> ## 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. # The making of the pack: Savages - URL: https://melbournestagereview.com/the-making-of-the-pack-savages/ - Published: 2026-09-06T09:48:22.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-06T09:48:22.000Z - Description: Uncanny, playful and increasingly menacing, Kitan Petkovski’s masterful production of Patricia Cornelius’s Savages watches camaraderie slowly curdle into the ugliest form of male entitlement. - Author: Ellen M. Scott - Tags: Reviews 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.