Review: Truck Driver (Sydney Opera House)

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Venue: Sydney Opera House (Sydney NSW), Jun 16 – 20, 2026
Playwright: Jonny Hawkins
Director: Nell Ranney
Cast: Jonny Hawkins
Images by Daniel Boud

Theatre review
Jonny Hawkins’ solo performance Truck Driver traces the continental crossings of Chiko, a long-haul driver whose solitary labour—ferrying cargo and livestock across vast distances—sustains the invisible arteries of contemporary consumption. Yet Hawkins refuses the easy reduction of their protagonist to mere instrument; Chiko is, above all, a consciousness in motion, his interior life rich with unspoken rumination. Only the chance encounter with a hitchhiker occasions the rare transmutation of thought into speech, exposing the profound isolation that structures his existence. In this respect, Chiko belongs to that vast, uncelebrated multitude upon whose labour modern life silently depends, and Hawkins’ play offers an uncommon aperture into the psychological textures of working-class experience—its resentments and generosities alike—in what reads as a sustained act of narrative restitution.

If the dramatic architecture occasionally strains under the weight of its own ambition, the work’s capacious humanism remains beyond question. As performer, Hawkins possesses an irrepressible charm that gracefully compensates for the text’s intermittent monotony. Their Chiko is at once vindictive and jovial, the archetypal larrikin rendered with sufficient vulnerability to forestall mere caricature. Even when the character ventures into objectionable territory, Hawkins maintains an empathic tether, eliciting from their audience not condemnation but the more complex gift of suspended judgment. There is, moreover, a palpable theatrical intelligence at play—highly entertaining in its artifice, yet grounded in an authenticity that never permits the performance to collapse into mere showmanship.

Nell Ranney’s direction demonstrates exceptional sensitivity, calibrating each line with interpretive nuance and liberating Hawkins’ physicality to move with fluid inventiveness, transfiguring what is, in literal terms, an essentially static predicament. Isabel Hudson’s set design—a miniature truck, perfectly proportioned to the stage’s dimensions—conjures both the monumental heft of these machines and, by implication, the outsized moral stature of the man who commands one. Nick Schlieper’s lighting and Steve Toulmin’s score make their most arresting impression in the highly dramatised prologue, where kinetic exhilaration establishes an almost visceral immediacy; yet for the bulk of the production, both designers exercise remarkable restraint, attuning the audience to the subtle frequencies of Chiko’s inner life.

The majority of our populace remains structurally invisible, even as we presume to understand the collective consciousness that shapes our political destinies. Chiko is, in certain respects, precisely the figure we might anticipate; yet he continually confounds expectation, revealing unexpected capacities for reflection and metamorphosis. He is, in the end, perpetually underestimated and perpetually taken for granted—a condition the play refuses to let us forget.

www.softtread.com.au

Review: Everyone Knows I’m A Pervert (KXT on Broadway)

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Venue: KXT on Broadway (Ultimo NSW), Jun 10 – 20, 2026
Playwright: Taylor Fernandez
Director: Beatrice Blackwell
Cast: Jade Fuda, Jenny Guigayoma, Jake Walker
Images by Laura Elaine

Theatre review
Chastity writes erotica online, openly disclosing a catalogue of unconventional sexual desires and proclivities. While she strives to resist feelings of shame surrounding these impulses, doing so proves far from straightforward. In Everyone Knows I’m A Pervert, Taylor Fernandez places considerable emphasis on the interior life of its protagonist, yet fails to construct a compelling dramatic framework around her. The result is a work whose central character never becomes sufficiently engaging, and without a robust narrative to sustain interest, the play struggles to establish a firm footing.

Beatrice Blackwell’s direction leans heavily into the script’s eccentric — and, it must be said, frequently laboured — humour, while doing little to compensate for its dramaturgical shortcomings. Consequently, the production often feels less like a coherent theatrical experience than an unrelenting barrage of noise and activity: at best energetic, at worst exhausting.

