> ## 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 trouble with the telling: LUKE - URL: https://melbournestagereview.com/the-trouble-with-the-telling-luke/ - Published: 2026-09-20T12:24:52.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-20T12:24:52.000Z - Description: Angus Cameron’s LUKE is a sharp, slippery new work about memory, intimacy and the cultural narratives that gather at the blurred edges of harm. Under Iain Sinclair’s direction, Red Stitch gives the play an exhilaratingly assured premiere — bold, restless and deeply provocative. - Author: Ellen M. Scott - Tags: Reviews In about 2006, perhaps 2007, I attended a guest lecture by Robert Dessaix at the Tasmanian School of Art where I was studying. There were a couple of hundred of us in the theatre. I remember the expression *you could hear a pin drop* ceasing, for once, to feel metaphorical. Dessaix was talking about Eros. I remember him speaking about the erotic as something far larger than sex: an intensity of attention, a way of being absorbed in experience. I recall him vividly saying that drinking a cup of tea could contain it. I was in my early twenties, and the philosophical lineage he was drawing on was completely new to me. I was enthralled. It was also before I had discovered meditation. The idea that seemingly banal experiences could become completely alive had me transfixed. I scurried off and read as many of his books as I could get my hands on. *Night Letters* remains a particular favourite, despite the shocking scenes of sexual brutality. Twenty years later, sitting inside Red Stitch, I found myself inhabiting an uncanny echo of that afternoon lecture. ![Dion Mills and Will Lonsdale stand very close together in the warm, patterned living room set, Mills leaning back playfully while holding a drink as Lonsdale watches him.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/09/DION-MILLS-WILL-LONSDALE_PNC7051_Parenthesy-112_LR.jpg) Dion Mills as Damon and Will Lonsdale as Chris in **LUKE*. Photo: Cameron Grant (Parenthesy) It is 2007 in Angus Cameron’s [*LUKE*](https://www.redstitch.net/luke-2026?ref=melbournestagereview.com). Damon (Dion Mills), a regional Victorian English teacher is arguing that education contains an erotic dimension. His nineteen-year-old former student Chris (Will Lonsdale) is sitting nearby. They have been drinking. Not long before, Chris removed his shirt, slipped into the dress Damon had been wearing, and danced with him. The attraction is perceptible but not exactly simple to assign. So when Damon begins talking about Eros, I recognise what he means. I am both completely captivated and deeply uneasy. Discussing the erotic in a lecture theatre full of adults is one thing. A high school teacher placing Eros within the bounds of the school ground, quite another. The philosophy remains recognisable; the circumstances alter its temperature completely. *LUKE* lives in that gap. In the space between the deliciously complicated and deeply fraught. Affection can coexist with power. Desire can be reciprocal while a relationship remains ethically asymmetrical. Memory can be sincerely held and also inaccurate. A story can illuminate an experience while deforming it. Someone can cause harm without recognising himself in the story of the harm. Continually, *LUKE* made me reconsider what I thought I had just witnessed. \* \* \* Cameron's play begins somewhere more playful. We are at fellow school teacher Olena’s house, which is bursting with life: books, records, booze, patterned wallpaper, crochet blankets, accumulated objects. Damon is wearing a dress, almost smock-like. Olena (Olga Makeeva), Russian-born and gloriously committed to the bit, is swaddled in an enormous coat and hat. Saint-Saëns’ *Danse Macabre* accompanies an absurd home-made pageant in which a doll becomes Anastasia Romanov, the last tsar’s daughter, and a hairdryer becomes a weapon. ![Olga Makeeva stands centre stage in an oversized dark military-style coat and large black fur hat, surrounded by patterned wallpaper, mismatched chairs and colourful crochet blankets.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/09/OLGA-MAKEEVA_PNC7051_Parenthesy-4_LR.jpg) Olga Makeeva as Olena in **LUKE*. Photo: Cameron Grant (Parenthesy) I spent the opening minutes wondering what on earth I was watching. Then I stopped wondering and my attention dissolved into the game. That mischief extends well beyond the opening pantomime. Damon and Olena have the ease of people who have entertained one another for years: teasing, performing, quoting, drinking, turning conversation into little scenes. When Chris arrives, announced through an elaborate pattern of knocks at the front door, he enters a world whose private language he already seems to know. Chris is leaving soon. He plans to travel through South America before moving to Melbourne for university, where he hopes to become a writer. Damon has been one of the adults who took that ambition seriously. The affection between them is obvious, as is the pleasure Chris takes in being truly seen by Damon. They spar over literature, quote *The Great Gatsby*, talk about sex, careers, homosexuality and the compromises of adult life. ![Dion Mills sits dramatically on the floor in a pale dress while Will Lonsdale gestures behind him and Olga Makeeva stands near the drinks cabinet. A large doll lies across an armchair beside them.