Review: Bette & Joan (Ensemble Theatre)

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Venue: Ensemble Theatre (Kirribilli NSW), Mar 20 – Apr 25, 2026
Playwright: Anton Burge
Director: Liesel Badorrek
Cast: Jeanette Cronin, Lucia Mastrantone
Images by Prudence Upton

Theatre review
Anton Burge’s 2011 play Bette & Joan offers a backstage glimpse into the lives of Hollywood legends Davis and Crawford during the making of the classic film Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? Set against the fraught atmosphere of that production, the drama examines their legendary feud and fraught intimacy, while exposing the deeper vulnerabilities of two aging muses navigating a merciless industry built on rigid hierarchies and the constant threat of obsolescence.

Burge’s script navigates the labyrinthine psychology of these titans with admirable precision, yet the work itself proves uneven in its ability to sustain engagement. Under Liesel Badorrek’s direction, the production’s stylistic elements are cohesively managed, resulting in a production that looks and sounds exquisite—but one that never quite draws us into its central concerns. Grace Deacon’s production design evokes the insular world of a soundstage, with the rear facades of filmmaking flats forming a backdrop. The two dressing tables, though impeccably glamorous, feel somewhat confining. Deacon fares better with her costuming, which achieves a haunting verisimilitude in resurrecting the stars’ 1962 silhouettes—the tweed and talons, the calculated armour of glamour under siege.

Cameron Smith’s video projections—whether pre-recorded or live—are seamlessly integrated and visually splendid, conjuring the texture of an earlier cinematic era. Lighting designer Kelsey Lee and composer Ross Johnston contribute moments of heightened drama, infusing this tribute to old Hollywood with flashes of theatrical beauty, even as the production rarely penetrates beyond surface-level homage.

Performers Jeanette Cronin and Lucia Mastrantone command the stage with palpable confidence, holding our attention through the sheer artistry of their mimicry. Cronin, in particular, delivers a strikingly accurate portrayal of Davis, capturing her distinctive mannerisms, vocal inflections, and a face seemingly sculpted from the same volcanic material as her subject’s.

At its core, Bette & Joan grapples with the phenomenon of female rivalry, revealing that even at the highest echelons of success, women remain bound by shared struggles within a system that depends on their diminishment. By cannibalizing each other’s reputations, they performed the industry’s work of self-sabotage, ensuring that the true mechanisms of dominance remained invisible and intact. Power in its most insidious forms flourishes when the disenfranchised are kept apart—persuaded that their true enemy lies beside them, while the forces that exploit them operate with impunity.

www.ensemble.com.au

Review: My Brilliant Career (Sydney Theatre Company)

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Venue: Roslyn Packer Theatre (Sydney NSW), Mar 21 – May 3, 2026
Book: Sheridan Harbridge, Dean Bryant (from the Miles Franklin novel)
Music: Mathew Frank
Lyrics: Dean Bryant
Director: Anne-Louise Sarks
Cast: Cameron Bajraktarevic-Hayward, Melanie Bird, Lincoln Elliott, Victoria Falconer, Kala Gare, Raj Labade, Drew Livingston, Ana Mitsikas, Christina O’Neill, Jarrad Payne, Jack Green, and Meg McKibbin.
Images by Pia Johnson

Theatre review
First published in 1901, when Miles Franklin was merely twenty-one, this seminal novel chronicles a teenage protagonist’s fierce determination to transcend restrictive gender conventions and forge an autonomous existence within the artistic sphere. Now, My Brilliant Career—that cornerstone of the Australian literary canon—has been reimagined as a stage musical by the formidable trio of Dean Bryant and Sheridan Harbridge, who craft the words, and composer Mathew Frank. Together, they amplify the original’s spirited verve to revelatory effect, delivering a production as profoundly moving as it is inspiring.

Under Anne-Louise Sarks’s astute direction and Amy Campbell’s sensitive choreography, the production arrives with startling immediacy, rendering its feminist discourse with the electrifying urgency of a revelation only just unveiled. Sybylla Melvyn, that indomitable protagonist, captivates utterly; every element of the staging conspires to forge an unbreakable empathic bond, compelling our complete investment in her trajectory.