On an otherwise bare stage, Holly Nesbitt’s lighting design shoulders much of the responsibility for generating visual interest, lending the production a welcome sense of theatricality and atmosphere. Zaphnath-Penaea Messenger’s sound design efficiently establishes locations and situations, though rarely aspires to anything more evocative or imaginative.

As Chastity, Jenny Guigayoma excels in the play’s occasional moments of vulnerability and poignancy, though such opportunities are regrettably scarce. Jade Fuda and Jake Walker assume a multitude of supporting roles, often with impressive versatility and commitment. Whatever the production’s flaws, the dedication of its performers is never in doubt.

Sexuality manifests differently in every individual, yet our reluctance to discuss these intimate dimensions of ourselves allows restrictive notions of acceptable sexual expression to persist. Chastity is entitled to regard herself as a “pervert”, but the term itself is ultimately devoid of meaning if we accept that there is no singular norm against which human sexual experience can be measured.

www.kingsxtheatre.com

Review: Shooting Hedda Gabler (Seymour Centre)

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Venue: Seymour Centre (Chippendale NSW), Jun 11 – 27, 2026
Playwright: Nina Segal
Director: Monica Sayers
Cast: Jane Angharad, Jennifer Rani, James Smithers, Alpha Sylla, Lib Campbell, Matthew Abotomey 
Images by Phil Erbacher

Theatre review
In Nina Segal’s Shooting Hedda Gabler, a Hollywood actor arrives in Norway to work beneath a film director celebrated as both visionary and enfant terrible. The parallel is deliberate: Segal subjects her protagonist to the same suffocating constraints that bind Ibsen’s heroine, collapsing the distance between the nineteenth century and our own to expose how tenaciously misogyny endures. Yet for all its darkness, the play is flecked with mordant wit, its sophistication rendering the medicine palatable without diluting its potency.

Under Monica Sayers’s direction, the production sustains a precarious equilibrium between entertainment and gravitas, ensuring its poignancy commands full attention. James Smithers’s set design achieves a marvellous synthesis of visual splendour and dramatic utility, while Charlotte Savva’s costumes evoke a distinctly Scandinavian restraint—elegant, immaculate, severe in their understatement. Travis Kecek’s lighting and Anthony MacDermott’s music operate with similar Nordic coolness, so subtly calibrated that one barely registers their presence until they tighten, scene by scene, an almost casual noose of foreboding.

Jennifer Rani, as the leading lady, navigates her character’s emotional trajectory with forensic precision, never permitting ambiguity about where she stands in her arc. James Smithers (doubling as the film director) imbues the despicable auteur with a nuanced malevolence that is all the more chilling for its theatrical relish—he leaves the audience no aperture through which to excuse his behaviour, yet remains magnetically watchable. Lib Campbell and Matthew Abotomey furnish the production with its most indelible comic textures, their performances audacious and outrageously inventive, offering necessary respite from the narrative’s unrelenting brutality.

The women of Shooting Hedda Gabler enjoy freedoms of expression unimaginable to the 1890s characters they portray, yet Segal suggests that such liberties are largely cosmetic. We may speak our minds and gesture at agency, but the architecture beneath— the structural mechanisms that shape female destiny—remains obstinately intact, fiercely committed to our subjugation. The play’s sharpest insight lies here: in the cruel illusion that progress has occurred when, in fact, the machinery has simply learned to disguise itself.

www.seymourcentre.com | www.secrethouse.com.au

Review: Mackenzie (Bell Shakespeare)

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Venue: The Neilson Nutshell (Sydney NSW), Jun 6 – Jul 18, 2026
Playwright: Yve Blake
Director: Virginia Gay
Cast: Billie Palin, Nikki Britton, Ryan González, Kimberly Hodgson, Anusha Thomas, Jane Watt
Images by Brett Boardman

