Review: The King Who Was A King (25A Belvoir)

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Venue: Belvoir St Theatre (Surry Hills NSW), Nov 1 – 22, 2026
Playwright: Ayah Tayeh (from the novel by H.G. Wells)
Director: Ayah Tayeh
Cast: Violette Ayad, Toby Carey, Marco Chiappi, Meg Hyeronimus, Brittany Santariga, Harry Stacey
Images by Patrick Phillips

Theatre review
H.G. Wells published The King Who Was a King in 1929, reworking as a novel a proposed film treatment that had failed to reach the screen. In Ayah Tayeh’s new adaptation, characters from the book assemble to tell its story, while Wells himself appears alongside them, reminding us that this is a contemporary interrogation of inherited ideas. Such an approach seems entirely appropriate for a species perpetually reckoning with its propensity for war.

Tayeh’s distillation can make Wells’ arguments seem simplistic, particularly at a moment when our daily encounters with the subject demand an almost unbearable complexity of thought and feeling. The adaptation gains depth, however, when it ventures beyond its source, admitting perspectives that complicate the author’s propositions and broaden the terms of the discussion.

As director, Tayeh establishes a surprisingly assured balance between gravity and droll humour, allowing the production to remain approachable without diminishing its subject. Particularly commendable is her refusal to resort to easy sentimentality or exploit the traumas that performers and spectators may bring to the room. There is a restraint to the staging that gives its emotional register integrity.

The work is visually elegant. Bronte Hunt’s minimal set offers just enough suggestion to evoke territorial boundaries and the divisions they impose, while Travis Kecek’s similarly understated lighting sustains a quiet dramatic tension. Andrea Knezevic’s costumes introduce a pleasing palette, although their execution would benefit from closer attention to detail. Daniel Hertern’s music is particularly effective, finding a sonic expression for the tangled pain that war engenders. Its expansive theatricality deepens the production’s emotional resonance without tipping into melodramatic excess or obvious emotional manipulation.

A strong ensemble brings commitment and generosity to the material, with an attentiveness to one another that lends the performance a cohesive energy. As Wells, Marco Chiappi is especially uninhibited, his commanding presence and instinctive timing providing an assured centre around which the production gathers.

The question of why we wage war, which occupies so much of Wells’ novel, can feel less pressing now than the increasingly desperate search for ways to stop it. For some, that desperation has acquired a new intensity; for others, it has long been an enduring condition. Its persistence can leave us suspended between the hope of peaceful resolution and a helplessness that gradually hardens into numbness. The play may offer little that is unfamiliar, but it recognises with honesty this exhausted, unresolved condition: our capacity to despair of humanity while continuing to ask something better of it.

www.belvoir.com.au | www.instagram.com/irregularprogramming.inc

Review: Strong Is The New Pretty (Sydney Theatre Company)

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Venue: Sydney Opera House (Sydney NSW), Oct 22 – Dec 12, 2026
Playwright: Suzie Miller
Director: Sarah Giles
Cast: Lucy Bell, Edyll, Amy Hack, Amy Ingram, Amber McMahon, Tara Morice, Nyasha Ogden, Contessa Treffone
Images by Prudence Upton

Theatre review
Established in 2017, a full century after the first women’s matches were documented in Western Australia, the AFLW arrived after a protracted delay. While its male counterpart flourished and consolidated its cultural dominance over the decades, it was not until recently that women’s football was afforded serious institutional legitimacy. The precipitating events that led to the league’s foundation are dramatised in Suzie Miller’s Strong is the New Pretty. Though Miller’s fictionalised account of these true events occasionally veers into predictable, overly earnest territory, its passion for the subject matter is both undeniable and admirable.

The production’s true triumph lies in the highly kinetic and imaginative direction of Sarah Giles. Collaborating with movement director Kelley Abbey, Giles constructs a theatrical landscape so visually and energetically arresting that the audience is utterly captivated, irrespective of their interest in the sporting arena. This stage magic is further elevated by Paul Jackson’s lighting design, which lends a striking vividness to the imagery being presented. Similarly, Craig Wilkinson’s video projections serve as a clever narrative anchor, literally charting key names and milestone events to keep the plot trajectory clear. The sonic landscape, comprising Clemence Williams’ composition and Brady Watkin’s sound design is judiciously deployed to rouse emotional investment and maintain a palpable sense of urgency for a story that is irrefutably important.

