. 

I wonder whether expertise can sometimes do something similar.

The more theatre I see, the more readily I recognise things. A gesture recalls another gesture. A choice belongs to a tradition I know. A structure announces itself earlier. This is part of learning to be a critic. I want this knowledge. I want much more of it.

But I don't want recognition to curtail my attention. Because *I recognise this* can so easily become *I know this*. And *I know this* can become *I have seen this before*.

Perhaps what I want, then, is not innocence. Nor do I want to manufacture wonder, walking into every performance determined to find it marvellous. I want something both simpler and more difficult.

Not expecting, but available.

## **The earth circles the sun on repeat**

*I have seen this before.*

There is nothing inherently wrong with that thought. Sometimes it is simply true.

![Close-up of the dark, irregular growth rings and cracked surface of a tree trunk.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/08/pexels-usannova-7123181.jpg)

Photo: Daria Usanova ([Pexels](https://www.pexels.com/photo/close-up-of-a-black-tree-log-7123181/?ref=melbournestagereview.com))

Theatre repeats itself. Artists repeat one another. Forms accumulate conventions. Devices that once seemed startling become familiar and eventually ubiquitous. Critics should be able to recognise those repetitions. Part of the value of experience is precisely that the work in front of you does not exist in a vacuum: you can see its precedents, notice what it borrows, understand where it departs, or when an apparently radical gesture has a rather long history.

But I have become interested in the pronoun.

*I* have seen this before.

That is a statement about the work, but it is also a statement about me.

I have spent the past four years seeing theatre across Melbourne with some regularity—often weekly, sometimes fortnightly, increasingly more as my appetite for it has swelled. Inevitably, I am building an inner archive.

That archive helps me see more. It also gives me more opportunities to become bored. There is a peculiar danger here for critics, whose expertise is built partly through an extremely unnatural concentration of cultural experience. A person who spends several nights a week in theatres is not encountering theatre under anything like the conditions of most of the people sitting around them.

That doesn't mean the critic should pretend it is new. Nor does it make boredom illegitimate. But I think there is a difference between recognising repetition and treating one's own saturation as evidence that the possibilities of the repeated thing have been exhausted.

We sometimes say that we need new stories. I understand the hunger behind that phrase, particularly when it means stories historically excluded from our stages, or ways of knowing and telling that dominant theatrical cultures have treated as peripheral. In Australia, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have been telling stories for tens of thousands of years. The question is not simply whether stories are new, but who has been heard, who has been authorised to tell them, and which ways of understanding the world have been given space. Expanding whose lives and imaginations appear on our stages can push at the boundaries of what a culture has learned to regard as ordinary, possible or true.

But taken literally, I am not sure humans have ever been especially good at producing completely new stories.

We fall in love. We lose people we love. Children struggle against parents and become parents themselves. We betray and forgive one another. We seek home, leave home, return home, discover that home has changed. We live with land and water, weather and seasons; we depend upon them, alter them, are altered by them; we remember that we *are* the land. We are constrained by the structures and norms we inherit, and discover—often painfully but also with great exhilaration—that they can be otherwise. We hurt people while trying to love them. We grow old. We die.

None of these experiences means precisely the same thing everywhere. We understand and organise them through the particular cultures, relationships, environments and histories in which we live. Then we jiggle them around and tell them again.

The repetition may itself tell us something. Cultures become preoccupied with particular fears, relationships, injustices and desires. Stories cluster. A device appears everywhere for a while and then recedes. What looks to a saturated spectator like artistic repetition may also be a culture returning to something it has not finished with.

And even when the story really is old, the encounter is not.

A teenager encountering a theatrical idea for the first time has not somehow arrived too late because I encountered it five years earlier. Nor is my fifth encounter necessarily the same as my first. I have changed. The world around the work has changed. The people making it are different. The bodies gathered to receive it are different.

This is where *we have seen this before* begins to trouble me.

Who is *we*?

Often, I suspect, it means a relatively small group of people who have had unusual access to a great deal of art. Critical experience may give us more authority to locate repetition. I'm not convinced it gives us the right to declare that repetition culturally spent.

## **Astonishment**

Years ago, during a strange period in my life coloured by grief, someone gave me Ben Okri's *Astonishing the Gods*.

I read it in an afternoon.

I have since bought the book more times than I can count on my fingers. The trouble is that I keep thinking of someone who might love it as I do, and giving my copy away. Eventually I buy another. Then, soon enough, I give that one away too.

![An illuminated glass sphere surrounded by looping trails of orange light against a dark background.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/08/pexels-suju-6310480-1.jpg)

Photo: Suzanne Jutzeler / suju-foto ([Pexels](https://www.pexels.com/photo/refraction-of-light-with-glowing-lights-6310480/?ref=melbournestagereview.com))

*Astonishing the Gods* is a rather odd, slim book.

Its unnamed protagonist is invisible, as are his mother and his people. He grows up without finding anything remarkable in this. It is only when he encounters the written histories of the world and cannot find himself or his people in them that invisibility becomes a problem. He leaves home and travels for seven years, searching for the secret of visibility.

Eventually, he arrives by ship at a strange city. It appears deserted, but he can sense people around him whom he cannot see. When the ship calls him back, he chooses to stay on the land.

What follows is an odyssey of sorts, though the journey becomes increasingly inward. He encounters guides, riddles, trials and dangers; he is frightened, tempted and bewildered. Again and again, the categories with which he arrived prove inadequate to what he encounters. His bewilderment, rather than something simply to be overcome, becomes part of his education.

The book met me when something in my life had already shifted. I had become unexpectedly receptive to experiences I didn't have particularly good language for, and Okri's fable met me there.

I don't remember reading it analytically. I remember drinking it, like a tonic. I remember something in its world corresponding to something that had opened in mine.

I was astonished, like the gods, I suppose.

I have always loved that word because of this book: astonish.

Not impress. Not entertain. Not even surprise.

There is something almost destabilising in astonishment. For a moment, whatever arrangement of the world you had been carrying proves insufficient for what has appeared in front of you.

The book left me with an idea I have returned to ever since: that experience may sometimes need to be repeated until it can be experienced properly and fully for the first time. I keep returning to that paradox.

*Repeated until it can be experienced for the first time*.

It seems impossible if firstness belongs only to chronology. I cannot see my first play twice. I cannot unknow Brecht so that I might encounter a Brechtian device without recognition. I cannot empty the theatre I've already seen out of my head before entering the next one.

But perhaps firstness can mean something other than ignorance. Perhaps it is a quality of encounter.

A performer, I am led to believe, knows this problem inside out. Performance is built on repetition. A gesture is rehearsed. A line is spoken again and again. A sequence becomes sufficiently familiar to enter the body. Then the performer comes before an audience and has to do it again. And again tomorrow. And perhaps again a hundred times.

Yet we don't usually expect all this accumulating experience to make the performer increasingly impervious to what is happening. Quite the opposite. Technique and repetition can create the conditions for responsiveness. The line is known so well that it can be spoken *now*. The choreography is held deeply enough in the body that the performer can remain responsive to another body. Mastery need not abolish presence. At its best, it makes presence *more* possible.

I wonder if I can ask something similar of myself as a critic.

The point cannot be to preserve ignorance. I would not wish away the treasure of memory simply to clear the archive. But perhaps all that accumulated knowledge can become more like a performer's technique than a suit of armour.

Held. Available. But not necessarily deployed at every moment.

This may be what I mean by wanting to remain astonishable. Not perpetually astonished. That sounds exhausting, and probably unbearable to sit beside.

Astonish*able*.

Capable of recognising something I have seen before and still allowing for the possibility that I have not seen *this*.

That distinction—between what I know already and what is happening to me right here, right now—is one of the things I first learned about encountering performance, from someone who knew much more about making it than I did.

## **To be: Who am I?**

I may be an artist, but I am not a theatre maker.

That seems worth saying plainly. I haven't trained in performance or directing or dramaturgy. I don't know what it is to spend six weeks in a rehearsal room and then put the result in front of an audience. There are forms of knowledge that come from making theatre that I don't possess, and I don't think seeing a great deal of theatre magically confers them.

But I haven't arrived at criticism entirely from outside that world either.

For several years, as I became an increasingly regular theatre-goer, I had the good fortune to encounter theatre alongside someone trained in making it. We would see something and then talk about it, often for hours.

I learned an enormous amount that way. About performance and craft, theatrical histories and traditions, things I didn't yet have names for. But perhaps the most important thing I learned was much simpler: my verdict wasn't very interesting.

Or, rather, it wasn't interesting *yet*.

I might emerge from a theatre declaring that I loved something or hated it, and the conversation would gently be guided elsewhere.

What happened? What did the work seem to be reaching towards? What choices did you notice? What feeling did it leave you with?

I was being taught, without particularly realising that I was being taught, to become intensely curious about my own response.

![A woman standing partly in shadow in a doorway, framed by the dark interior around her.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/08/pexels-fotios-photos-17660570.jpg)

Photo: Lisa Fotios ([Pexels](https://www.pexels.com/photo/woman-taking-pictures-in-mirror-in-black-and-white-17660570/?ref=melbournestagereview.com))

*I didn't like that* closes something. *What happened there?* opens it.

Opening the question doesn't determine where I will land. Sometimes sustained attention reveals an achievement I initially missed. Sometimes it makes the failure clearer. Sometimes the answer remains simply: I don't think this worked.

But now there is something to investigate.

I later came to understand that some of what I was learning had roots in the ways artists respond to one another's work. An artist showing something unfinished to another artist is vulnerable in a particular way. Looking closely is not simply a matter of delivering a verdict from the safety of the other side of the room. You try to understand what happened: where something became alive, where it lost you, what possibilities might exist inside what is not yet working.

Public criticism is not the same thing. A finished production offered to an audience is not a work-in-progress showing, and a critic is not conducting a feedback session for its makers. But I am grateful that some of my earliest education in criticism came indirectly from a practice in which attention precedes judgement.

If I can offer anything to the artists I write about, I hope it is the feeling that their work was closely seen—not only for what they intended, but for what it became in the encounter. 

And sometimes, what it became will not work. 

I think artists should be allowed to “fail”, whatever that might mean.

That sentence sounds almost embarrassingly obvious until we consider how uncomfortable failure can make us. Particularly in a precarious arts ecology, there can be an understandable impulse to protect the work: to soften criticism because people have worked hard, because careers are fragile, because money is scarce, because making anything at all under these conditions is an enormous achievement.