Theatre review
When a soothsayer prophesies that Mackenzie will ascend from bit-part player in a children’s television programme to the apotheosis of global pop stardom—the eponymous “number one pop girl”—her trajectory, mapped deliberately onto the skeleton of Macbeth, charts the corrosive geometry of ambition: a vertiginous rise that darkens into regret. Yve Blake’s play with songs is, to its credit, irreverent and acidly witty; yet, like so many adaptations of Shakespeare, it cannot ultimately escape the reductive compression that accompanies transposing Elizabethan tragedy into contemporary vernacular. Still, the production yields genuine delights, not least a score that crackles with infectious pleasure.

Virginia Gay’s direction ensures the evening never flags, sustaining a kinetic entertainment that is matched by scrupulous attention to the calibre of performance across the ensemble. Elle Evangelista’s choreography compounds this dynamism, rendering the staging so relentlessly animated that one’s attention is held with almost hydraulic force. The design elements, however, are less uniformly successful.

Keerthi Subramanyam’s set never fully metabolises the space into the requisite theatrical world, though her costume work is inspired, capturing both the gaudy exuberance of pop iconography and the unvarnished textures of everyday existence with equal acuity. Kelsey Lee’s lighting is intricately conceived, yet it intermittently falters, lacking the baroque flamboyance demanded by the production’s high-camp register and marred by moments of technical clumsiness. By contrast, Tom Lowndes’s sound design is masterfully achieved, modulating between registers of levity and catastrophe while conjuring the supernatural against a ground of naturalism, thereby supplying the production with its genuine dramatic voltage.

What ultimately indelibly impresses, however, is the superlative standard of performance from every member of the cast. Kimberley Hodgson, in the central role, is nothing short of flawless. She excavates the psychopathology of the ambitious ingénue with forensic precision, tracing the arc from naivety to corruption with a granularity that reveals every shading of moral complexity. Her work is suffused with subtlety yet remains magnetically, consistently potent

Pop stars, like monarchs, occupy a stratosphere of existence that can feel hermetically sealed from ordinary relatability; Shakespeare’s genius, of course, lay in making the remote resonantly human. Mackenzie may never fully transcend the somewhat prosaic narrative of a celebrity life unravelling, but in its final accounting it offers an unflinching meditation on the perils of unmoored ambition—a caution that, in our present moment of unbridled rapacity, reverberates with mournful immediacy.

www.bellshakespeare.com.au

Review: W (Old Fitz Theatre)

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Venue: Old Fitzroy Theatre (Woolloomooloo NSW), May 29 – Jun 14, 2026
Playwright: Madelaine Nunn
Director: Rachel Chant
Cast: Danielle Cormack, Celeste Cortes-Davis, Edyll Ismail, Ally Morgan, Shannon Ryan, Grace Smibert
Images by Phil Erbacher

Theatre review
In Madelaine Nunn’s W, an elite women’s football team hurtles toward the season finals, yet the play’s dramatic momentum is diffused rather than concentrated. Between coach Sue and five players, our attention is parcelled out too sparingly; while team captain Rosie receives marginally more narrative real estate, her story never quite becomes the play’s anchoring centre. The result is a dramatic architecture that feels structurally tentative—compelling in its parts, yet uncertain of its whole.

What holds the production together is Rachel Chant’s astute direction. She renders each character with such precision and emotional texture that the ensemble transcends the script’s fractured architecture, making the evening dramaturgically coherent and, for the most part, gripping. Still, there is something irreducibly splintered about the writing itself—an episodic restlessness that prevents the work from achieving the satisfying unity it intermittently promises.

Among the cast, Shannon Ryan delivers a performance of unwavering commitment as Rosie, yet her isolation is palpable; she generates little chemistry with her fellow players, and that disconnection quietly erodes the production’s emotional foundation. Danielle Cormack, by contrast, thrives as Sue, crafting a character of terrific vitality—by turns hilarious and deeply, authentically felt. The remainder of the ensemble matches her standard with consistent excellence, balancing humour and emotional depth while executing Poppy Lynch’s movement direction with an athletic rigour that lends the staging a genuine physical exhilaration.