Kala Gare delivers a thoroughly virtuosic performance in the central role, commanding the stage with breath-taking intensity to create an indelible theatrical experience. Remarkably, Gare and the supporting ensemble assume the dual responsibility of dramatic interpretation whilst simultaneously constituting the instrumental foundation of the entire musical landscape—a demonstration of extraordinary artistic versatility. Under Victoria Falconer’s expert musical direction, each composition emerges as a triumph of exuberance, sustaining a level of entertainment that never once falters.

Set and costumes by Marg Howell evoke the visual vernacular of the late nineteenth century, yet—like every other element of the production—deploy considerable artistic license to ensure the work feels distinctly contemporary. Eschewing any slavish fidelity to historical accuracy that might risk feeling dowdy or remote, preventing the work from collapsing into the fusty dreariness of period-bound exactitude that might otherwise alienate contemporary sensibilities. Matt Scott’s lighting makes sparing use of grand gestures, focusing instead on the nuanced cultivation of atmosphere, achieving its mood-crafting objectives with impeccable restraint and consummate efficacy.

Girls should be taught not only that they possess every right to shape their own lives, but also that the denial of independence precipitates inexorably a descent into despondency, corrosive resentment, and a misery that permeates the very marrow of being. Sybylla’s narrative stands as a testament to resistance—particularly arduous resistance, for she must steel herself not against hardship, but against pleasure itself; she must privilege the austere dictates of intellect over the intoxicating, ephemeral promises of romantic entanglement.

Every instinct of her adolescent being strains toward those deceptively beautiful, ultimately hollow comforts, yet it is precisely this opposition to that which appears most desirable that renders her struggle both agonizing and transcendent. In her defiance, we recognize the heart breaking truth that the most exquisite cages remain cages still, and that the price of genuine freedom is often the conscious, painful renunciation of that which sparkles most brightly.

www.sydneytheatre.com.au

Review: Stage Kiss (New Theatre)

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Venue: New Theatre (Newtown NSW), Mar 18 – Apr 11, 2026
Playwright: Sarah Ruhl
Director: Alice Livingstone
Cast: Emma Delle-Vedove, Nicola Denton, Victoria Fowler, Lynden Jones, Nicholas Papademetriou, Frank Shanahan, Jason Spindlow
Images by Bob Seary

Theatre review
In Sarah Ruhl’s comedy Stage Kiss, an actress, cast opposite the very man with whom she once had a bitter falling out, finds herself helplessly ensnared in a backstage romance. Though her husband and daughter look on with dismay, she surrenders to the peculiar intimacy of the stage, where simulated passion gives way to genuine longing. The play’s central conceit—that the body cannot tell a feigned kiss from a real one—becomes a sly meditation on how art blurs the line between imagination and truth.

Alice Livingstone’s direction mines every vein of comedy in the text, yielding a production of genuine charm. As the central figure, Emma Delle-Vedove is wholly convincing, imbuing her performance with a satisfying depth that lends the storytelling real substance. Opposite her, Jason Spindlow matches her stride for stride, his timing and comic sensibility proving an ideal complement. The supporting ranks are enlivened by Nicholas Papademetriou and Frank Shanahan, both of whom generate uproarious laughs through their intrepid, delightfully unguarded performances.

The production’s visual language is shaped by Merle Leuschner’s set, which capably navigates the play’s spatial requirements, and Bianca De Nicola’s costumes, which neatly delineate character. Together, the two elements inadvertently echo the resourceful aesthetic of regional theatre, conferring a certain lived-in verisimilitude. Holly Nesbitt’s lighting contributes welcome nuance, its selective details lending the stage visual depth. The sound design, however, proves a notable shortcoming—its lack of energy frequently undermines the production’s momentum, leaving it feeling less dynamic than the material demands.

