Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity: What might we become

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 opens with images of war and mass destruction. McDonald brings us closer, into an encounter between three women.

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: grubby walls, classical statues among the wreckage, a great jagged hole in the roof from which fragments occasionally fall.

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.

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.

McDonald’s poetry comes quickly, and while I am still thinking about one image, I miss the next. 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.

Masterpieces is brutal and delicate, intellectually restless and deeply affecting. It is a remarkable piece of theatre.

As the shifts between these forms become less frequent, the relationships among the three women take over. 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. Cole becomes more convincing as Mitra’s authority falters. Fear, bitterness, grief and dependence seem to draw the performance more deeply into the body; the soldier becomes more complex and exposed.

For much of the conflict, Tass keeps the three women near the centre of the expansive set. I wondered whether a smaller playing area might have intensified their uncomfortable proximity, giving captor and captive less room to withdraw from one another.

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. An account of family life becomes a description of appalling violence. Nadia’s daughter has witnessed so much that she no longer speaks; Thaker makes Nadia’s distress painfully apparent.

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.

Books, paintings and stones preserve connections to lives beyond this room. Mitra’s uniform carries a different set of claims. When it passes to another body, she insists that its new wearer honour it: “Stand taller.” She expects even an enemy to recognise what it represents.

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 woman whose skilled hands she later needs. Having damaged Layla’s body, she must now depend on what it can do.

"Go figure."

Montgomery-Griffiths returns to this phrase throughout the production, a bleak little shrug at human behaviour. At the performance I attended, a few people laughed intermittently, but the black jokes offered little release.

Layla recalls her father asking why, in a world of such cruelty and suffering, there is so much beauty. A Rembrandt does not compensate for the dead. A beautiful sentence cannot restore a family. Yet the paintings, poetry and little shower of umbrella rain belong to the same world as the violence. McDonald keeps returning to our capacity for both.

Discussing a Rembrandt depicting women making their way to Christ’s tomb, captive and captor ask why anyone would undertake an arduous journey to tend the dead. Both have reason to ask: 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?

Towards the end, an act of care for something human beings have made gives the discussion of duty a theatrical expression. I wished we had been left there. McDonald returns instead to a recurring absurdist motif; for me, the callback interrupts an ending that needed nothing further.

Even so, I left Masterpieces sobered. Quiet, perhaps even a little meek.

The nurse can be playful, kind and reverent, and still ask another person to kill. The soldier can torture, then appeal to her victim to save her. The captive can condemn violence, then choose it.

None of these actions settles who the women are. There is still the question of what each might do next.

Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity plays at Theatre Works, 14 Acland Street, St Kilda, until 1 August 2026.