The design elements are equally accomplished. Meg Anderson’s set and Aloma Barnes Siraswar’s costumes combine visual vibrancy with meticulous detail, while Luna Yuet Yee Ng’s lighting is calibrated with exquisite sensitivity, seizing every opportunity for theatrical flourish and transforming it into something genuinely beautiful. Clare Hennessy’s sound design deepens the atmosphere at every turn, enriching the production’s dramatic texture without ever overwhelming it.

The play arrives at a cultural moment when many still refuse to acknowledge the insidious depth of everyday sexism; the marginalisation of women’s sport renders that denial impossible. Curiously, W never names misogyny outright, yet the additional labour these women endure to pursue their passion speaks with unmistakable eloquence. In the end, W tackles the extra miles women must run—but stops just short of naming the finish line they are forbidden to cross.

www.oldfitztheatre.com.au | www.newghoststheatre.com

Review: Tootsie (Teatro)

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Venue: Teatro (Leichhardt NSW), May 26 – Jun 21, 2026
Book: Robert Horn
Music & Lyrics: David Yazbek
Directors: Cameron Mitchell
Cast: Andrew Bevis, Chris Huntly-Turner, Brendan Irving, Elena Kokubo, Donna Lee, Lachlan O’Brien, Tyran Stig, Alana Tranter.
Images by Robert Miniter

Theatre review
Michael Dorsey, an actor of considerable talent but negligible employability, seizes an unexpected opportunity when an audition calls specifically for a woman. His decision to adopt the persona of Dorothy Michaels sets in motion a cascade of consequences far more triumphant than he could have anticipated. This stage adaptation of the 1982 film Tootsie—sharing both its title and its essential premise—derives considerable vitality from David Yazbek’s effervescent, jaunty score and, perhaps more crucially, from Robert Horn’s exceptionally nimble book, which manages to render the narrative with a contemporary sensibility that largely obviates the mustiness one might expect from a four-decade-old property. That a story of this vintage could be resuscitated without appearing anachronistic or, worse, tone-deaf in the current cultural climate is no small feat; the production merits particular praise for its interrogation of gender inequity through a lens that feels immediate rather than merely dutiful.

Under Cameron Mitchell’s direction and choreography, the work sustains its entertainment value without sacrificing narrative coherence, navigating its inherently preposterous premise with such assurance that one scarcely questions the plausibility of the central deception. Mitchell possesses the rare capacity to suspend disbelief not through obfuscation but through the sheer force of theatrical conviction, rendering the absurd eminently digestible.

Where the production falter is in its visual execution. The design elements, regrettably, undermine rather than elevate the material. Angela White’s costumes and Helen Thatcher’s wigs suffer from a conspicuous parsimony, appearing neither flattering nor sufficiently polished to support the illusion upon which the drama depends. Dan Potra’s set, painted in a disconcerting and rather aggressive shade of red, has a rough-hewn, provisional quality that feels more workshop than finished production. Peter Rubie’s lighting design offers a measure of redemption, imparting occasional visual sophistication to the proceedings, though it ultimately stops short of genuine ingenuity or surprise.

In the formidable role of Michael/Dorothy, Andrew Bevis shoulders an almost impossible burden and, unfortunately, delivers a performance that falls short of the role’s demands. His vocal work proves inconsistent, and more damagingly, he lacks the magnetism necessary to anchor so outsized a character. The romantic chemistry between his Michael and Julia, portrayed by Elenoa Rokobaro, is essentially nonexistent—a deficiency rendered all the more conspicuous by Rokobaro’s own transcendent vocal performance, which stands as one of the production’s undeniable glories. The supporting ensemble, by contrast, is uniformly superb. Tyran Stig and Alana Trantner emerge as particular treasures, creating indelible characterizations distinguished by vocal excellence and a comic timing that feels both spontaneous and impeccably wrought.