And the work can still leave us unmoved.

Generosity, as I understand it, cannot mean pretending otherwise. If I approach a work openly and something doesn't connect, I want to be able to say so precisely. If the dramaturgy collapses, if a performance choice obscures rather than illuminates, if an idea remains inert, if the work reaches for something it cannot hold, serious attention requires me to notice that too.

But failure does not make the attempt unworthy.

In fact, I am not sure what kind of art we would have if failure were unacceptable. Art that cannot fail cannot risk very much. And a culture that demanded that every artistic attempt resolve into excellence would seem to me to be making a peculiar demand of art: that it present a perfection we would never reasonably demand of human beings.

We are messy. We misjudge. We reach beyond our capacities. We try things we cannot yet pull off. Or perhaps we once could, and painfully discover that we no longer can. Sometimes the attempt teaches somebody else what becomes possible next. Criticism should be able to stay with that complexity: this did not work, and the attempt still matters. 

And critics, (in)conveniently, are not exempt.

Once I write about a performance and publish what I have written, I have made something too. My criticism can be inattentive. I can misunderstand. I can overstate an argument, become seduced by a clever formulation, mistake my particular response for a universal one. I can be wrong.

If I ask artists to make their work available to my attention, then my own work has to become available in return.

Perhaps this is where I locate myself as a critic: not outside the encounter, delivering a judgement upon it, but somewhere within a larger ecology of people making things, receiving things, responding, misunderstanding, trying again.

I am present, but not central.

Fallible. And still looking.

## **That thing I’ve been yearning for: It’s in the giving**

There is another, much smaller thing I keep thinking about.

My mother taught me to smile at people when I passed them in the street. I still do it. But I used to get annoyed when they didn't smile back.

It was a tiny indignation, hardly worth mentioning, but apparently I had constructed a little moral transaction without noticing it. I had smiled. I had offered warmth. The other person was supposed to recognise the offering and return it.

Then, at some point, something shifted. I realised that simply passing another person in the world had already given me the experience of smiling. They didn't need to smile back.

Perhaps they hadn't noticed me. Perhaps they were sad, distracted, shy, tired, wary of strangers. Perhaps they simply didn't owe me anything. None of it could undo the smile that had already spread across my face.

I don't want art to owe me anything either.

I don't attend generously so that the work will reward me with wonder. I don't make myself available so that an artist will move me. The performer doesn't owe me transformation because I have paid attention, any more than I owe the performer praise because they have exposed something of themselves.

And I don't think I can prescribe this disposition to anybody else. Nor would I want to. There are critics whose severity I admire, critics whose wit can cut a work open in ways my temperament probably never will, critics interested in questions quite different from my own. Criticism would be desperately dull if we all approached theatre in the same way.

This is not a manifesto.

It is a promise I am trying to make to myself.

## **My invitation. My plea**

I don't expect theatre to astonish me. I want to remain astonish*able*.

I won't always manage it.

There will be tired nights and bad moods and too many shows in too few days. There will be complex themes treated with insufficient nuance that get on my nerves. There will be familiar devices and fashionable ideas. There will be programming decisions that make me cynical: work that seems chosen because it is safe, prestigious or likely to get bums on seats. I may have serious things to say about the institutions making those choices. But the artists in front of me still deserve to be encountered as themselves, not merely as evidence in an argument I have already begun having with the institution that programmed them.

I suspect there will be moments when knowing what I know makes it difficult to see anything except what I already recognise. There may come a time when I mistake having seen a great deal for having seen *everything*.

And the danger, I suppose, is that I may not know when that has happened.

I realise this is all very easy for a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed new critic to say. Ask me about it in twenty years, and I may well chuckle.

Nonetheless, I am writing this down now, and putting it somewhere other people can see.

My invitation is this: if one day you notice that my knowledge has become armour; that *I've seen this before* has become *there is nothing here to see*; that I am more interested in demonstrating what I know than discovering what is in front of me—

please splash some cold water in my face.

Help wake me up.
### Some home truths are hard to swallow: Cut Chilli
URL: https://melbournestagereview.com/some-home-truths-are-hard-to-swallow-cut-chilli/
Last updated: 2026-09-03T12:27:53.000Z
There are a lot of jokes in [*Cut Chilli*](https://arts.darebin.vic.gov.au/Programs-and-opportunities/Programs/Speakeasy-presentations/Cut-Chilli?ref=melbournestagereview.com). I didn't laugh very much. 

Strangely, this may be one of the play's great achievements.

Much of Chenturan Aran's play unfolds around a family dinner already primed for disaster. Jamie (Indra Liyanaarachchi), a Sri Lankan Tamil intercountry adoptee raised by white Australian parents, has brought his new girlfriend Zahra (Anna Kaleeda) home to meet the family. Everyone is determined to be on their best behaviour. Nobody is particularly good at it.

Jamie’s parents, Katherine (Alexandra Sangster) and Lee (Soren Jensen), are joined by Lee’s older brother Jeff (Ben Grant), and dinner quickly becomes an exercise in social miscalculation. Zahra, who is Lebanese Muslim, is subjected to awkward questions and horrifically stereotyped assumptions, delivered with apparently good intentions, but she is hardly a passive visitor, quick to push back and occasionally provoke. Jamie needles his parents and turns discomfort into jokes; Katherine works determinedly to keep everything buoyant. Lee, a local councillor facing re-election, flip-flops between campaign mode and Tibetan singing-bowl meditation, while Jeff could easily just be there for the beer. 

Aran has a very good ear for the particular comedy of people trying so hard not to say the wrong thing that the wrong thing becomes almost inevitable. The early humour rides gleefully on the edge of what can and cannot be said on stage, drawing laughter one moment, an audible wince the next.

![The Cut Chilli cast gathered around a crowded family dinner table, with Jamie gesturing animatedly at its centre.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/08/Cut-Chilli-by-Chenturan-Aran_Darebin-Arts-Speakeasy_Alexandra-Sangster--Indra-Liyanaarachchi--Ben-Grant--Anna-Kaleeda-and-Soren-Jensen_photographer-Sarah-Walker.jpg)

**Cut Chilli* by Chenturan Aran, Darebin Arts Speakeasy. Alexandra Sangster, Indra Liyanaarachchi, Ben Grant, Anna Kaleeda and Soren Jensen. Photographer: Sarah Walker.

Beneath the social fumbling and barbed exchanges is the reason Jamie has really come home. He wants to see the papers from his adoption, and Katherine does not want to give them to him. What begins as evasion gradually becomes a battle over how much of Jamie’s own history he is entitled to know. Katherine ducks and weaves until, finally, she insists that she has been protecting him. For Jamie, that protection has itself become a source of harm. As the family’s best behaviour falls off a cliff, the jokes keep coming, but the pain beneath them becomes harder to ignore.

Jamie’s relationship with humour is complicated. He describes learning, while growing up visibly different from his family and those around him, to soothe other people with jokes and smiles. Even this insight, newly acquired in therapy, becomes comic: while explaining it, he absent-mindedly eats a spoonful of crushed chilli, sending him spluttering desperately around the room.

Liyanaarachchi is loose, playful and magnetic, carrying Jamie effortlessly between irrepressible humour and gathering anger. The humour never disappears entirely; at times it seems defensive, at others simply part of how Jamie connects with people. Across the play, comedy keeps changing function: it provokes, deflects, exposes and sometimes simply gives this family a way to delight in one another. But the closer the play gets to Jamie’s pain, the less straightforward laughter becomes.

Zahra could easily become a foil for all this volatility, but Kaleeda gives her more elasticity than that. Her political certainty and capacity to provoke are tempered by flashes of tenderness and generosity.

Katherine is harder to read. Sangster gives an extraordinary, exquisitely layered performance, sustaining an almost exhausting brightness as Katherine dances, fusses, pours copious amounts of wine, and repeatedly tries to “keep it light”. She can be shrill, irritating and caustic, her determined brightness becoming increasingly brittle as Jamie's questions grow more urgent. But beneath the effervescence sits something approaching terror: that in helping her son recover the story of his birth family, she might somehow write herself out of his. Aran does not let that fear excuse what Katherine withholds. Nor does Sangster allow us to dismiss the love entangled with it.

Under Isabella Vadiveloo's direction, the cumulative effect is surprisingly gruelling. The family confrontation runs long and hot, with jokes continuing to arrive but laughter offering only intermittent release. By now, the hurt beneath the comedy has become too visible for every joke to provide an easy escape. At the performance I attended, laughs sometimes broke out around the room, but rarely gathered into the kind of collective release we often expect from comedy. That withholding of release becomes an integral part of the production's power: the tension the audience might ordinarily discharge through laughter is allowed to keep accumulating.

![Lee sits cross-legged on the floor, shouting with his fists clenched during a heightened moment in Cut Chilli.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/08/Cut-Chilli-by-Chenturan-Aran_Darebin-Arts-Speakeasy_Soren-Jensen_photographer-Sarah-Walker-1.jpg)

**Cut Chilli* by Chenturan Aran, Darebin Arts Speakeasy. Soren Jensen. Photographer: Sarah Walker.

When the release finally comes, it is through pathos rather than comedy. The deep, recognisable pulse of shared grief hits us in the guts, in a way laughter never could. 

After the slapstick and shouting reach a crescendo, Jamie and Katherine end up outside, somewhat unexpectedly sharing a joint, and find a tentative way back towards one another. Sangster and Liyanaarachchi play the scene with remarkable delicacy, allowing all the exaggerated energies of the family confrontation to settle into something intimate and beautifully vulnerable. And all that tension finally has somewhere to go. Aran lets mother and son meet in the losses each has carried, and in a shared act of imagination that briefly makes those losses less solitary.

All the while, another story has been unfolding, seemingly at the play's edges, though I wonder if it sits closer to its heart. In video-projected sequences\*, Milakāy (Aarati Ilanko), a Tamil woman in Sri Lanka, speaks across the ocean as she gathers stones from the shore. “*A stone never lies,*” she tells us. “*You just have to read it right*.” Against the squabbling and self-justification of the family drama, Milakāy brings a deeper, more elemental register: one of knowing, memory and connection. Gradually, these scenes give shape to absences in Jamie's history that cannot be recovered through his Australian family alone. Stone, water, spice and scent become a different kind of record: one grounded not in adoption papers, but in place, ancestry and touch.