To observe that a woman possesses the right to shape her own life is perhaps to state the obvious, yet the sentiment bears repeating. In Stage Kiss, we encounter a woman who does precisely that—choosing to be artist, mother, wife, and lover, often in uneasy succession. Where conventional parlance would accuse her of trying to “have it all,” the play instead presents her simply sampling what is on offer, fumbling through each decision, and making mistakes with disarming regularity. In a culture saturated with glossy, unattainable ideals of achievement, watching her flawed navigation proves a far more honest—and surprisingly inspiring—spectacle.

www.newtheatre.org.au

Review: Contest (Flight Path Theatre)

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Venue: Flight Path Theatre (Marrickville NSW), Nov 17 – 28, 2026
Playwright: Emilie Collyer
Director: Kirsty Semaan
Cast: Melissa Jones, Willa King, Suz Mawer, Emma Monk, Lana Morgan
Images by Phil Erbacher

Theatre review
A group of recreational netball players convene for what appears, on the surface, to be a routine sporting engagement. Yet beneath the veneer of physical exertion lies a more profound undertaking: the deliberate cultivation of social bonds and a shared space for processing emotional turmoil. Though they may seem an unlikely cohort, these women gather with an unspoken recognition that loneliness is a condition to be actively, even consciously, resisted. This premise, rich with dramatic potential, forms the foundation of Emilie Colyer’s new play, Contest.

The work opens with promise, gesturing toward a meaningful exploration of female solidarity in an atomised world. However, as the evening unfolds, the initial intrigue gives way to a fundamental structural disappointment. The piece is composed of a series of vignettes that feel more like fleeting, disconnected confessions than a coherent dramatic narrative. Lacking a compelling throughline or sufficient character development to anchor our investment, the scenes accumulate without resonance, preventing the play from ever achieving the connective tissue it so desperately seeks.

While the writing itself may falter, the production elements strive to inject vitality into the proceedings. Kirsty Semaan’s direction ensures a certain visual and spatial vibrancy, and her collaboration with movement director Amelia Pawsey generates enough kinetic energy on stage to momentarily divert the eye. Yet these bursts of physical dynamism often ring hollow, feeling like choreographed diversions from a text that fails to provide substantial grounding. The exercise, for all its motion, frequently feels empty at its core.

A notable exception is Charlotte Leamon’s sound design, which emerges as a genuine highlight. Leamon’s work deftly seizes every opportunity to underscore mood and subtext, injecting texture and atmosphere into what might otherwise be an entirely staid affair. It is a sensitive and resourceful aural landscape that breathes life into the production’s quieter corners.

The five-member cast performs with admirable commitment and a convivial ensemble spirit that is not without its charms. They bring warmth and authenticity to their interactions, yet they cannot fully compensate for the material’s limitations, struggling to excavate emotional depth from characters who remain frustratingly indistinct.

Contest gestures toward an important thesis: that in the sporting arena, the ostensible goal may be victory, but for these women, the true aim is community—a quiet dismantling of the very structures designed to keep individuals apart. It is a resonant idea, this quiet act of reclaiming connection in a world engineered for solitude.

www.flightpaththeatre.org | www.spacejumptheatre.com

Review: Monster (KXT on Broadway)

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Venue: KXT on Broadway (Ultimo NSW), Mar 6 – 21, 2026
Playwright: Duncan Macmillan
Director: Kim Hardwick
Cast: Tony J Black, Romney Hamilton, Linda Nicholls-Gidley, Campbell Parsons
Images by Abraham de Souza

Theatre review
Duncan Macmillan’s Monster confronts its audience with an uncompromising examination of human depravity through the fraught pedagogical relationship between Tom, a beleaguered schoolteacher, and Darryl, a fourteen-year-old pupil exhibiting escalating criminal and sociopathic tendencies. Macmillan deliberately eschews moralistic didacticism in favour of unvarnished verisimilitude, constructing a narrative architecture that systematically dismantles the audience’s tendencies for denial or evasion.

Director Kim Hardwick translates the play’s uncompromising themes into an equally austere production aesthetic. Her direction deploys uncomfortable stillness as a dramatic vacuum, allowing horror to reveal itself without mediation. This minimalist tension is amplified by Charlotte Leamon’s sound design and Topaz Marley-Cole’s lighting, which coalesce during transitions to externalize our creeping dread. Through this calibrated accumulation of unease, Hardwick ensures we arrive at Monster‘s most unsettling recognition in lockstep with the characters: the gradual, inexorable realization that the situation is irredeemable.

Tony J Black, undertaking the role of Tom as a last-minute replacement, performs with script in hand—a circumstance that is entirely understandable. By contrast, Campbell Parsons delivers an extraordinary inhabitation of young Darryl, manifesting a terrifying and persuasively unhinged presence that systematically thwarts the audience’s compulsion toward rehabilitative narrative arcs. The production’s depth is further enriched by its supporting players. Romney Hamilton and Linda Nicholls-Gidley perform with unwavering commitment, each finding moments of dramaturgical incisiveness that cut through the tension, illuminating new facets of the play’s moral complexity.