The art of drag, it must be acknowledged, has undergone a profound evolution since Tootsie first appeared, migrating from the margins of subcultural expression to occupy an unprecedented position in mainstream consciousness. Its potency resides in what it reveals about the constructed nature of gender—the fluidity of identity itself—and in its implicit argument for a radical, unconditional acceptance that transcends the arbitrary taxonomies by which we so often classify one another. In 2026, one might reasonably expect this narrative to plumb such themes with greater depth and daring, particularly given its determination to remain accessible to family audiences. Yet if this staging does not fully exploit the rich thematic territory now available to it, it nonetheless succeeds in being genuinely delightful, navigating its material with a lightness of touch that thankfully avoids the pitfalls of either creepiness or regression. That, in itself, is no inconsiderable achievement.

www.teatroitalianforum.com.au

Review: Cadaver Synod (KXT on Broadway)

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Venue: KXT on Broadway (Ultimo NSW), May 27 – Jun 6, 2026
Playwright: Ruby Blinkhorn
Director: Mathew Lee
Cast: Yasna Delo, Luke Fewster, Nat Jobe, Mark Langham, Diego Retamales, Leon Walshe
Images by Robert Catto

Theatre review
In 897 AD, the corpse of Pope Formosus was exhumed and put on trial for perjury and other crimes—a spectacle of posthumous justice that remains one of history’s most macabre episodes. Ruby Blinkhorn’s Cadaver Synod, named for this grisly affair, places us in the tumultuous aftermath as Formosus’s successor, Pope Stephen, attempts to impose order upon a world of chaos and deepening distrust. The historical premise is undeniably rich theatrical fodder, yet the play itself often struggles to find its centre. The narrative darts in so many disparate directions that it feels less like a cohesive drama than a long-form television series crammed into ninety minutes, with narrative gaps that leave the audience perplexed and ultimately unsatisfied.

What rescues the production is Mathew Lee’s direction, which sustains attention through sheer force of pacing. Each scene crackles with tension, even if that tension derives more from our curiosity about what might happen next than from genuine engagement with the play’s thematic concerns. Lee marshals his design team with impressive precision: Alice Vance’s set and costumes lend the production an elegant, faintly extravagant grandeur; Frankie Clarke’s lighting is sumptuously rendered, conjuring moments of genuine visual delight; and Cameron Smith’s sound design delivers the production’s most dramatic beats with visceral impact, though it could benefit from more intense atmospheric calibration.

In the central role, Nat Jobe brings an immense sincerity that keeps us firmly attentive, leavened by flashes of flamboyance that prevent the evening from turning oppressively dour. Equally compelling is Leon Walshe as Father Gabriel, who imbues one of the play’s more tragic figures with emotional authenticity and affecting vulnerability.

The world of Cadaver Synod may be archaic, but its concerns—corruption, the abuse of power—remain depressingly eternal. Given the relentless parade of such abuses, there is something absurd in our continued willingness to place men in these positions of authority, as though we cannot conceive of organising our existence without such hierarchies. We can, in our better moments, imagine systems more equitable and just; translating those visions into practice, however, appears to remain forever beyond our reach.

www.kingsxtheatre.com

Review: Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (Hayes Theatre)

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Venue: Hayes Theatre Co (Potts Point NSW), May 22 – Jun 21, 2026 | Riverside (Parramatta NSW), Jun 25 – 28, 2026
Book: Jeffrey Lane
Music and Lyrics: David Yazbek
Director: Rebecca McNamee
Cast: Oliver Clisdell, Blake Erickson, Emma Feliciano, Brendan Godwin, Madelene Kirkwood, Scarlet Lindsay, Kristina McNamara, Aurélie Roque, Jordan Shea, Christopher Tendai, Rowan Witt
Images by John McCrae

Theatre review
Lawrence and Freddy, kindred spirits in the art of the swindle, prey upon wealthy women with motives that extend well beyond the merely pecuniary. Pride—arguably the more potent fuel for their elaborate deceptions—renders their eventual collision not merely probable but structurally inevitable.