The ensemble cast is visibly invested in this history, and their onstage cohesion is a pleasure to witness. Lucy Bell, Amber McMahon, and Tara Morice ground the production as key figures in the historical moment that we revisit, with each actor imbuing their role with unassailable sincerity.

Ultimately, Strong is the New Pretty is a literal crusade for gender equality, yet its conclusion offers a more nuanced critique: true progress for marginalised genders is not achieved by merely replicating damaging, pre-existing systems. While substituting the old patriarchy with a matriarchy is a tempting conceptual framework, the play suggests that dismantling a pre-existing hierarchy just to replace with another, would be a miscalculation. Instead, it advocates for a network of self-possessed, self-motivated matriarchs, a model of multiplicity rather than hegemony, as the path that will truly serve us. Equality, in this sense, is not simply a matter of allowing women to occupy positions of power, but of rethinking the structures through which power itself is exercised.

www.sydneytheatre.com.au

Review: Never The Sinner (Qtopia)

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Venue: Qtopia (Darlinghurst NSW), Oct 9 – 24, 2026
Playwright: John Logan
Director: Kurtis Laing
Cast: Jack Bridges, Laila Chesterman, Josh Hammond, Frey Kenay, Mark Langham, Harlee Timms, Alex Travers
Images by Jack Shep

Theatre review
In 1924, in Chicago, teenagers Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb were apprehended for the kidnapping and murder of an acquaintance. The apparent pointlessness of the crime, seemingly committed for little more than sport, continues to baffle and disturb. Playwright John Logan delves into the case in Never the Sinner, inviting us to examine it from two perspectives, that of the historical moment and that of the present day. The young men’s fascination with Nietzsche’s concept of the Übermensch serves as a linchpin in Logan’s account, offering a framework through which to understand their actions. It also lends itself to a contemporary reading of the pair as privileged white men, whose wealth and social standing may have fostered a sense of impunity, encouraging them to act without regard for the consequences.

Logan’s meticulous examination of the court case is admirable, revealing an exemplary depth of research and thought. Yet, despite its intellectual ambitions, the play never quite engages the audience on either an emotional or an analytical level. Fortunately, director Kurtis Laing transforms the material into a viscerally compelling piece of theatre. Even if we remain largely indifferent to the characters themselves and their eventual fates, the production’s sheer theatricality, charged with power and magnetism, holds our attention throughout.

Leopold and Loeb were famously lovers, and actors Jack Bridges and Josh Hammond establish a convincing, libidinous chemistry between them. Bridges brings a studied deliberateness to Leopold, while Hammond makes a memorable impression as the more impulsive Loeb. Their contrasting performances create a compelling dynamic, one that is also dramaturgically apt, reflecting the differences in temperament that distinguish the two men. Both actors are persuasive in their respective roles, lending the production a vitality that compensates for the writing’s occasional lack of dramatic momentum.

The supporting cast is equally commendable, with each performer bringing precision and confidence to the ensemble. Collectively, they contribute to a staging whose polish and effectiveness are genuinely surprising. Laila Chesterman, who also appears in the ensemble, demonstrates a keen eye as costume designer, capturing the period with convincing accuracy while introducing touches of flamboyance that lend the production a heightened theatricality. Matthew Phillips likewise takes on dual responsibilities, overseeing both lighting and sound design, and makes a substantial contribution to the atmosphere through each discipline. His lighting has a carefully calibrated sensuality, reinforcing the sexual undercurrents of this true-crime narrative, although the shadows occasionally fall too heavily across the actors’ faces, obscuring some of their expressive work. The sound design is impressively dramatic, but its repeated use of certain atmospheric textures can become monotonous, with repetition undermining the effect it otherwise creates.