The world in which we live confronts us with ubiquitous atrocity, demanding of its survivors not merely resilience but, a calibrated measure of productive delusion. Optimism constitutes less a sentimental luxury than an existential imperative—one without which flourishing simply becomes impossible. Indeed, viable existence itself appears contingent upon hope, however tenuous or substantially fabricated that hope may prove upon examination. Art then enters, to afford us the space to dwell in life’s deepest truths. However harrowing, these confrontations serve as a balm—permitting us to gaze upon reality without flinching, if only briefly, before we must again turn away.

Review: The Last Train To Madeline (ATYP)

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Venue: The Popsy (Sydney NSW), Mar 11 – 21 , 2026
Playwright: Callum Mackay
Director: Hayden Tonazzi
Cast: Tyallah Bullock, Rylea Eilis, Sophie Gnodtke, Finn Middleton, Rory Spinks, Leon Walshe
Images by Phil Erbacher

Theatre review
Madeline and Luke’s friendship, forged in childhood amid the quiet streets of Wangaratta in 2003, serves as the emotional bedrock of Callum Mackay’s The Last Train to Madeline. Their shared rural upbringing and divergent fates—she escaping to the metropolis to chase ambition, he remaining tethered to their regional origins—form the narrative’s central tension. Mackay crafts a meditation on parallel lives that never quite intersect, where unfulfilled longing persists despite geographical and emotional distance.

The work arrives as something of an anomaly: an unabashedly sentimental romance in an era dominated by ironic detachment. Mackay excavates emotional terrain with commendable earnestness, offering nuanced portraits of maturation in isolated communities. Yet for all its sincerity, the narrative struggles to achieve universal resonance; its specificities, while authentically rendered, may leave broader audiences unmoved.

Hayden Tonazzi’s direction compensates somewhat through vigorous staging—kinetic movement and concentrated emotional intensity lend the production a visceral pulse. Ultimately, however, neither the narrative architecture nor its inhabitants achieve the gravitational pull necessary to fully captivate. The production remains admirable in its intentions, yet distant in its execution.

Savanna Wagman’s production design evokes the particular textures of small-town existence, grounding the narrative in an authentic provincial milieu while simultaneously asserting a bold theatrical vision that proves consistently satisfying to the eye. Spencer Herd’s lighting design complements this approach with soft, languid imagery that mirrors the narrative’s prevailing tone of wistful tenderness. Oliver Beard’s soundscape and musical compositions operate on dual registers: establishing atmospheric immersion while penetrating the interior landscapes of the characters’ private struggles.

Six performers inhabit the evolving personas of Madeline and Luke across the temporal arc of their lives, with Rylea Eilis and Finn Middleton emerging as the production’s most compelling interpreters. The pair craft distinct psychological profiles that resonate with verisimilitude, and their chemistry as a romantic unit achieves a persuasiveness that anchors the narrative’s emotional stakes. We observe these figures gradually establish interdependence, cultivating a bond that becomes instrumental in fortifying their respective passages toward maturity.

What unfolds between them is a gradual architecture of trust and interdependence, as two young people navigate the precarious terrain of shared adolescence. Their friendship becomes a vessel for resilience, each finding in the other a quiet scaffolding upon which to lean while charting the uncertain passage toward adulthood. It is a portrait of connection as both refuge and rudder—anchoring even as it orients.

Yet the work quietly demonstrates that such bonds, however formative, cannot permanently substitute for the sovereignty of self. Adulthood demands a different kind of mastery: not over another, but over oneself. The old intimacies, once vital, must be relinquished, or maybe temporarily set aside, as one sets aside a compass once the destination is in sight. It is a bittersweet acknowledgment that growth often requires distance, and that love, in its most mature form, often means letting go.

www.atyp.com.au

Review: Julius Caesar (Bell Shakespeare)