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, the 2004 musical comedy adapted from the 1988 film, promises unalloyed frivolity, and its libretto brims with comic invention. Yet under Rebecca McNamee’s direction, the production does not consistently translate that potential into theatrical life; a certain vital spark remains stubbornly elusive. Despite Dylan Pollard’s buoyant musical direction and Cameron Boxall’s vigorous choreography, an unmistakable deficit of chemistry among the principals keeps the enterprise earthbound.

Blake Erickson’s Lawrence possesses the requisite savoir-faire, and Rowan Witt’s Freddy exerts a roguish appeal, but their pairing never achieves that alchemical synergy whereby the whole transcends its constituent parts. Kristina McNamara, as Christine—the narrative’s ostensible mark and emotional fulcrum—invests her performance with admirable precision and intensity, yet the production retains a curiously restrained, almost buttoned-up quality that sits at odds with the material’s inherent vulgarian exuberance.

Visually, the production fares considerably better. Soham Apte’s set design emerges as a genuine asset, importing glamour and a welcome sense of theatrical fantasy to the proceedings. James Wallis’s lighting proves most compelling when it abandons restraint for something more operatically bold. Angelina Daniel’s costumes, by contrast, are inconsistently realized: certain pieces achieve a polished, character-defining flair, while others land with an unfortunate visual discord.

What proves most striking about Dirty Rotten Scoundrels is its moral architecture—or rather, the conspicuous absence of one. The narrative does not merely tolerate its protagonists’ ethical bankruptcy; it actively celebrates their cunning. One might read in this a particularly American strain of cultural logic: the conflation of charisma with virtue, of success with moral license. The musical’s gleeful amorality invites a broader reflection on a society increasingly inclined to reward performance over principle—a trajectory, one observes from current state of affairs in the USA, that leads only to diminishing returns. 

www.hayestheatre.com.au | www.instagram.com/redfernlane

Review: Savior (Griffin Theatre Co)

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Venue: Belvoir St Theatre (Surry Hills NSW), May 16 – Jun 14, 2026
Playwright: Happy Feraren
Director: Kenneth Moraleda
Cast: Chrissy Mae Valentine, Chaye Mogg, Mark Paguio, Michael Whalley
Images by Brett Boardman

Theatre review
When a typhoon devastates Tacloban, Michelle, a Manila-based NGO aid worker, commits herself wholeheartedly to relief efforts—only to find her labour obstructed by Joe, her manager, who arrives from the United States to supervise the disaster response mission with little regard for the community and a great deal of regard for himself. Happy Feraren’s Savior certainly broaches weighty subject matter, yet it is the precision of its dialogue that ultimately resonates. The comedy operates across a wide register, from broad farce to piercing social observation, and it lands with remarkable consistency, eliciting sustained laughter even when the narrative itself does not always summon the gravitas necessary to inspire deeper emotional investment. What the play occasionally lacks in dramatic heft, it more than compensates for in comic satisfaction.

Kenneth Moraleda directs with palpable assurance, constructing a rhythm that keeps the characters perpetually engaging and the comic timing impeccably calibrated. He deserves particular credit for the deft deployment of brief, sobering interludes—moments of gravity that refocus attention on the production’s true emotional core and from which the surrounding comedy acquires its sharpest edge.