Through Milakāy, *Cut Chilli* also opens beyond this particular family's reckoning onto the larger history of intercountry adoption: cultural displacement, unequal systems of power, and the movement of children across borders and into new families, sometimes through fraud and trafficking. Jamie's search for his own beginnings reaches beyond the question of what Katherine has or has not told him, towards questions of identity, belonging and who gets to hold the record of a person's life. Aran keeps these larger questions embedded in the messy particulars of family life, allowing the history and politics of intercountry adoption to be felt at the anguished scale of individual lives. And although the politics are never foregrounded at the expense of the family narrative, they burn through nonetheless.

*Cut Chilli* is an exceptional Australian play: wickedly witty, deeply complicated and remarkably tender. For all its noise, it ultimately draws the room into a profound stillness. There are histories Jamie may never fully recover, grief neither mother nor son can undo, and distances that cannot simply be argued away. Aran and Vadiveloo allow discovery and connection without pretending either can make loss whole again.

---

\* *At the performance reviewed, a technical issue with the projection surface made much of the English surtitling of Milakāy’s Tamil dialogue difficult to read. I subsequently consulted Aran’s published script to fill in some of what I had missed.*

[*Cut Chilli*](https://arts.darebin.vic.gov.au/Programs-and-opportunities/Programs/Speakeasy-presentations/Cut-Chilli?ref=melbournestagereview.com) plays at [Darebin Arts Speakeasy](https://arts.darebin.vic.gov.au/Programs-and-opportunities/Programs/Speakeasy-presentations?ref=melbournestagereview.com), Northcote Town Hall Arts Centre  
189 High Street Northcote, until Saturday 23 August 2026.

---

Disclosure: A complimentary ticket to *Cut Chilli* was provided to Melbourne Stage Review for the purpose of review. Melbourne Stage Review retains full editorial independence.
### Break of Day: Dignity without innocence
URL: https://melbournestagereview.com/break-of-day-dignity-without-innocence/
Last updated: 2026-08-16T12:25:53.000Z
What does it mean to live in a “hole”?

Burra Creek is one, at least according to Pamela (Kat Stewart). A nowhere place on the outskirts of a city, neither properly urban nor rural, where the singular promise of employment comes from an enormous online retail warehouse operating around the clock. Pamela works the nightshift there, travelling three buses each way. For seventeen years, she has been determined that her daughter Rae (Sherry-Lee Watson) will have something better. Finish school. Go to university. Get out. But Steve Rodgers’ [*Break of Day*](https://www.malthousetheatre.com.au/whats-on/season-2026/break-of-day?ref=melbournestagereview.com)(Malthouse Theatre, 7-29 August 2026) asks what it means to live in a hole when the walls shape not only whether you can climb out, but what you can dare to imagine.

Pregnant at sixteen and left to raise a child while her own mother was dying, Pamela has spent the years since working herself into the ground with painfully little to show for it. Nightshifts barely keep the household afloat; even ordinary material needs, such as menstrual pads, become unaffordable. Whatever room Pamela once had to imagine a different life for herself has narrowed around the task of making one possible for her daughter. Rae makes that hope plausible: fiercely intelligent, in her final year of school, and labouring over an extended essay on Lolita, a text she chose herself.

![Pamela stands alone in a narrow wash of blue light, surrounded by darkness on the stage.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/08/MalthouseBreakofDay_photoPiaJohnson_159.jpg)

Kat Stewart as Pamela in **Break of Day* at Malthouse Theatre. Photo: Pia Johnson.

In these early scenes, I wasn't entirely convinced by *Break of Day*. Rodgers is grappling with class, gender, generational tensions and social mobility, and occasionally the writing works too hard to make those concerns legible. Some class markers feel especially conspicuous. Pamela's opening image of toddlers with rotten teeth from drinking Mountain Dew, for instance, is vivid but so immediately legible as shorthand for deprivation that it flirts with caricature. I was wary, too, of the easier version of this kind of theatre: poverty rendered as suffering for an audience safely outside it.

But the play soon complicates that suspicion. For instance, Pop (Richard Piper) initially seems easy enough to place: cantankerous, provocative and casually misogynistic, needling Rae with comments about her “sexy” appearance and gendered advice for getting ahead. When she finally turns on him, she confronts him with what she has learned about his history of betrayal and sexual entitlement; his appeals to different times and circumstances cannot quite contain it. The connection back to Rae’s chosen essay text is almost too neat, but the scene itself is not. Rae crosses a line too, taking away his walking frame and leaving it beyond reach, turning his dependence into punishment.

![Rae and Pamela at the kitchen bench while Pop stands opposite them with his walking frame inside Pamela’s modest home.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/08/MalthouseBreakofDay_photoPiaJohnson_064.jpg)

Sherry-Lee Watson as Rae, Kat Stewart as Pamela, and Richard Piper as Pop in **Break of Day* at Malthouse Theatre. Photo: Pia Johnson.

That act unsettles any simple moral arrangement: Rae is wronged but capable of cruelty; Pop is culpable without being reducible to villainy. His own history surfaces too: childhood loss, deprivation, and the stories he has told himself about the choices he made. *Break of Day* allows harm to remain complicated: something people inflict, inherit, answer for and sometimes pass on.

Piper is extraordinary in holding those contradictions together, and the scene also draws some of Sherry-Lee Watson’s strongest work as Rae. Watson is at her best when Rae’s anger breaks through: fierce, sharp and unsparing, giving the confrontation genuine danger. Piper meets that ferocity with remarkable physical detail. His Pop is frail but still capable of grandiosity, at one point hoisting his walking frame above his head in a burst of bravado before his body abruptly gives way. His voice, gait, instability and flashes of pride are so completely inhabited that seeing Piper walk freely onto the stage at curtain call produces its own small shock.

Later, Pop finds himself physically helpless and dependent on Rae for the most basic forms of care. He resists her help, pride and shame colliding with a body that has left him exposed, before reluctantly allowing her to tend to him. Rae’s tenderness after everything that has passed between them is profoundly moving; so too is the trust Pop must place in her to accept it. Anger does not disappear. History is not rewritten. Shame, dependence and tenderness simply coexist.

The encounter between Rae and Pop is among the production’s most affecting achievements, and it was here that the play finally broke through my reservations. Somewhere in that scene, as Rae washes him, Pop curls over and weeps. So did I. There is something profoundly human in the act of care itself: the recognition that, whatever histories we carry, we remain creatures whose bodies will one day betray our independence. What moved me was the social dignity the play finds within that bodily *indignity*, without first requiring innocence. Rae and Pop can both know the harm that has passed between them and still encounter each other in care.

What *Break of Day* keeps worrying at, though, extends beyond the moral complexity of one family. What does agency mean when the field of possible choices has already been radically narrowed? Poverty does not make Pamela's choices for her; deprivation does not absolve Pop of the harm he has caused. Rodgers never lets circumstance become an alibi. But neither does he pretend that choice occurs on neutral ground. These characters act within structures — class, gender, work, migration, family history — that shape what is possible, make some choices ruinously costly, and place others almost beyond imagining.

![Pamela and Sanjeeva, wearing high-visibility workwear, stand together inside the warehouse beneath the metal staircase of the two-storey set.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/08/MalthouseBreakofDay_photoPiaJohnson_085.jpg)

Kat Stewart as Pamela and Chum Ehelepola as Sanjeeva in **Break of Day* at Malthouse Theatre. Photo: Pia Johnson.

Those structures are not abstract in *Break of Day*; they are lived through the body. Bodies toil, bleed, sweat, age and desire; eventually, they fail and need tending. Poverty appears in what bodies go without and what labour extracts from them; dependence in bodies that leak and falter; desire in the heat and smell of sex. This is where the play's social and economic structures become intimate — in flesh that bears their costs.

Nowhere is this more potent than in Pamela herself. Periodically stepping out of the play’s naturalistic exchanges, she addresses us directly, returning to the same refrain: she is invisible. She walks home from nightshift unnoticed; waits in a shop while the attendant ignores her. But the monologues reveal a deeper estrangement. Pamela describes floating somewhere beyond herself, watching her body undergo these experiences as they occurred.

Her insistence on invisibility initially feels slightly at odds with what we are seeing — largely because Stewart is such a powerful presence onstage. Gradually, though, the paradox becomes clearer. Pamela is relentlessly active, yet almost all that activity is absorbed by survival. Seventeen years of work and motherhood have kept life going without giving her much room to alter its terms. Stewart makes this vivid: a woman intensely present to us, yet sometimes strangely absent from her own experience.

There is a bitter social counterpart to that invisibility, too. *Break of Day* understands how a person can go largely unseen in need, while the systems around her remain perfectly capable of making her visible and holding her accountable, when their own rules or interests require it.

![Pamela leans forward at the edge of the staircase, partially lit against the darkness of the warehouse setting.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/08/MalthouseBreakofDay_photoPiaJohnson_009.jpg)

Kat Stewart as Pamela in **Break of Day* at Malthouse Theatre. Photo: Pia Johnson.

If Pamela's life has calcified around the roles she must perform, Rae's boyfriend Jedediah (Theo Clarke) slips freely between them. A cleaner at the same warehouse who wants to be an actor, he rehearses *The Tempest* while pulling sodden filth from a blocked toilet by hand, after the plunger fails. Preparing Caliban, he resists dismissing the character as simply a “beast”, looking instead for another dimension in him. There is a small barb here, too, about an education system that talks earnestly about colonisation and then hands its students Shakespeare; Jedediah's response is neither rejection nor submission: he makes the role his own.

Clarke is superb. There is an ease to his performance that is difficult to manufacture: loose, playful, physically assured, his movement and speech springing coherently from the same impulse. Jedediah can move from Shakespeare to a hilariously ill-advised attempt at a contemporary monologue from *Chopper* without either feeling incongruous. He seems freer than almost anyone else in the play to move between possible selves without mistaking any one of them for the whole of him.

Jedediah also insists on something Pamela cannot imagine: that getting out need not be the only future available to the young people of Burra Creek. Why not stay and make their corner of the world better? At first, I found the optimism almost irritating. But the idea gains force, particularly as Rae begins to question how much of the future she has spent years rehearsing, is actually hers. 