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Venue: Sydney Opera House (Sydney NSW), Mar 7 – Apr 5, 2026 | Canberra Theatre Centre, Apr 10 – 18, 2026 | Arts Centre Melbourne, Apr 23 – May 10, 2026
Playwright: William Shakespeare
Director: Peter Evans
Cast: Jules Billington, Peter Carroll, Septimus Caton, Ray Chong Nee, Leon Ford, Mark Leonard, James Lugton, Ava Madon, Ruby Maishman, Brigid Zengeni
Images by Brett Boardman

Theatre review
It is a testament to the unsettling prescience of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” that it resonates with such urgency today. In an era marked by the rise of authoritarian figures across the globe—from the United States to West Asia, and from Russia to Africa—the play gives dramatic form to a pervasive and dangerous fantasy: the assassination of a monstrous leader. Yet the true sophistication of the work lies not in its depiction of the killing, but in its unflinching interrogation of the aftermath. It indulges our visceral desire for a tyrant’s fall, only to force us to confront the sobering question of what comes next.

Perhaps it is a testament to the enduring power of Shakespeare’s narrative that director Peter Evans approaches the material with such restrained deference, seemingly content to let the text speak for itself. While one might wish for a staging with greater interpretative audacity—something to jolt the senses and cater to the abbreviated attention spans that define the 21st-century spectator—the production ultimately finds its strength in a kind of quiet integrity. It resists the temptation to embellish, trusting instead in the story’s inherent moral gravity. The result, though at times dramatically inert and emotionally remote, nevertheless ensures that the play’s central thesis lands with unadorned clarity.

Amelia Lever-Davidson’s lighting design and Madeleine Picard’s sonic composition each begin with subtlety, only to swell into heightened theatricality as the production careens toward its conclusion—a gradual unshackling of atmosphere that mirrors the play’s unravelling order. Simone Romaniuk’s costumes chart a more subtle arc of descent: pristine shades of white give way to the muted austerity of military fatigues, signalling a visual erosion of civility. All of this unfolds against Peter Evans’ scenography, which is marked by a carefully calibrated functionality—spare, yet not without its own quiet appeal.

Leon Ford’s Cassius and Brigid Zengeni’s Brutus anchor the production with a taut, combustible intensity, their charged exchanges lending the drama an urgent, propulsive rhythm. Yet it is Mark Leonard Winter who emerges as the production’s most indelible presence. His Mark Antony is a study in delicious flamboyance—magnetic, audacious, and unsettlingly modern. In his hands, the role acquires a dramatic sensibility that feels both distinctly contemporary and strangely singular, drawing us into the gravitational pull of a performance that refuses to be forgotten.

It is entirely understandable—perhaps even inevitable—that we indulge in fantasies of political assassination, so relentlessly are we barraged with images of despots and the devastation they wreak across continents. Yet we must not lose sight of a more sobering truth: these figures did not materialize from the ether. They ascended through systems meticulously engineered for their rise, buoyed by social forces that will persist, unperturbed, long after their removal. Decapitate the serpent, and the body slithers on.

www.bellshakespeare.com.au

Review: Fair Play (Old Fitz Theatre)

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Venue: Old Fitzroy Theatre (Woolloomooloo NSW), Mar 6 – 21, 2026
Playwright: Ella Road
Director: Emma Whitehead
Cast: Rachel Crossan, Elodie Westhoff
Images by Robert Miniter

Theatre review
Ann and Sophie first cross paths as teenage athletes, both chasing the same shimmering horizon: Olympic glory in the 800 metres. What begins as parallel ambition gradually intertwines into something deeper—a bond that seems impervious to fracture. Yet Fair Play, Ella Road’s penetrating drama, understands that the most devastating ruptures often arrive disguised as inevitability. When crisis finally strikes, it exposes not merely personal betrayal but the insidious architecture of a system that routinely engineers competition among women, transforming potential solidarity into corrosive envy.

Road’s early scenes occasionally risk the prosaic, relying perhaps too heavily on the familiar rhythms of sporting narratives and adolescent camaraderie. Yet this mundanity proves deliberate—a foundation upon which the later moral complexity acquires its full, disquieting force. When the narrative pivots, it does so with devastating precision, compelling us to confront one of contemporary society’s most fraught ethical battlegrounds. The play ultimately rewards patience with a meditation of considerable sophistication, as it interrogates the conditions that conspire to pit women against one another.