In an era dominated by the rhetoric of the manosphere, revisiting Leopold and Loeb offers a timely opportunity to consider how they misappropriated Nietzsche’s concept of the Übermensch, interpreting it as a justification for dominance over others. Today’s self-proclaimed alpha males similarly preach contempt for weakness, treating empathy and accountability as signs of inferiority. Yet genuine strength lies not in the subjugation of others but in the mastery of oneself. The pursuit of dominance, the anxieties of status and the impulse towards cruelty are more often compensatory expressions of insecurity and emotional immaturity than evidence of superiority. The misappropriated ideal of the superman thus becomes a costume worn by men such as Leopold and Loeb, and their contemporary counterparts: men who have failed to master themselves but imagine they have somehow transcended everyone else.

www.qtopiasydney.com.au | www.instagram.com/goodtimetheatrics

Review: We Are The Tigers (Hayes Theatre)

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Venue: Hayes Theatre Co (Potts Point NSW), Oct 9 – Nov 8, 2026
Book, Music and Lyrics: Preston Max Allen
Director: Chiara Assetta
Cast: Artemis Alfonzetti, AJ Betts, Brianna Bishop, Pippin Carroll, Chelsea Dawson, Jenny Guigayoma, Anabel Jamieson, Caitlin McCallig, Millie Seeto, Olivia Vásquez
Images by Jessie Jay

Theatre review
A squad of cheerleaders assembles in the basement of their captain’s parents’ home to rehearse for an upcoming competition — only for one member after another to be murdered, sending the team’s meticulously ordered world into chaos. We Are the Tigers, Preston Max Allen’s 2015 musical, rests on a premise as flimsy as its plot, and a score of consummate genericness prevents the show from achieving true satisfaction; yet it emerges as a delightfully silly whodunit, possessed of enough wit and intrigue to hold an audience in its grip from start to finish.

Direction by Chiara Assetta is taut and crisp, with each scene delivered at a lively pace that maintains our engagement. Kimberly Gilbert’s music direction draws out both the rock sensibilities and the kitschier elements of the score, keeping the energy high while reinforcing the show’s comic tone. The likeable cast of ten impresses with uniformly strong vocals, while their distinct portrayals of familiar character archetypes lend the storytelling a welcome sense of vitality. Brianna Bishop is particularly memorable as team captain Riley, bringing extraordinary wit and impeccable comic timing to the role.

Alice Vance’s set design conjures the blandness of suburbia with perhaps more fidelity than is wise, while the large television planted centre stage proves a miscalculation, utilised for a mere few seconds at the show’s opening and closing. Lily Mateljan’s costumes capture their high schoolers faithfully but err on the side of naturalism for a form so dependent on pizzazz. Fortunately, Topaz Marlay-Cole’s lighting supplies ample dynamism, lifting the production’s visual register overall.

There is an inherent paradox at the heart of “We Are the Tigers”. The musical appears intent on satirising the saccharine superficiality of American culture, embodied here by the rituals and hierarchies of high school cheerleading, yet it remains firmly attached to the very conventions of the Broadway musical that seem to epitomise the artificiality it seeks to critique. The result is an entertaining enough murder mystery, but one whose aesthetic choices ultimately undermine the sharpness of its own satirical intentions.

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

Review: A Place In The Sultan’s Kitchen (Sydney Opera House)

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Venue: Sydney Opera House (Sydney NSW), Oct 14 – 17, 2026
Playwright: Joshua Hinton
Director: Leland Kean
Cast: Joshua Hinton
Images by Ravyna Jassani

Theatre review
Josh Hinton was born in Australia 27 years ago, yet, like so many people of colour in this country, he is frequently confronted with the question, “Where are you from?” It can be a tiresome enquiry, particularly when one’s ancestry resists a straightforward explanation. Of mixed heritage, Hinton finds his family history too complex to distil into a convenient answer for casual conversation. Instead, he devotes A Place in the Sultan’s Kitchen to exploring his origins, spending 70 minutes tracing the intertwined histories of his grandparents and seeking a deeper understanding of his connections to Iran, Sri Lanka and England. Presented primarily as a monologue (with his brother Dominic by his side, operating video and sound cues, and occasionally interjecting verbally) the work sees Hinton prepare his favourite curry while recounting stories of his grandparents’ lives before they eventually settled in Australia. These are rich and often colourful histories, and Hinton relates them with evident sincerity and considerable warmth. Yet the style of presentation lacks a certain dynamism, making it difficult to sustain one’s concentration throughout the performance.