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/09/OLGA-MAKEEVA-DION-MILLS-WILL-LONSDALE_PNC7051_Parenthesy-62_LR.jpg) Olga Makeeva, Dion Mills and Will Lonsdale in **LUKE*. Photo: Cameron Grant (Parenthesy) Cameron lets this intimacy become complicated gradually. Chris talks about flirting online, about the person he becomes in chat rooms, about coming out. He removes his shirt during one of their games and slips into the dress Damon had been wearing during the earlier pageantry. They flirt a little. They dance. Then Chris asks about Luke. Luke, a younger student, is leaving the school amid rumours that a male staff member has made him uncomfortable. Chris wants to know what Damon knows. Damon says very little. The question catches at something between them anyway. Their dance breaks apart; the evening briefly loses its ease. It recovers. That is part of the pleasure of Cameron’s writing. These people know how to return to one another through jokes, quotations, another drink, another game. Olena reappears after going out to get something nice to celebrate with: a bottle from the shed. Soon Damon is playfully lecturing again, this time on the topic of teaching. ![Will Lonsdale gestures animatedly beside a wooden record player in the richly patterned 2007 living room, with records stacked on the shelf below.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/09/WILL-LONSDALE_PNC7051_Parenthesy-106_LR.jpg) Will Lonsdale as Chris in **LUKE*. Photo: Cameron Grant (Parenthesy) And now we arrive at Eros. Watching this conversation after Chris has asked about Luke changes its charge completely. Damon speaks expansively about the intimacy of education, about the fascination a teacher can inspire, about love between teacher and student. He reaches towards queer history too: the absence of useful sex education, the ways gay men have historically had to learn from one another, the old and vicious association between homosexuality and paedophilia. Some of what he says is persuasive. Some of it is reckless. Occasionally the same sentence seems suspended between the two. Mills is extraordinary. Damon’s intellectual confidence never quite tips into caricature. He enjoys provocation, enjoys the force of his own argument, enjoys Chris’s attention. Yet there is tenderness there too, and a genuine belief in teaching as an intimate act of recognition. I could understand why Chris had been drawn to him. I could also understand why Olena, sitting a few feet away, kept trying to pull the conversation back from the edge. Cameron gives us no comfortable vantage point from which to judge the room. Damon’s argument does not become meaningless because the circumstances are fraught. The circumstances do not become harmless because the argument is intellectually coherent. And Chris is hardly passive within the exchange. He pushes, flirts, tests. Act I ends with Damon retreating for a cigarette and Chris recalling an encounter from his school days in which being watched by his former teacher became intensely charged. Cameron leaves the memory unresolved, held somewhere between desire, attention and the responsibility attached to Damon's influence, power and role. \* \* \* A decade later, Chris has become the writer Damon once encouraged him to be. The past has become creative material. What follows is perhaps best left largely undescribed. *LUKE* is a play that continually revises the terms on which we understand what we have already seen, and several of its most powerful turns depend upon the audience encountering those revisions for themselves. What can be said is that Cameron becomes increasingly interested in the distance between an event and the story later made from it. Memory selects. Writing arranges. Patterns emerge because somebody decides which details belong beside one another. The resulting story may reveal something previously invisible; it may also acquire a certainty the underlying events never possessed. ![The three performers occupy a stark, mostly white version of the room, framed by tall pale scenic panels. Will Lonsdale sits at left, Dion Mills stands near the centre doorway and Olga Makeeva stands at right.