> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://melbournestagereview.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Smile, we are watching you: Cold War 2.0 - URL: https://melbournestagereview.com/smile-we-are-watching-you-cold-war-2-0/ - Published: 2026-09-03T22:55:35.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-03T22:55:35.000Z - Description: Punk, politics, surveillance and pop culture collide in Cold War 2.0, a theatrical barrage where meaning is both made and lost in the noise. - Author: Ellen M. Scott - Tags: Reviews 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.