The ensemble of four delivers uniformly excellent work, each actor crafting a distinct and thoroughly delightful character who commands continued attention. Chrissy Mae Valentine strikes an impressive equilibrium in the role of Michelle, grounding her portrayal in the earnest conviction of a genuine charity worker while ensuring every line lands with comic precision. Michael Whalley leans fully into the caricature dimensions of Joe, wielding the role to mount a pointed, satirical critique of whiteness within a broader context of social commentary. Mark Paguio proves utterly charming as Jobert, making an indelible impression through relentless optimism while nonetheless threading welcome complexity into the performance whenever the script permits. Chaye Mogg, as Janna, brings jovial verve to a production that never flags in energy.

Hailley Hunt’s set design meaningfully evokes a fragile sense of fabricated order erected atop rubble, capturing the delusory semblances of structure that humans impose upon chaos in an effort to feel in control. Her costuming for one of Joe’s entrances proves especially inspired, drawing a huge laugh and encapsulating the acerbic tone central to the production’s impact. Brockman’s lighting transitions fluidly between locations with minimal fuss, always modulating the precise tonal register required by each scene. Dobby’s richly imagined sound design positions the audience firmly within each environment, fostering an atmospheric connection to the narrative world.

Savior confronts the paradox of post-colonial experience across much of the Global South: communities devastated by catastrophe find themselves dependent upon assistance from nations that plundered and abandoned them, only to return imposing foreign values and disregarding the priorities of those they purport to rescue. The play makes painfully visible the West’s fondness for swooping into crisis to perform benevolence, even as it remains steadfastly unwilling to elevate these same regions to anything approaching commensurate prosperity.

www.griffintheatre.com.au 

Review: The Birds (Belvoir St Theatre)

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Venue: Belvoir St Theatre (Surry Hills NSW), May 16 – Jun 7, 2026
Playwright: Louise Fox (from the story by Daphne de Maurier)
Director: Matthew Lutton
Cast: Paula Arundell
Images by Pia Johnson

Theatre review

In Louise Fox’s stage adaptation of The Birds, the opening scenes find Tessa repelling fifty invading avian assailants from her home with fierce, maternal resolve. By the second day, the sky has darkened with swarms bent solely on human annihilation. In this contemporary reimagining of Daphne du Maurier’s 1952 narrative, Fox not only shifts the protagonist from husband to wife but also transposes the story’s psychic register—from post-war unease to the distinctly modern terrors of ecological collapse and technological dominion. Working within the conceit of horror fantasy, Fox crafts a vividly absorbing meditation on the paralysis that accompanies our present awareness of impending, seemingly inevitable catastrophe.

Paula Arundell commands the stage alone, her eminently sympathetic presence grounding the surreal narrative in an air of authenticity. She renders Tessa with such sustained credibility that the audience remains unwaveringly allied with her struggle, compelled to will her survival even as circumstances turn increasingly phantasmagoric. Director Matthew Lutton leans into the text’s genre elements, drawing spectators into Tessa’s escalating dread while prompting reflection upon our individual and collective relationship to the disquieting features of our current moment. Yet the production occasionally suffers from Lutton’s largely restrained approach; a work of such unbridled imagination might have flourished under a more audacious, extravagant directorial hand.

Kat Chan’s production design opts for elegant simplicity—largely effective, though the text’s expansive vision clearly invites a more spectacular scenic realization. Niklas Pajanti’s lighting memorably punctuates the drama’s most harrowing junctures with startling precision, but it is J. David Franzke’s sound design and composition that truly conjure the atmosphere of foreboding, rendering the murderous flock’s malevolent presence viscerally, irrefutably real.

The birds’ ferocious, overwhelming assault mirrors the paralysis induced by our contemporary predicament—not merely environmental and technological crises, but the relentless barrage of political conflict and warfare. In an era saturated with information, we find ourselves perpetually stupefied and disempowered by the unceasing torrent of horrors arriving from every quarter. Tessa’s distinction lies in her refusal of passivity; confronted with hopelessness, she can do nothing but resist. It is a lesson that resonates with urgent, uncomfortable clarity.

www.belvoir.com.au | www.malthousetheatre.com.au