Emma Whitehead’s direction (along with exciting choreography by Cassidy McDermott Smith) imparts a vital buoyancy to the staging, evoking with precision the vigour of youth—that particular alchemy of velocity and infinite horizon that defines adolescence at its most hopeful. They render visible the girls’ intimacy not through declaration but through accumulated detail: the shared language of glances, the physical fluency of bodies in syncopated motion, the unspoken covenant of ambition mutually held.  When the narrative’s rupture finally arrives, Whitehead navigates the transition with remarkable adroitness, modulating seamlessly into an atmosphere of sombre gravity, to honour the weight of the social terrain now under examination, treating the play’s emergent concerns with the deliberation they demand.
 
Design elements cohere with admirable precision, conjuring a kinetic vocabulary that renders the athletic milieu not merely as backdrop but as embodied philosophy. Kate Beere’s set operates on dual registers: the literal, with its tactile evocation of racing tracks as arenas of corporeal sacrifice; and the symbolic, its organic curves suggesting femininity itself as sites to be navigated, contested, inscribed upon. EJ Zielinski’s lighting and Aron Murray’s video projections interweave with the sonic architecture of Mitchell Brown and Osibi Akerejola to forge a taut, propulsive rhythm, to hold us in sustained anticipation.
 
Actors Rachel Crossan and Elodie Westhoff distinguish themselves not merely through individual proficiency, but also through the sublime chemistry they generate in concert. What proves most striking, however, is their navigation of the play’s political subtexts. They communicate the covert economies of female friendship—the unspoken negotiations, the micro-calibrations of power—with the same fluency they bring to more explicit ideological content. The result is a performance that operates on multiple frequencies simultaneously: the immediate human drama and its broader sociological implications, the personal and the structural, held in productive tension.

 

(Spoilers ahead.)
The revelation of Ann’s PAIS or Partial Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome marks the play’s foremost intentions—what begins as narrative twist crystallises into urgent ethical inquiry. Fair Play thus positions itself at the volatile intersection of contemporary sporting discourse and broader debates surrounding sex, gender, and bodily autonomy. Road declines the comfort of easy resolution; no tidy settlement is proffered, no ideological position fully vindicated. Instead, the play achieves something more valuable: it carefully charts exactly how injustice operates, in all its complexity.

We encounter sporting authorities obsessively preoccupied with demarcating the boundaries of sex and gender, yet demonstrably incapable of furnishing coherent definitions for the very categories they police. Trans and intersex athletes thus find themselves suspended in a state of administrative limbo, condemned to navigate systems that simultaneously demand their classification and deny their intelligibility. Their innocent bodies become the terrain upon which ideological warfare is waged, and Fair Play recognises that none of it is genuine ethical concern but ritualised purification, a periodic expulsion of those who threaten the fantasy of binary certainty upon which so much of our mythology depends. The cruelty is systemic, the uncertainty weaponised, the suffering rendered as collateral damage in a conflict that purports to be about protection, while actually securing older hierarchies of tyrannical exclusion.

 

 

www.oldfitztheatre.com.au | www.lostthought.com

Review: A Mirror (Belvoir St Theatre)

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Venue: Belvoir St Theatre (Surry Hills NSW), Feb 21 – Mar 22, 2026
Playwright: Sam Holcroft
Director: Margaret Thanos
Cast: Eden Falk, Faisal Hamza, Yalin Ozucelik, Rose Riley
Images by Brett Boardman

Theatre review
A clandestine troupe stages a subversive theatrical production, its barbs aimed squarely at the Ministry of Culture and its censorious apparatus. Interwoven throughout are meditations on the nature of representation itself—whether literal or fictitious—as though artists must cleave to one pole or the other. Sam Holcroft’s A Mirror opens and closes with considerable force, yet the intervening dramaturgy wanders in states of descriptive and ideological confusion.

The decision by director Margaret Thanos to render an authoritarian regime through Australian voices, produces an effect of unintended absurdity, particularly when measured against the evident depth of our own democratic institutions (in comparison with other nations). There is, undeniably, a kernel of truth in the play’s suggestion that socioeconomic forces shape the conditions under which art is made, but whether Holcroft’s heightened, schematic approach can resonate meaningfully beyond that observation is less certain. What lingers is not the intricacy of the political critique, but the more elemental, perhaps eternal, truth that enduring work has always demanded of its makers one indispensable quality: courage.