Here, *Break of Day* complicates one of the more comforting stories we tell about inequality: that getting the exceptional child out constitutes success. But even the meaning of “getting out” depends on where you are standing. Burra Creek’s status as a “hole” proves relative. Pamela’s supervisor Sanjeeva (Chum Ehelepola), an old schoolmate now charged with enforcing the warehouse’s rules, rejects her description of the place as hell. Set against his family’s experience of violence and migration, Burra Creek is not somewhere to escape from, but somewhere his family once escaped to. Trap, refuge, home: Burra Creek can be all three. Ehelepola holds those competing truths with quiet precision.

![Jedediah stands beside a toilet in the brightly lit lower-level utility room, while his supervisor Sanjeeva stands above him on the warehouse level in high-visibility clothing.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/08/MalthouseBreakofDay_photoPiaJohnson_097.jpg)

Theo Clarke as Jedediah and Chum Ehelepola as Sanjeeva in **Break of Day* at Malthouse Theatre. Photo: Pia Johnson.

Goodes and designer Anna Cordingley make those limits spatial. Cordingley’s staggering two-storey revolve shifts between Pamela’s worn brick-veneer home and the warehouse, turning distance into labour as Pamela walks and the architecture moves around her. Paul Jackson’s lighting works deftly through windows, doorways and exterior light to mark the passing hours. The warehouse looms above and around the home, binding work and domestic life into the same structure. It organises time, sleep, movement and possibility: Sanjeeva administers its rules; Jedediah cleans its toilets; Pamela gives it her nights. It offers employment, but no real way out.

Jethro Woodward’s composition and sound design give the production much of its pulse, particularly through transitions. Not every transition is as well judged, however. One comic callback badly misjudges its moment. Pamela earlier recalls that Sanjeeva used to sing; he insists he still does, posting performances online. When this returns immediately after the encounter between Rae and Pop, the thematic logic is clear — another self persisting beneath the role Sanjeeva now occupies — but the writing and direction place it too quickly against the preceding grief, crashing through the pathos before it has had time to settle. I longed to remain in the grief the production had earned. I wasn’t ready to be moved on.

![Jedediah stands outside the brightly lit house set while Rae stands inside the kitchen and Pop sits nearby in his chair, all framed within the larger dark stage.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/08/MalthouseBreakofDay_photoPiaJohnson_220.jpg)

Theo Clarke as Jedediah, Sherry-Lee Watson as Rae and Richard Piper as Pop in **Break of Day* at Malthouse Theatre. Photo: Pia Johnson.

That tonal misstep stands out because elsewhere Rodgers and Goodes are incredibly adept at letting contradiction and pain sit unresolved, keeping politics embodied rather than abstract. Stewart anchors an ensemble alive to those tensions: frailty and swagger, anger and tenderness, constraint and possibility.

By the final stretch, the reservations I had carried through the first few scenes had fallen away. What begins as a story about escape and social mobility becomes a harder reckoning with how people make lives within conditions they did not choose. What kind of social order calls it opportunity when flourishing requires leaving the people and places that made us who we are?

*Break of Day* refuses easy answers. Social and economic conditions cannot simply be willed away, but neither do they determine us.

I walked out of Malthouse with tears rolling down my face. *Break of Day* had not convinced me that Burra Creek isn't a “hole”, nor that leaving it would be a mistake. The question was knottier than that. Its characters cannot simply choose their way out of poverty, trauma, history, or the structures that delimit their lives. But nor are they reducible to them. A hole has walls. People inside still move between them. Do we claw at the earth for a way out, or plunge our hands into the same soil and help something grow?

---

The world premiere of[*Break of Day*](https://www.malthousetheatre.com.au/whats-on/season-2026/break-of-day?ref=melbournestagereview.com) plays at [Malthouse Theatre](https://www.malthousetheatre.com.au/?ref=melbournestagereview.com), 113 Sturt Street Southbank in Melbourne, until Saturday 29 August 2026.
### The clown gag inside the horror:  Marginalia
URL: https://melbournestagereview.com/marginalia-pummel-squad-review/
Last updated: 2026-08-19T12:59:15.000Z
I leave [*Marginalia*](https://fortyfivedownstairs.com/event/marginalia/?ref=melbournestagereview.com) wound up like a spring, almost out of breath. There are, admittedly, a lot of stairs between the bowels of fortyfivedownstairs and Flinders Lane, but they aren't really to blame. I've just escaped the fever pitch of a deranged nightmare: funny, disturbing and possessed of a heady logic: *better to laugh than cry*.

That fever pitch is still some way off — it is a long jog to the first joke. Tyler (Ludomyr Kemp-Mykyta) runs in wide circles around the stage to Fatboy Slim’s *Right Here, Right Now* (I didn't time it, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were the full 6:27 track). Every transition in the beat registers somewhere in their body, however slightly: a shift in gait, a contortion of the mouth, a flick of the wrist in recognition. 

![Ludomyr Kemp-Mykyta as Tyler runs across a black-and-white checkerboard stage, caught mid-stride under blue theatrical lighting.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/08/Marginalia-by-Pummel-Squad_Photos-by-Nick-Robertson-020.jpg)

Ludomyr Kemp-Mykyta as Tyler in **Marginalia*. Photo: Nick Robertson.

It ought to be banal. Instead, the repetition winds the room tighter. Nothing much is happening, but something surely must, and Kemp-Mykyta holds the audience inside that anticipation. Small ripples of laughter begin to break through — not because the running itself is especially funny, but because they are *still running*. And with such conviction.

When Tyler finally speaks, they confirm what they suggest we must surely have gathered already: they are a barber. They hate it. Like the rest of us, Tyler works because they have to; the job is merely a means to an end. What they really are, they explain with magnificent earnestness, is an artist. This — the running — is the art. And then *Right Here, Right Now* starts again.

By then, almost without our noticing, Pummel Squad has strapped us in for the ride. Two balaclava-clad figures carrying a semi-automatic weapon emerge from stage right; the irrepressible 'Clowno' (Molly Holohan) appears from the left. Tyler attempts to de-escalate whatever this is. They fail. Shots are fired. The temperature changes, and there is no going back: menace and hilarity will coexist until the end.

From here, *Marginalia* hurtles forward according to the logic of a nightmare. A disembodied voice begins narrating Tyler's actions as they eat a sandwich, first describing what is happening and then getting disconcertingly ahead of them: what's in the sandwich, what's in their mouth. A nose, it turns out. Gogol’s errant appendage belongs here to Major Pepsi (Cooper Donald McDonald), a fabulously wealthy government official whose absurdly expansive portfolio encompasses seemingly every arm of government — including, almost as an afterthought, the Arts.

Pepsi wakes noseless amid the imagined opulence of his bedroom, tucked into a shopping trolley dressed as a bed — the first of many ingenious lo-fi transformations in Savanna Wegman's design. From there, his search for the missing nose propels us through a civic landscape of socialites, bureaucrats, welfare recipients, police, prisoners, clergy and a prodigiously large nose with a mind very much of its own.

![Cooper Donald McDonald as Major Pepsi covers his noseless face with one hand while an enormous sculpted nose looms behind him on the dimly lit stage.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/08/Marginalia-by-Pummel-Squad_Photos-by-Nick-Robertson-129.jpg)

Cooper Donald McDonald as the noseless Major Pepsi, with the object of his search looming behind, in Marginalia. Photo: Nick Robertson.

The aesthetic is gloriously ramshackle; the dramatic execution is anything but. Pummel Squad describes its practice as ‘poor theatre’, and *Marginalia* makes a virtue of theatrical scarcity. Rough-hewn set pieces are shifted, turned and repurposed in full view, continually remaking the space. White Y-fronts recur beneath increasingly outlandish costumes; faces acquire thick black cartoon noses, blue eyeshadow and smeared red mouths. As the nightmare escalates, so does the grime: makeup smudges, bodies dishevel, until the grotesquerie of this world seems written across the performers themselves.

Such apparent chaos requires formidable control, and director Katy Maudlin keeps the production’s escalating disorder on a tight rein. Kemp-Mykyta is magnetic. McDonald remains the fixed point as the ensemble transforms around him, giving Pepsi a potent combination of entitlement, vanity and childish desperation. Alexandra Aldrich is deliciously excessive as Pepsi's extravagantly coiffed mother, all hoity-toity vowels and mounting social horror. Moving through a succession of roles, AYA is particularly difficult to look away from: slight in frame but potent in movement, voice and presence.

![AYA performs in a vivid orange wig and exaggerated clown makeup, gesturing with one hand against the dark theatrical set.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/08/Marginalia-by-Pummel-Squad_Photos-by-Nick-Robertson-120.jpg)

AYA in **Marginalia*. Photo: Nick Robertson.

Across the ensemble, the rhythms of the form are impeccably handled: exaggerated faces, abrupt transformations, elastic accents and minute reactions are precisely timed. 

The technical work is similarly assured. Justin Gardam’s sound design is particularly deft; music seems not so much to begin as to have quietly appeared, slipping scenes into familiar cinematic registers before we quite notice it happening. Amelia Lever-Davidson’s lighting can be unexpectedly beautiful amid all this grime: in the church, haze catches the light around the altar before an enormous nose on fishnet-clad legs emerges through it, like some gloriously profane apparition.

The satire finds its sharpest edge in a Centrelink-like welfare office, where Harry McGee is perfectly officious as a clerk perched above the supplicants queueing below. Nonsensical government forms are dispensed through horizontal blinds below him.

There is no sentimental portrait of the downtrodden here. Their needs are various, sometimes ridiculous, sometimes painfully ordinary. When Pepsi's insistence that — *I need help* — is taken up around the room, the phrase begins to exceed his own absurd grievance. Everyone needs help. What begins as one powerful man's demand becomes, almost despite him, a collective cry.

![Harry McGee as a welfare clerk peers down from behind horizontal blinds, wearing an orange visor as performers queue below in the production’s absurdist Centrelink-like office.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/08/Marginalia-by-Pummel-Squad_Photos-by-Nick-Robertson-182.jpg)

Harry McGee in **Marginalia*. Photo: Nick Robertson.

Elsewhere, the joke stops being quite so easy to laugh at. AYA's Police Superintendent periodically slips behind hanging yellow plastic strips; screams follow from somewhere we cannot see. In conversation with Pepsi, they reel off the policies he has authorised, each accompanied by the turning of an imaginary wheel or pulling of a lever — and another blood-curdling scream. The distance between bureaucratic authority and what is done in its name suddenly becomes horribly short.