Race is ostensibly the central concern of Hinton’s work. However, although he acknowledges that he has not been particularly conscious of experiencing overt racism himself, his engagement with the subject feels insufficiently developed. Hinton possesses an appealingly genial stage presence, but when addressing race, affability alone is hardly enough. While we can appreciate that his personal experiences may not have exposed him to the more egregious manifestations of racial prejudice, the decision to bring race into the public arena invites a broader engagement with the social and political realities that continue to shape the lives of people of colour. Racial discrimination remains a persistent feature of Australian life, and its renewed visibility in the present climate makes it difficult to understand why a work ostensibly concerned with race should leave questions of marginalisation and persecution largely unexplored. Personal experience need not be the sole basis for such an examination, and by declining to pursue these questions with greater urgency, Hinton’s work remains frustratingly superficial, its sincerity unable to compensate for the lack of critical depth.

At the conclusion of the show, Hinton reveals that he now answers the perennial question of where he comes from by saying, “I come from Wollongong.” It is a quietly satisfying resolution, affirming his sense of belonging to the place in which he was born and raised, and one that his ancestors would presumably have been glad to see him claim. Yet there is an irony in this assertion of uncomplicated belonging: the very ease with which Hinton can now locate himself within Australian society may owe something to the sacrifices and hardships endured by those who came before him. One cannot help wondering whether those ancestors might also appreciate a fuller acknowledgement of what they endured to make possible the relative security and comfort in which he now lives, when declaring his origins. To claim one’s place is meaningful; to recognise the historical cost of that belonging would have made this work considerably more resonant.

www.merrigong.com.au

Review: Tartuffe (KXT on Broadway)

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Venue: KXT on Broadway (Ultimo NSW), Oct 2 – 17, 2026
Playwright: Phillip James Rouse (after Molière)
Director: Phillip James Rouse
Cast: Annie Byron, Deborah Galanos, Julian Garner, Lucy Miller, Tamara Lee Bailey, Dominique Purdue, Travis Howard, Will Thomas
Images by Phil Erbacher

Theatre review
The most significant difference between Phillip James Rouse’s adaptation and Molière’s Tartuffe is the extent to which the former secularises the story of a religious impostor. Recasting the play for a contemporary audience without the historical baggage of Christianity is an understandable strategy, particularly in an age populated by grifters who exploit our willingness to believe in false gods of various kinds. Yet Rouse’s adaptation also demonstrates how difficult it is to replicate the particular satisfaction of Molière’s original, whose success rested in no small part on its incisive critique of the Church and religious hypocrisy. There is something especially gratifying about exposing the failings of an institution that claims moral authority, and Rouse’s largely secular retelling sacrifices some of that critical potency in the process.

Rouse’s direction is animated by a commitment to comic exuberance, and the production is undeniably energetic and boisterous, with an unmistakable vein of camp running throughout. Not every member of the cast, however, manages to sustain this heightened comic register with sufficient consistency. Fortunately, Julian Garner strikes precisely the right tone in the title role, delivering a delicious combination of scheming opportunism and self-serving delusion. He brings both presence and charisma to Tartuffe, making the character’s duplicity as entertaining as it is exasperating. Deborah Galanos is equally noteworthy as Orgonelle, a female reimagining of Orgon, imbuing the role with a flamboyance and emotional intensity that sit comfortably within the absurdist, grotesque sensibility of Rouse’s direction.

The stage is populated with multicoloured balloons which, whatever their intended symbolism, provide a measure of visual engagement. Anna Gardiner’s costumes combine elements of the classical European aesthetic of Molière’s period with a more contemporary sensibility, while Richard Whitehouse’s lighting remains largely at full intensity, sustaining the production’s relentlessly heightened comic energy. Matty James’s sound design is effective during the play’s more sinister passages, but at other times seems to work against the actors’ attempts to generate laughter. The resulting incongruity has a certain curiosity value, although it ultimately proves more distracting than illuminating.

If religion no longer commands the same hold over us that it once did, the con artist has hardly disappeared. The objects of our credulity have simply changed. Today, we are sold rockets promising journeys we will never undertake, to destinations we have little desire to visit, and persuaded to part with our hard-earned money for ephemeral digital investments bearing fashionable names but possessing no intrinsic value.