The principal quartet—Eden Falk, Faisal Hamza, Yalin Ozucelik, and Rose Riley—bring considerable acuity to their respective roles, yet seldom cohere into an ensemble that transcends the sum of its parts. For all the mounting urgency of their narrative arc, little of enduring resonance remains once the final curtain falls. The design elements, too, settle for competence rather than distinction. Angelina Daniel’s set and costumes, while serviceable, lapse into staidness precisely where theatrical boldness is most required. Phoebe Pilcher’s lighting and Daniel Herten’s score prove their mettle in moments of heightened tension, yet falter during the protracted stretches of naturalism, which grow unnecessarily dour.

It is undeniable that fascism is ascendant across the globe. In Australia, democratic institutions appear, for the present, intact—yet the historical record offers scant comfort. Subversion, after all, requires no novelty of method; the same infiltrations attempted for centuries persist, adapted to contemporary conditions. Authoritarian regimes, almost without exception, train their sights first on the arts and the media—not merely as instruments of propaganda, but as sites of potential resistance. History demonstrates that while the wholesale destruction of a creative culture may require extreme force, the systematic erosion of democratic voice is altogether more achievable, more insidious.

The possibility that such a future could take root here is not abstract; it is a latent condition, ever-present. What stands against it is not inevitability, but resolve. The more tenaciously we hold to our convictions—the more defiantly we insist upon critical thought, and the messy, generative space of artistic freedom—the less hospitable this society becomes to the despots who would claim it. Resistance, in this sense, is not a dramatic gesture, but a sustained practice.

www.belvoir.com.au

Review: Afterglow (Eternity Playhouse)

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Venue: Eternity Playhouse (Darlinghurst NSW), Feb 26 – Mar 22, 2026
Playwright: S. Asher Gelman
Director: S. Asher Gelman
Cast: Julian Curtis, Matthew Mitcham, Matthey Predny
Images by Cameron Grant, Parenthesy

Theatre review
In S. Asher Gelman’s Afterglow, the familiar architecture of the ménage-à-trois serves as the unstable foundation for a drama about the limits of non-monogamy. When the married couple, Josh and Alex, invite Darius into their bed, the arrangement predictably unravels, not from jealousy, but from a more transgressive breach of contract: the development of genuine, “forbidden” emotion. While the play’s narrative arc is undeniably conventional, its very simplicity throws into sharp relief a rarer cultural conversation. It examines the particular anxieties that surface when gay men, having embraced the ostensibly stable structures of marriage and domesticity, find themselves haunted by the very bourgeois values they have adopted, revealing the potential for anguish when liberation is measured against a heteronormative template.

Originally staged by Gelman in 2017, the production shows only faint traces of its vintage. Ann Beyersdorfer’s scenic design impresses less through bold aesthetic choices than through its architectural fluidity, reshaping itself to the narrative’s spatial demands with a necessary pragmatism. Jamie Roderick’s lighting bathes the stage in a high-gloss, almost cinematic glamour, yet this polish proves a double-edged sword; the illumination frequently spills into the house, breaching the fourth wall in a manner that diffuses focus rather than deepening immersion. Between scenes, Alex Mackyol’s sound design becomes most discernible, its sonic cues evoking a distinctly late-aughts gay sensibility—a period detail that now situates the action in a specific, if recent, cultural moment.

The three-member cast commits fully to material that offers them little shelter. As married couple Alex and Josh, Julian Curtis and Matthew Mitcham channel genuine intensity into the domestic rupture at the play’s core, their performances lending weight to a script that often lacks it. Matthew Predny, as Darius, locates something rarer still: a vein of authentic vulnerability that cuts against the work’s prevailing surface performativity, hinting at the more grounded drama that might have been.

The casting of three white men in this Afterglow is not a neutral choice but a necessary one. It is what permits the play its studied obliviousness, its serene detachment from the sociopolitical currents that continue to churn beyond the bedroom door. Marriage equality was never an ending, only a waypoint—a fact underscored daily by resurgent homophobic violence in Australia and the fascistic lurch of American politics. To present queer domesticity as a closed loop, untroubled by the world outside, is to mistake a fragile foothold for a permanent perch. The afterglow is real. It is also, for many, already fading.

www.afterglowplay.com