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/09/WILL-LONSDALE-DION-MILLS-OLGA-MAKEEVA_PNC7051_Parenthesy-213_LR.jpg) Will Lonsdale, Dion Mills and Olga Makeeva in **LUKE*. Photo: Cameron Grant (Parenthesy) Cameron also complicates our own position as witnesses. Characters return to the night we have just watched and remember it differently. Sometimes our recollection of Act I appears to support one person; elsewhere, someone confidently denies something we saw happen. Having shown us the past, Cameron might have allowed us the comfortable authority of knowing what “really” occurred. Instead, he makes that authority increasingly difficult to sustain. The question becomes sharper once memory passes into art. Chris has learned to do exactly what Damon once encouraged: to write, to shape, to be *ruthless*. His work takes fragments of experience and gives them perspective, motive and dramatic coherence. In doing so, he enters other people’s consciousnesses. He imagines what they thought, what they wanted, what a gesture meant. And then he releases all of that to the world, to be digested as near-fact. Here, Cameron probes the contemporary appetite for moral legibility: the speed with which ambiguous histories can be sorted into victims, perpetrators and enablers, then circulated as settled accounts. Olena keeps pressing on the places where Chris’s version becomes too clean. Olga Makeeva brings a compact, kinetic intensity to the role, her wit landing as sharply as her arguments. Olena's scepticism carries no claim to objectivity; her own recollections are imperfect. She keeps returning Chris to the stubborn difference between interpretation and evidence. A writer can make an account persuasive. Persuasiveness does not settle whether it happened that way. ![Olga Makeeva stands over a seated Will Lonsdale in a dark, exposed version of the set, with the backs of scenic structures and an open backstage doorway visible around them.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/09/OLGA-MAKEEVA-WILL-LONSDALE_PNC7051_Parenthesy-309_LR.jpg) Olga Makeeva as Olena and Will Lonsdale as Chris in **LUKE*. Photo: Cameron Grant (Parenthesy) Here Cameron’s interest in storytelling folds back onto theatre itself. Every night at Red Stitch, actors make imagined interior lives persuasive in front of us. A pause, a look, the distance between two bodies can give a line an implication nowhere contained in the words alone. *LUKE* prompts us to begin noticing how readily those choices begin to feel solid. Indeed, Iain Sinclair directs with remarkable tonal agility. The production can be ridiculous, intimate, intellectually combative and quietly menacing within the same stretch of conversation, yet the transitions flow masterfully. Most impressively, Sinclair refuses to telegraph Cameron’s reversals. We discover them alongside the characters, and sometimes only after we have already committed ourselves emotionally to what we think we are seeing. Nathan Burmeister’s design develops the same idea spatially. The warm, cluttered room of 2007 changes as the decades pass. In Act II colour drains away. Surfaces become cleaner, whiter, more controlled; but also increasingly lifeless. Eventually, the wiring and mechanics of the set itself begin to show: the reverse sides of scenic pieces, equipment, the architecture behind the stage usually kept beyond the fiction. I initially found that final set transformation oddly stark and a little baffling. As *LUKE* becomes increasingly candid about the construction of memory and story, the production also becomes candid about its own construction. The room that once seemed so abundantly real begins to disclose how it was made. That formal intelligence would be satisfying on its own. But what keeps *LUKE* from landing as merely an elaborate intellectual puzzle is the grief running underneath it. These are people who once delighted in one another. The early games, quotations, ridiculous costumes and endless drinks establish a deep sense of affection and belonging before Cameron begins showing us its weaknesses. Decades later, the losses accumulated around that first night cannot be reasoned away. Perhaps this is where *LUKE* circles most beautifully back to Eros. We return to certain memories because, in them, we were intensely alive: seen, desired, absorbed, frightened, changed. The relationships themselves may be gone. The aliveness remains. Storytelling becomes the means of returning to that aliveness. And in *LUKE*, that return carries danger. Stories simplify, accuse, obscure, consolidate a version of the past until its edges become difficult to see. By the final movement, Cameron allows storytelling another capacity too: it can return us to conversations that life has already closed. That was where the play really grabbed me. Beneath all its arguments about sex, power, memory and authorship sits something terribly ordinary: the wish to go back and speak differently, to understand more, to repair what can no longer be repaired. Perhaps that is why *LUKE* begins with Anastasia. Damon and Olena start the night by playing with a story whose ending is already fixed, entertaining for a moment the old fantasy that history might have turned out otherwise. Twenty years later, in Act III, Cameron returns to the same temptation. We know how it ends. We tell it again anyway. --- The world premiere season of [*LUKE*](https://www.redstitch.net/luke-2026?ref=melbournestagereview.com) plays at [Red Stitch Actors’ Theatre](https://www.redstitch.net/?ref=melbournestagereview.com), St Kilda, until 11 October 2026. --- Disclosure: A complimentary ticket to *LUKE* was provided to Melbourne Stage Review for the purpose of review. Melbourne Stage Review retains full editorial independence.