> ## 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. # Some home truths are hard to swallow: Cut Chilli - URL: https://melbournestagereview.com/some-home-truths-are-hard-to-swallow-cut-chilli/ - Published: 2026-08-15T06:26:46.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-03T12:27:53.000Z - Description: Wickedly witty, deeply complicated and remarkably tender, Cut Chilli finds comedy, anguish and profound intimacy in the messy politics of family, intercountry adoption and what it means to belong. - Author: Ellen M. Scott - Tags: Reviews 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.