It is here that something more painful begins to register beneath the farce, though *Marginalia* never gives that pain an easy place to land. There is little conventional pathos: instead, the unease accumulates across the world Pummel Squad has built.

At times, that relentless grotesquerie approaches saturation; the brutality of the Superintendent sequence, in particular, comes perilously close to overwhelming the comic frame around it. The laughter drains from the room. Watching Pummel Squad dance along that edge is electric.

And still, *Marginalia* is very, very funny. Pummel Squad keeps finding the clown gag inside the horror and the horror lurking inside the clown gag. Just as an image threatens to become unbearable, it can collapse into slapstick; a political grievance can balloon into ridiculous spectacle. The laughter offers little relief. Instead, it propels us through a world becoming ever more unhinged.

![The Marginalia ensemble spread across the stage beneath intense red lighting, their bodies caught in exaggerated poses amid the production’s ramshackle set.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/08/Marginalia-by-Pummel-Squad_Photos-by-Nick-Robertson-183.jpg)

The ensemble of **Marginalia*. Photo: Nick Robertson.

For all its cartoonish exaggeration, there is something horribly recognisable in the world Pummel Squad has assembled. Wealth accumulates at the top while everyone else queues to ask for help. Political authority is sufficiently removed from its consequences that those who exercise it need never witness them. Paid work, Tyler has already suggested, is something endured to make possible the life one actually wants; art is tacked onto the end of an impossibly long list of government portfolios. Even revolution proves vulnerable to vanity, spectacle and self-interest. 

With a Victorian election approaching amid a political climate increasingly animated by disaffection, grievance and distrust, all this carries an uncomfortable contemporary charge. *Marginalia* takes aim everywhere, but its targets are connected by a common question about who gets to need, who gets heard, and who has enough power to make their own need everybody else's problem.

Perhaps this is why the pain amid all that hilarity is so difficult to pin down. It resides less in any one character than in the world accumulating around them. There is something close to despair simmering underneath *Marginalia*, but Pummel Squad refuses despair's solemnity. Instead, they make it ridiculous, excessive, violent, vulgar — and extraordinarily entertaining.

Eventually, they let us go. I climb back out onto Flinders Lane. The night is comparatively quiet; there is air again. I head towards the tram stop. Barely a stone's throw away, 101 Collins rises above the city. After *Marginalia*, it looks just a little more grotesque than I remember.

---

[*Marginalia*](https://fortyfivedownstairs.com/event/marginalia/?ref=melbournestagereview.com) plays at [fortyfivedownstairs](https://fortyfivedownstairs.com/?ref=melbournestagereview.com), 45 Flinders Lane, Melbourne, until Sunday 16 August 2026.
### Notes from an unfinished exhibition
URL: https://melbournestagereview.com/notes-from-an-unfinished-exhibition/
Last updated: 2026-08-16T12:47:00.000Z
At the end of [*Exhibition: First and Second*](https://www.lamama.com.au/whats-on/explorations-2026/exhibition-first-and-second/?ref=melbournestagereview.com), Caroline Lee bows. But it isn't quite the bow we are used to. At the corner of her mouth she gives away something slightly sheepish, almost questioning, as if to say: *I hope that was okay?*

This is [La Mama Explorations](https://www.lamama.com.au/whats-on/explorations-2026?ref=melbournestagereview.com), a series in which everything presented is, by definition, unfinished. Lee performs with script in hand, its provisional state conspicuous: vast sections on some pages are crossed through with raw pen strokes. The palette is visible. 

There is something startlingly intimate about being allowed to see it.

Before Lee enters, we see an enormous repurposed canvas backdrop hanging from a rail at the back of the stage, its long tail spilling into chaotic folds across the floor. We have to negotiate its rubble on our way to our seats. There is also a small dark-timber desk and lamp, books, framed family portraits, an old chair. Another chair will eventually emerge from beneath the canvas.

Lee enters barefoot in a white slip, clutching a white handbag. She approaches tentatively, puts on her shoes, finds a crumpled piece of brown paper on the floor, and reads.

What follows is a collage of women, images, memory and representation, drawing on [Nathalie Léger's writing](https://dorothyproject.com/book/exposition/?ref=melbournestagereview.com) about women who have themselves made and inhabited images. Lee acknowledges the dizzying recursion: a woman playing a woman writing about a woman playing another woman. At times Lee plays Léger; at others, Léger's subjects. 

The layers keep shifting. A nineteenth-century countess, [La Castiglione](https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2000/comtesse?ref=melbournestagereview.com), commands hundreds of photographic portraits of herself; Lee rolls through the poses in silence, first with infectious fascination and later with an almost aggressive exasperation. Barbara Loden writes, directs and stars in [*Wanda*](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/barbara-loden-a-woman-telling-her-own-story-through-that-of-another-woman?ref=melbournestagereview.com), a film inspired by the story of another woman, further blurring the boundaries between woman, character and image. Other women flicker through.

The work becomes easier to follow when you stop insisting on a narrative thread. Instead: follow Lee's attention. When some archival detail fascinates her, we lean towards it too. When she is amused, frustrated or frightened, the emotional logic remains clear even when the connections are not. Moving restlessly between narrator and subject, historical lives and imagined memories, Lee is a magnetic guide through the work's shifting layers, carrying us from fascination to frustration, fear and exquisite tenderness.

And then her own life enters the collage.

Her mother was a botanist. Lee reads from [her book](https://www.mup.com.au/books/name-that-flower-the-identification-of-flowering-plants/9780522876048?ref=melbournestagereview.com) — a life compressed into a few lines of professional achievement. She imagines her mother as a child. Tasmania sits somewhere beyond a brick wall. She searches frantically for traces of her, left decades earlier in a guest book. Later, she becomes the daughter caring for her as death approaches. The gestures of care are exquisitely small: *there you go*.

All the while, Meg White's canvas design keeps changing. Under Laurence Strangio's direction, Lee walks across it, disappears behind it, crawls beneath it. It becomes costume and photographic backdrop; elsewhere, something suffocating. Its transformations are simple, precise and often startlingly beautiful.

Then it becomes breath.

Lee gently lifts a fold from the floor and lets it fall, her body slowly rising and falling with it. Again. Her mother's laboured breathing, made material in canvas and movement. It brought tears to my eyes.

Perhaps there is something particularly affecting about encountering such a moment before the work around it has hardened into certainty. We usually meet performers after the crossings-out have disappeared. Here, Lee is offering something deeply personal while still working out the shape in which to offer it.

That exposure feels extraordinarily generous.

I don't know what *Exhibition: First and Second* will eventually become. That is, after all, the point. But there is a peculiar privilege in being invited into a work while it is still becoming: seeing the uncertainty, the seams, the fresh edits — and watching it breathe.

---

[*Exhibition: First and Second*](https://www.lamama.com.au/whats-on/explorations-2026/exhibition-first-and-second/?ref=melbournestagereview.com) is at [La Mama HQ ](https://www.lamama.com.au/?ref=melbournestagereview.com) until 9 August 2026, as part of [La Mama Explorations](https://www.lamama.com.au/news/2026/la-mama-explorations-is-back?ref=melbournestagereview.com).
### Funeral Flowers: Still growing
URL: https://melbournestagereview.com/funeral-flowers-still-growing/
Last updated: 2026-08-16T12:40:33.000Z
Some plays leave you thinking about the characters. Others leave you thinking differently about the world. [*Funeral Flowers*](https://www.redstitch.net/funeral-flowers-2026?ref=melbournestagereview.com) (Red Stitch, 25 July-23 August 2026) somehow does both.

Inspired by the life of London florist Gina Moffatt, the play follows seventeen-year-old Angelique through foster care, first love, sexual violence and an unwavering dream of becoming a florist. Directed by the deft hand of Candy Bowers and anchored by an extraordinary solo performance from Lucy Ansell, this Australian premiere is a work of uncommon compassion, refusing sentimentality without ever surrendering hope.

Ansell's achievement is immense. Playing seventeen-year-old old Angelique and the constellation of people who shape her life — her foster carer Sam, controlling boyfriend Mickey, floristry teacher Carol, her imprisoned mother and many others — Ansell transforms with such complete physical, vocal and emotional conviction that it becomes easy to forget only one performer stands before us. Voice shifts, certainly, but so too do posture, rhythm, breath, gaze and emotional temperature. Each character seems to arrive with an interior life already unfolding, as though we have stepped briefly into lives that existed long before the lights came up. It is a performance of extraordinary precision and astonishing emotional generosity.

![Lucy Ansell stands centre stage wearing a silver jacket against a blue-lit backdrop in Funeral Flowers.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/08/Red-Stitch-FuneralFlowers_Lucy-Ansell_Photo-by-JessDcruze_4.jpg)

Lucy Ansell in Emma Dennis-Edwards' **Funeral Flowers*, directed by Candy Bowers for Red Stitch. Photo: Jess D'Cruze.

Dennis-Edwards' writing is every bit as accomplished. Flowers are not merely recurring symbols but an evolving poetic vocabulary through which Angelique understands herself and the world around her. Early in the play she gently dismantles the common association between lilies and death, describing them instead as symbols of innocence: 

> *"...the soul departing the body and giving new innocence to the person who has died."* 

Later, after one of the play's most harrowing scenes, Angelique imagines lilies pushing through the soil on her skin before they disappear with the devastating realisation: 

> *"...but I'm not innocent again."* 

The image is unforgettable because the play refuses the comfort it seems momentarily to promise. Trauma cannot simply be washed away. Innocence cannot be restored through metaphor. Rather than reaching for redemption, *Funeral Flowers* searches, stubbornly and beautifully, for something more difficult: dignity.

That same raw honesty extends to every relationship in the play. Dennis-Edwards pushes us to go beyond the reassuring simplicity of heroes and villains. Mickey's coercive control unfolds with painful accuracy, revealing how intimate partner violence can disguise itself as devotion. Yet even after his betrayal, Angelique comes to see the frightened child beneath the violent young man. 

This is not forgiveness, nor does the play ask us to redeem him. It is the moment she finally sees him in his entirety—and herself separately from him. In a lesser play, such recognition might become absolution. Here, it becomes liberation. *Funeral Flowers* asks what becomes possible when people are finally seen as they are, rather than as fear, shame or longing has taught us to imagine them.

