> ## 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 shape of love has changed: Rhomboid - URL: https://melbournestagereview.com/the-shape-of-love-has-changed-rhomboid/ - Published: 2026-10-04T01:55:53.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-04T01:55:53.000Z - Description: Funny, tender and beautifully performed, Rhomboid explores the messy space between friendship and romantic love, and the limits of the language we use to describe how we feel about one another. - Author: Ellen M. Scott - Tags: Reviews 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.