Yet the production's most profound insight lies elsewhere.

Following an assault, Angelique returns home consumed by shame. Convinced she is "*dirty and soiled inside*", she cannot imagine anyone meeting her with anything but disgust. Her foster carer, Sam, has spent the night desperately trying to contact her. When Angelique finally walks through the door, Sam's fear emerges first as anger. Neither is wrong, yet they miss one another entirely. Sam cannot yet see the shame consuming Angelique; Angelique cannot recognise the love beneath Sam's frustration.

![Lucy Ansell lies curled on a concrete platform surrounded by flowers and foliage under green stage lighting in Funeral Flowers.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/08/Red-Stitch-FuneralFlowers_Lucy-Ansell_Photo-by-JessDcruze_7.jpg)

Lucy Ansell in **Funeral Flowers*, Red Stitch. Photo: Jess D'Cruze.

It is an exquisitely observed moment because of its psychological truth. Dennis-Edwards understands that profound shame can render care almost impossible to receive. At precisely the moment Angelique most needs comfort, she is least able to recognise it.

Bowers' production meets that emotional complexity with remarkable theatrical confidence. Bianca Pardo's vibrant, multi-level design, Christian Biko's richly textured soundscape and Kyra Ryan's expressive lighting embrace theatricality without ever overwhelming it. Just as importantly, Bowers knows exactly when to let those elements fall away. The production repeatedly trusts silence, stillness and human presence to carry the emotional weight, giving moments of genuine connection the space they need to unfold.

The production’s confidence in restraint finds its fullest expression, as Angelique apologises before leaving Sam’s care. She reaches across and tenderly wipes the tears from Sam's face. Bowers allows the gesture to linger without embellishment, trusting its simplicity. Nothing more needs to be said. It is one of the most affecting moments I have witnessed on stage this year.

And it was also the moment that stayed with me after I left. Not because it resolved the relationship, but because it gently expanded it. Watching Sam and Angelique finally find one another, I found myself thinking about the conversations we have around children in care—and the ones we don't.

I have read a great deal about resilience over the last few years, particularly in relation to children in out-of-home care. Over the past four decades, research has evolved from viewing resilience as an individual capacity to "bounce back" from adversity, towards a far richer understanding of resilience as something socially enabled through relationships, belonging, recognition, opportunity and the meanings young people make of their own lives.

Yet watching *Funeral Flowers*, I found myself wondering whether our broader public conversations about resilience—particularly once translated into policy, funding priorities and service design—sometimes stop too soon. We speak confidently about "protective factors": stable placements, supportive relationships, educational engagement, independent living skills. These are essential conversations. They shape where resources flow, how services are designed, and what practitioners are asked to prioritise.

But they are not the *whole* conversation. Or they shouldn’t be.

More than twenty years ago, Anne Deveson described resilience as "*the life force that flows and connects every living thing, continually prompting regeneration and renewal*." 

Although contemporary resilience research has likewise moved well beyond notions of resilience as an individual trait, *Funeral Flowers* reminds me that the things which make a life worth living are often the hardest things to measure or develop policy ‘interventions’ for.

Survival is not the same thing as having something to *live towards*.

![Lucy Ansell reclines among concrete platforms and flowers under warm stage lighting in Funeral Flowers.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/08/Red-Stitch-FuneralFlowers_Lucy-Ansell_Photo-by-JessDcruze_3.jpg)

Lucy Ansell in Emma Dennis-Edwards' Funeral Flowers, directed by Candy Bowers for Red Stitch. Photo: Jess D'Cruze.

Angelique's flowers matter because they become the place where identity, beauty, vocation and possibility converge. Carol does more than teach floristry; she recognises Angelique's gift before Angelique fully trusts it herself. The flower shop Angelique dreams of owning is more than employment. It is a future she authors for herself.

That distinction feels important.

Protective factors create the conditions in which a life can begin to unfold. They are not the life itself. 

Watching *Funeral Flowers*, I found myself thinking about the people who notice what makes kids come alive—and who is there (or not) to nurture those fragile beginnings until they become part of a life.

And I wonder about the more than [34,000 children currently living in out-of-home care](https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/child-protection/child-protection-australia-2024-25/contents/insights/supporting-children?ref=melbournestagereview.com) across Australia, whose passions may look entirely different. Music. Football. Mechanics. Dance. Caring for animals or Country. The thing itself almost doesn't matter. What matters is that someone notices it. That someone makes room for it to grow. That alongside protecting children from harm, we remain equally committed to nurturing the identities, relationships and vocations that make a life feel worth living.

In keeping with Dennis-Edwards' refusal of easy redemption, the closing scenes offer no false consolation. Angelique does not recover her innocence. She does not receive justice. She remains permanently altered by the brutality of her experience. She wonders whether she is "more a weed than a flower" before answering her own question:

> *"But I'm still here.* 
> *I'll rise through the dirt,* 
> *Even when it hurts."*

It is a quietly magnificent image.

![Lucy Ansell stands centre stage in Funeral Flowers, where Bianca Pardo's layered set shifts seamlessly between memory, longing and possibility. Photo: Jess D'Cruze.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/08/Red-Stitch-FuneralFlowers_Lucy-Ansell_Photo-by-JessDcruze_5.jpg)

Lucy Ansell in Red Stitch's Australian premiere of **Funeral Flowers*, directed by Candy Bowers. Photo: Jess D'Cruze.

Not because weeds are beautiful, nor because suffering somehow ennobles them. But because they continue reaching towards the light, even after the world has buried them.

So does Angelique.

And perhaps that is the quiet gift *Funeral Flowers* leaves us with: a reminder that flourishing begins when someone notices what is waiting to bloom.

---

[*Funeral Flowers*](https://www.redstitch.net/funeral-flowers-2026?ref=melbournestagereview.com) plays at [Red Stitch Actor's Theatre](https://www.redstitch.net/?ref=melbournestagereview.com), Rear 2 Chapel Street, St Kilda East, until Sunday 23 August 2026.
### Losing Face and the trouble with ageing well
URL: https://melbournestagereview.com/losing-face-and-the-trouble-with-ageing-well/
Last updated: 2026-08-16T12:36:53.000Z
There is a point in [*Losing Face*](https://www.mtc.com.au/plays-and-tickets/whats-on/season-2026/losing-face?ref=melbournestagereview.com) when a dead woman is strapped to a bellboy trolley, arms spread almost cruciform, and transformed into what looks like a grotesque wellness Christmas tree. Bags of yellow collagen hang on her. An LED mask casts a gruesome red glow across her face. At her feet is an assortment of spiritual paraphernalia. Someone has changed her into loose, coarse cotton, as though death were merely an inconvenient interruption on the way to yoga.

And still the jokes keep coming. So does the laughter.

Mine included.

It has been a good few years for ageing. Or at least for its rebrand. Apparently the phrase “anti-ageing” has become slightly embarrassing. Too hostile, perhaps. Too obviously suggestive of the possibility that getting older might be something to oppose. In its place have come gentler formulations: healthy ageing, positive ageing, pro-ageing, skin longevity. The beauty industry increasingly talks not about reversing age but about extending the period in which skin remains healthy, resilient and vital. “Skin longevity” is now sufficiently established to be described as one of beauty and wellness’s major trends.

The language is kinder. The work has not necessarily gone away. Wrinkles can still be reduced. Collagen can still be stimulated. Dark spots corrected. Skin firmed, tightened and plumped. We are simply invited to understand these activities differently. They belong not to a futile war against time but to the responsible maintenance of the body we have been given.

We are not anti-ageing. We are “ageing well”.

![Older woman receiving a cosmetic injection near her eye.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/07/pexels-cottonbro-7582553.jpg)

Photo: Cottonbro Studio / [Pexels](https://www.pexels.com/photo/medic-give-injection-in-forehead-7582553/?ref=melbournestagereview.com)

This distinction becomes rather harder to sustain in Marieke Hardy’s *Losing Face*, directed by Leticia Cáceres for Melbourne Theatre Company (22 June–25 July 2026).

Three old friends — Jo, Simone and Lauren — have arrived at a luxury wellness retreat to celebrate Jo turning fifty.

Happy birthday. Let’s fix you.

Under the ministrations of Tomas, a spectacularly self-regarding wellness guru, bodies are cut, injected, inflated, bandaged and displayed. Surgically enhanced lips resemble a “Bubble O’Bill”. Simone emerges with freshly trimmed arms, blood appearing above the dressings. Lauren acquires a hugely bandaged backside.

Jo, Simone and Lauren are not remotely dignified about any of it. Drugs are retrieved from underwear. A pre-surgery bender ends with the women dragging home an illuminated Guzman y Gomez sign. Desire remains enthusiastically bodily. Tomas makes his entrance elevated above them, spotlighted like a contestant on an old-fashioned talent show, a kind of wellness messiah. The women swoon. One responds to his attentions by enthusiastically fanning her vagina.

It is extremely funny.

But fifty is an interesting birthday at which to stage all this. The women of *Losing Face* are not old. They are middle-aged. Yet perhaps that is precisely the point. The contemporary project of ageing well does not begin in old age. Increasingly, it begins before ageing has had the discourtesy to become particularly visible.

Aesthetic medicine even has a word for the more extreme version of this logic: [prejuvenation](https://academic.oup.com/asjopenforum/article/doi/10.1093/asjof/ojad061/7209250?login=false&ref=melbournestagereview.com). Rather than waiting for the signs of ageing and attempting to reverse them, interventions begin earlier to prevent those signs becoming established in the first place. Elsewhere, the language of “skinspan” now borrows from healthspan: the objective becomes extending the period during which skin retains a healthy — and explicitly youthful — appearance.

The ageing body becomes a project with no obvious starting point and, as *Losing Face* will eventually demonstrate, no obvious end.

Heather Widdows has argued that beauty has increasingly acquired something of the force of an [ethical ideal](https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-032-08035-6%5F3?ref=melbournestagereview.com): bodily maintenance is entangled with effort, discipline, self-care and the requirement to keep working on oneself. The idea is useful here because the wellness retreat in *Losing Face* is not really offering its women frivolity. It offers work.

Work on the face. Work on the arms. Work on the breasts. Work on the arse.

The production gives this idea a beautifully ridiculous physical form in an impractical designer chair. Lauren must contort herself simply to use it, upon arrival at the retreat. Later, newly operated and heavily bandaged, she circles it like a dog trying to settle before painfully lowering herself down. Fashion has made an object worse at performing its most basic function. Around it, wellness is doing something remarkably similar to human bodies. 

Against their increasingly incapacitated bodies stands Tomas. Lithe, strong, flexible and comically sexual, he represents another possibility altogether. His is a body that can actually do things, surrounded by bodies being rendered increasingly dysfunctional in pursuit of improvement.

![Wil King as Tomas stands elevated above four women on the wellness retreat set in Losing Face.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/07/Wil-King--Genevieve-Morris--Christie-Whelan-Browne--Michala-Banas-and-Madeleine-Sami.-Photo-by-Pia-Johnson.jpg)

Wil King, Genevieve Morris, Christie Whelan Browne, Michala Banas and Madeleine Sami in **Losing Face*, Melbourne Theatre Company. Photo: Pia Johnson

And yet Hardy is too canny to make Jo, Simone and Lauren merely victims of all this. They want things.

They are vain and hungry, sexual and jealous, funny and cruel. They participate in the economy around them. They desire Tomas and what he sells. One of the great conveniences of dismissing beauty culture as something patriarchy simply *does to women* is that it leaves very little room for the messy business of women wanting beauty, enjoying it, using it, refusing it, investing in it, competing through it and changing their minds about it.

Research on [women’s responses to ageist beauty norms](https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-032-08035-6?ref=melbournestagereview.com) suggests something similarly untidy: accommodation can sit beside resistance, acceptance beside continued beauty work. The choices do not divide themselves cleanly into liberated and oppressed. Neither do Hardy’s women.

This messiness matters because looking good carries value. Sociologists have called some of that value [aesthetic capital](https://www.emerald.com/books/oa-edited-volume/13544/chapter/84205799/Physical-Appearance-as-a-Form-of-Capital-Key?ref=melbournestagereview.com): the social advantage that can attach to being perceived as attractive. *Losing Face* takes the metaphor rather more literally.

We eventually discover that Tomas has been harvesting youth itself, extracting collagen from one body to transfer its value to another. The metaphor has become flesh itself. And here *Losing Face* begins to brush against another contradiction in the way women age. Research with older women has documented the familiar experience of becoming socially less visible with age. In [Sue Westwood’s work](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08952841.2023.2197658?ref=melbournestagereview.com), one woman captures it with painful economy: “It’s the not being seen that is most tiresome.”

The women of *Losing Face* have not reached old age. But they inhabit a culture that has given them ample warning of its possibility.

There is a peculiar doubleness here. A woman can become less visible while the signs of ageing on her body become more so. The wrinkle. The sag. The grey hair. The changing distribution of lumps. The accumulation of evidence on a surface that increasingly fails to resemble the one we have learned to value.

The newer language of longevity does not necessarily escape this bind. A [recent account of longevity culture](https://www.theguardian.com/wellness/2026/jul/14/anti-ageing-science-longevity-culture?ref=melbournestagereview.com) argues that the old hostility to ageing can survive quite comfortably beneath more scientific and affirmative language; women continue to carry a disproportionate burden of the expectation to remain visibly youthful.

Age. Embrace it. Celebrate it.

Just make sure you do it *successfully*.

*Losing Face* takes this demand and makes a spectacle of it. Its middle-aged women become impossible not to look at.

![Madeleine Sami displays her heavily bandaged buttocks as Genevieve Morris reacts beside her in Losing Face.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/07/Madeleine-Sami-and-Genevieve-Morris.-Photo-by-Pia-Johnson--1-.jpg)

Madeleine Sami and Genevieve Morris in **Losing Face*, Melbourne Theatre Company. Photo: Pia Johnson

Their bodies become larger, stranger, more incapacitated and more spectacular as the play proceeds. A minor characcter - competitive guest, who periodically appears at the retreat sporting a preposterously enormous hat, seems less an aberration than the logical destination waiting at the end of the path.

And we laugh.

This is where I become less certain about what *Losing Face* is doing to us.

Or, perhaps more accurately, what we are doing with it.

Because what exactly are we laughing at?

The women? Tomas? The “Bubble O’Bill” lips? The recognition of beauty practices we already find faintly absurd? The grotesque distance between the promise of improvement and the wounded bodies limping around the stage? Hardy’s language? Cáceres’s exquisite physical comedy? Our own susceptibility to some milder version of the same promises?

The laughter moves too quickly to settle. That matters.

If we were simply laughing at foolish middle-aged women mutilating themselves in an attempt to remain young, *Losing Face* would be a much meaner and much less interesting play. If we were simply laughing at an industry that exploits them, it would be a much easier one. Instead, the object of satire and the object of laughter keep slipping over one another.

Then Jo dies.

At the performance I attended, standby cover, Lucy Goleby, played Jo with script in hand. If this constrained her performance, it was remarkably difficult to detect. Goleby brought a striking lifeforce to Jo: physically expansive, vocally dynamic, utterly committed to the production’s vulgarity. She seemed fresh in a world devoted to manufacturing freshness.

And then Jo dies.

Death should settle things. At the very least, it should provide the natural limit to the wellness project. There is, after all, only so much collagen can reasonably be expected to accomplish. But Tomas does not encounter Jo’s death and become contrite. Nor does he seem especially defensive. He simply extends the logic of wellness beyond its natural limit. Jo becomes his ultimate project.

Collagen is pumped into dead veins. Red light illuminates dead skin. Spirituality and technology and beauty treatment accumulate around a body that has already provided the only possible answer to his promises of mastery over mortality.

The image is horrifying. It is also ridiculous. The profound has been covered in tinsel.

There is something particularly sharp about this joke now. Longevity culture increasingly collapses boundaries among health, beauty and the postponement of ageing: cellular health, collagen production, skin longevity, biohacking, healthspan. 

![Person lying down wearing a red LED light therapy face mask.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/07/pexels-dinc-tapa-691009-7216285.jpg)

Photo: Ding Tapa / [Pexels](https://www.pexels.com/photo/close-up-of-a-person-with-an-led-face-mask-on-7216285/?ref=melbournestagereview.com)

The rhetoric is not necessarily fraudulent — some of the underlying practices have legitimate health or dermatological purposes — but the categories have become remarkably friendly neighbours.

Hardy simply keeps following the promise: if ageing can be managed, why stop at death?

More remarkably, Simone and Lauren do not break the logic of the farce either. They do not call the police. They attempt to steal Jo’s body back. To distract Tomas, they deploy the currency of the world they are supposedly now resisting: sex and vanity. Simone has already seen through Tomas. It hardly matters. She falls straight back under his spell.

Nobody learns very much. The farce only escalates. The nurse, revealed to be seventeen despite her middle-aged appearance (the result of Tomas's collagen harvesting), finally abandons him, only to announce her intention to meet another teenager and see if she can get fingered. Even liberation refuses dignity.

Eventually Simone and Lauren haul Jo’s body to the upper reaches of the set, now recontextualised as a pier. An earlier “fuck it” bucket list had included Jo’s desire to be “shark bait”, so they decide to oblige.

A few superficial words are uttered. The body goes over. Moments later, the soundscape supplies the screams and alarm of a crowded beach discovering what has just landed among them.

Unperturbed, Simone and Lauren reconcile the long-standing quarrel that drove much of the relational drama throughout the play. “I’ll buy you a marg\[arita\].”

Blackout. Applause.

Even then, *Losing Face* is not finished refusing death its gravity. The competitive guest, whom we might reasonably have assumed had expired during an impossibly long stint in the ice bath, suddenly springs back to life, thrilled by how much younger she feels.

Blackout again. Applause.

It would be easy to see the persistence of comedy after the death as a failure of tone: a farce that encounters tragedy but cannot generate sufficient pathos to carry it. I think that interprets the play almost exactly backwards.

*Losing Face* refuses to become a different kind of play because someone has died.

Its darker trick is that death itself is absorbed into the farce. The machine does not stop. It decorates the corpse and carries on. So do we.

At the performance I attended, laughter rolled continuously through the stalls. It diminished a little after Jo’s death, but it certainly did not disappear. I kept laughing too.

This is where the question that followed me out of the theatre really begins.

Hardy and Cáceres have placed these women inside something like a goldfish bowl. Their vanity, betrayals, bodily indignities and appetites are magnified into grotesque spectacle, and we are given permission to look. More than that, we are given permission to enjoy looking.

For a moment, the internal logic of the play becomes powerful enough that disposing of Jo’s body at a crowded beach can seem like a reasonable solution to a practical problem. Described outside the theatre, the same action is horrifying.

One minor character appears to understand this. The nurse can barely look at Simone and Lauren after Jo’s death. She rushes past them. For a moment, she seems to carry the moral conscience of the scene.

She cannot bear to look.

We can.

I don’t think that necessarily makes our looking cruel. Comedy complicates the transaction. We can recognise the absurdity of beauty culture while participating in it. We can know a body has been made grotesque for our amusement while laughing at the culture that made the grotesquerie intelligible. We can be repelled by Tomas and seduced by the theatrical world built around him.

Perhaps we can even recognise ourselves.

The contemporary injunction to “age well” makes that recognition harder to escape. It is difficult to object to health. Or vitality. Or strength. Or taking care of ourselves. The vocabulary has become sufficiently virtuous that the point at which care shades into correction can be remarkably difficult to locate.

![Young woman in profile wearing a red surgical head wrap, with cosmetic surgery markings drawn across her face.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/07/pexels-ben-lyric-74513582-8528647-2.jpg)

Photo: Ben Lyric / [Pexels](https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-woman-with-marks-drawn-on-her-face-8528647/?ref=melbournestagereview.com)

What makes *Losing Face* more than a simple satire of the wellness industry is its understanding that there is no clean line between coercion and desire, care and correction, looking and being looked at. Jo, Simone and Lauren do not cross a single line and become ridiculous. They move through a world in which entirely ordinary desires — to remain attractive, to feel sexual, to be noticed, to inhabit a body that feels like one’s own — are attached to an industry with an almost limitless capacity to generate work for itself.

And the ultimate promise beneath all that work remains impossible. The body *will* age. Eventually, it will die.

Then Hardy straps the corpse to a trolley and puts the LED mask back on.

There is something wonderfully insolent about that image. It strips the euphemism from the project. Optimisation encounters the one body that cannot possibly be optimised and simply keeps going.

But *Losing Face* leaves another piece of the machinery less exposed: us.

This is where I wanted Cáceres to turn the screw another fraction. Not by abandoning comedy for pathos. *Losing Face*’s great strength is its refusal to let death rescue us from comedy. A solemn corpse might have offered its own kind of easy moral release: we stop laughing, recognise death, become good people again.

Nor did I need the production to punish us for enjoying itself.

But there was an opportunity to make the laughter catch, however briefly, at the back of our throats. To make us uncertain not only about what we were watching, but about the pleasure we were taking in watching it.

The goldfish bowl is beautifully clear. It might have been made just a little more reflective.

![Four women sit facing the audience beneath three large projected female faces in Losing Face.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/07/Christie-Whelan-Browne--Genevieve-Morris--Michala-Banas-and-Madeleine-Sami.-Photo-by-Pia-Johnson.jpg)

Christie Whelan Browne, Genevieve Morris, Michala Banas and Madeleine Sami in **Losing Face*, Melbourne Theatre Company. Photo: Pia Johnson

Perhaps that is why Jo’s body has stayed with me. Not because Tomas keeps treating it. Of course he does. By then *Losing Face* has taught us exactly what sort of man he is.

What is stranger is how quickly I accepted her body as another comic object. Collagen. LED mask. Cotton donned for yoga. Each addition makes the image worse. Each also makes it funnier.

Death enters the room. The jokes continue.

And perhaps the most interesting question *Losing Face* leaves behind is not why the jokes continue after death.

It is why we keep laughing.
### Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity: What might we become
URL: https://melbournestagereview.com/masterpieces-theatre-works-review/
Last updated: 2026-08-16T12:45:35.000Z
A nuclear mushroom cloud blooms before us. Faces contort in suffering. Cities lie in ruins.

Human beings did this.

Nadia Tass’s production of Heather McDonald’s [*Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity*](https://www.theatreworks.org.au/2026/masterpieces?ref=melbournestagereview.com) begins at the scale of catastrophe, confronting us with images of war and human suffering. McDonald’s writing does something perhaps more unsettling. It makes the scale smaller and more recognisable.

An art restorer stands captive, arms outstretched and shackled. A soldier interrogates her. A third woman stands nearby, apparently a nurse. Around them, Vivekanantham’s set bears the scars of war: rubble, grubby walls, classical statues among the wreckage, a great jagged hole torn through the roof, occasionally surrendering more fragments to the rubble below.

Here, violence has hands. But so does beauty.

The contradiction aches through *Masterpieces*, never quite healing. Human beings destroy cities and paint Rembrandts. They torture and tell stories. They break bodies and gently tend to them. McDonald offers no comforting division between the kinds of people capable of one and the kinds capable of the other.

That makes for an extraordinarily dense evening: demanding, unsettling and deeply rewarding.

*Masterpieces* moves initially between fragments of film, relational drama and direct-address lecture, and it takes a little time to learn its grammar. One moment Montgomery-Griffiths is the captive, her cream silk shirt stained with bodily fluid, infected wounds on her wrists; the next she pulls on a tweed jacket:

“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.”

The house lights rise. She speaks of cultural masterpieces: in the face of profound destruction, what does a society choose to preserve? Then the question becomes personal. Imagine a fire: if everything we could save had to fit inside a shoebox, what would we choose in the moments before catastrophe?

We had each been handed a small bag on entry containing a pencil, a tiny piece of paper and a stone. We scribble our answers while Montgomery-Griffiths continues speaking. I miss some of what she says.

There is something fitting about this. McDonald’s poetry spills out quickly, one exquisite morsel following another before there is enough time to digest the last. Trying to hold onto it is like putting your hand into a river and expecting to possess the water. Stay too long with one image and another has already flowed by.

Some images remain in memory, days after the play: six headless horses encountered on a walk. A bicycle for two. A professor buried to the waist and stoned to death with books. Rembrandt's self-portraits confronting mortality in his own sagging flesh. A mother drowned. Stones saved from journeys in more peaceful times. Roses grown from the ashes, now fed with blood. A butcher of smiles, with a love of opera.

There is something extraordinary in the accumulation: *Masterpieces* is brutal and delicate, intellectually restless and deeply affecting. It is a remarkable piece of theatre. 

As its formal shifts become less insistent, the relationships among its three women take over. The abstractions of war contract into bodies, objects and story.

![Kate Cole as Mitra confronting Jane Montgomery-Griffiths as the captive Layla on the war-damaged set.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/07/Masterpieces-Production-Images-59.jpg)

Kate Cole and Jane Montgomery-Griffiths in **Masterpieces*. Photo: Sarah Clarke.

Montgomery-Griffiths is extraordinary as Layla, the captive art restorer. Violence remains in her body, well after the moments that inflict it have passed: a convincing limp, the painful wince that seems to arrive before thought can mediate it. She moves between defiance, rage, callousness, tenderness, grief and black humour with such fluidity that the seams between performer and character are impossible to see.

Kate Cole’s soldier, Mitra, takes longer to settle. Her accent is a little difficult to place and, to my ear, remains unresolved. Nor does she quite summon the early ferocity needed to spar with Montgomery-Griffiths and match her roar. But as the plot turns and certainty gives way to vulnerability, Cole finds something much more powerful. Fear, bitterness, grief and dependence seem to draw the performance more deeply into the body; the soldier becomes more complex, more exposed and, for me, considerably more convincing.

The expansive set creates an interesting tension with this increasingly intimate drama. For much of the conflict, Tass keeps the three women largely within its centre, and I found myself wondering what greater spatial compression might have done: how a smaller playing space might have usefully suffocated their dynamic, forcing bodies already caught in relationships of captivity, coercion and dependence into still more uncomfortable proximity.

Laila Thaker is superb, bringing a different kind of force to the character, Nadia. Her guise as nurse is playful, reverent, pragmatic and capable of sudden ferocity. Thaker’s gesture work is particularly lovely: the subtle physicality accompanying a recitation from the Qur’an; an exasperated flick of the wrists — *I give up* — in the middle of heated debate; water spun from an umbrella to amuse the captive, conjuring remembered rain.

Her storytelling is equally deft. One account moves from the ordinary remnants of family life to almost unbearable violence, and in telling it Nadia changes the moral pressure in the room. Her story recasts her: a grieving daughter and a weathered mother, tortured by her own daughter's silence — her little eyes had witnessed too much and the girl no longer speaks.

Earlier, Layla had resisted Nadia’s call to kill their captor: if they did that, she argued, they would be no better than 'them'. Now the suffering is no longer abstract, and neither is our captive's moral choice.

![Laila Thaker as Nadia, standing among rubble on the set of Masterpieces.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/07/Masterpieces-Production-Images-78.jpg)

Laila Thaker in **Masterpieces*. Photo: Sarah Clarke.

Objects gather weight throughout *Masterpieces*. Books. Paintings. Stones. Uniforms. Small things asked to hold histories much larger than themselves.

A uniform carries authority, belonging and dignity, but inevitably, violence too. When Mitra’s uniform passes to another body, its meanings travel with it. So does her expectation that its new wearer should rise to what it represents: “Stand taller.” Even an enemy, once inside the uniform, is asked to honour it. And with the transfer, moral categories muddy too.

Hands become particularly charged in *Masterpieces*. They create and restore. They hurt and can be hurt. They can refuse. They can fail. Mitra has tortured the body whose skilled hands she later needs. The body you damage may belong to the very person whose capacities you later depend on.

"Go figure."

Montgomery-Griffiths returns to this phrase throughout the production, a bleak little shrug at the absurdity of human behaviour. *Masterpieces* contains humour, but almost no comic release. A few people laughed intermittently at the performance I attended; more often its black jokes produced rueful recognition. This is humour from somewhere near the point where the alternatives are to cry or scream.

Joy does not have much purchase here either. And yet beauty does.

The art restorer speaks of her father: a man who looked at a world of extraordinary horror, cruelty and suffering and asked a question that lodges somewhere inside the production: given all this, why is there so much beauty?

Not *despite* the horror, exactly. That would make beauty its consolation.

The question is stranger than that. Why are creatures capable of one, also capable of the other?

A Rembrandt does not compensate for the dead. A beautiful sentence cannot restore a family. The little shower of umbrella rain alters no material fact. Yet McDonald keeps placing acts of destruction beside acts of making, remembering and tending without allowing either to cancel the other.

The question of beauty gradually becomes entangled with another: why tend at all when nothing can be restored?

As captive and captor discuss a Rembrandt depicting women making their way to Christ’s tomb, they confront another question: why make an arduous journey to tend to the dead when nothing can bring them back? By now, both women know something of that futility: the soldier’s mother and the restorer’s father lie in the same mass grave.

"No, not love."

"Duty."

The distinction landed heavily for me. Love might explain care born of attachment. Duty makes a more austere claim: what is required of me now?

![Jane Montgomery-Griffiths, Kate Cole and Laila Thaker together on the rubble-strewn set of Masterpieces.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/07/Masterpieces-Production-Images-106.jpg)

Jane Montgomery-Griffiths, Kate Cole and Laila Thaker in **Masterpieces*. Photo: Sarah Clarke.

Towards the end, we are offered a poignant image of what that duty can look like: an almost exquisite act of care for something human beings have made and deemed worth preserving. I wished we had been left there. McDonald, however, returns once more to a recurring absurdist motif. For me, that final callback breaks a spell that did not need breaking.

But despite this rude interruption, what the play has unsettled in me does not dissipate. Our nurse can be playful, kind and reverent, and still ask another person to kill. Our soldier can torture, then appeal to her victim to save her. Our captive can condemn violence, then choose it.

These are not revelations of some hidden self underneath the roles of civilian, captive or enemy. Nor does war expose some essential human nature beneath civilisation. The possibilities multiply instead.

I left *Masterpieces* sobered. Quiet, perhaps even a little meek.

The play does not strip these women back to reveal who they really are.  
It keeps asking what they might become next.

That is considerably more disturbing. And more hopeful.

---

[*Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity*](https://www.theatreworks.org.au/2026/masterpieces?ref=melbournestagereview.com)plays at [Theatre Works](https://www.theatreworks.org.au/?ref=melbournestagereview.com), 14 Acland Street, St Kilda, until 1 August 2026.