We congratulate ourselves on our moral clarity, our education and our capacity for informed judgement, yet we willingly purchase candles supposedly redolent of anatomy and vote for the ultra-rich, who repeatedly demonstrate that they regard us less as citizens than as opportunities for exploitation. The contemporary Tartuffe need not pretend to speak for God; he need only convince us that he knows something we do not. And judging by our collective willingness to believe him, business is very good.

www.kingsxtheatre.com | www.instagram.com/raus_aus

Review: Catch As Catch Can (Old Fitz Theatre)

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Venue: Old Fitzroy Theatre (Woolloomooloo NSW), Oct 9 – 31, 2026
Playwright: Mia Chung
Director: Anna Houston
Cast: Andre de Vanny, Robin McLeavy, David Soncin
Images by Phil Erbacher

Theatre review
The Lavecchias and the Phelans of New England have been friends for decades. They lead unremarkable American lives, guided by conventional values, and encounter difficulties that feel devastatingly consequential to those experiencing them, yet are hardly extraordinary in the broader scheme of things. It is precisely this ordinariness that gives Mia Chung’s Catch as Catch Can its emotional force. The dialogue is hyperrealistic, its rhythms, vocabulary and repetitions capturing the texture of everyday speech with uncanny fidelity. Yet Chung’s audacious dramatic structure transforms this apparent naturalism into something extravagantly theatrical. Her stipulation that just three actors portray six characters, traversing generations and gender, creates a startling interplay between the familiar and the estranging.

As performers move between the roles of mother and son, or father and daughter, the production illuminates the peculiar intimacy of family life, and the ways in which those closest to us become embedded in our emotional worlds. Familial bonds can be so profound that the boundaries between our feelings and those of others begin to blur, leaving us unable to distinguish where one person’s emotional experience ends and another’s begins. Chung’s formal conceit makes this entanglement physically manifest, as the same bodies give expression to different generations, suggesting that our identities are never entirely our own, but are shaped by the people whose lives intersect with ours.

The text presents extraordinary challenges for its performers, yet Andre de Vanny, Robin McLeavy and David Soncin do considerably more than rise to the occasion. Together, they deliver a production of astonishing precision and emotional depth, an achievement that feels almost impossible until witnessed firsthand. Their artistry is confoundingly impressive: their technical command is beyond question, their concentration unwavering, and their familiarity with the material’s intricate demands remarkable. The speed and complexity of the exchanges require not only exceptional memorisation and coordination, but an acute sensitivity to the subtle distinctions between characters. That the actors accomplish this with such fluency, while preserving the humanity of each individual they portray, is a testament to their formidable skill.

Director Anna Houston gives the production a sense of immediacy and urgency, maintaining a propulsive momentum from beginning to end without sacrificing the emotional complexity of the material. We find ourselves awestruck by the seemingly superhuman feat unfolding before us, but this is far more than a technical exhibition. The virtuosity of the performances serves a deeper purpose, bringing ordinary lives into extraordinary focus and allowing us to recognise something of ourselves in the characters’ vulnerabilities, disappointments and attachments. The production’s achievement lies in making the improbable mechanics of its theatrical form feel entirely natural, while rendering the familiar business of living profoundly affecting.

Aron Murray’s lighting and Steve Toulmin’s sound design contribute atmospheric nuances with admirable restraint, each responding sensitively to the emotional trajectory of the drama. Together with Kate Beere’s thoughtful set design, they create an understated beauty that eschews spectacle in favour of something more elemental: a quiet reverence for the sacredness of everyday existence. The production understands that the significance of a life need not be measured by extraordinary events, but may reside in the accumulated weight of small interactions, private sorrows and seemingly inconsequential choices.

The play begins with Theresa and Roberta engaged in conversation and concludes with their sons, Tim and Robbie, occupying a separate but structurally related scenario. With the same two actors embodying these respective pairs, the ending establishes a formal echo of the beginning, suggesting that the patterns of human experience are neither isolated nor confined to a single generation. There is something almost cyclical in this arrangement, as though the characters are caught within a continuum in which lives, relationships and emotional struggles recur in altered forms. The structure evokes spiritual conceptions of existence as an interminable cycle, standing in intriguing tension with the predominantly Western tendency to understand life and death as discrete, linear events.

Perhaps this is where Catch as Catch Can extends beyond the intimate confines of family drama and towards a more expansive philosophical proposition. So much destruction, whether ecological, socioeconomic or interpersonal, arises from a failure to recognise the continuity between our actions and their consequences. We behave as though the damage we inflict belongs to the immediate present, or to someone else’s future, rather than to a shared continuum of existence. What we leave behind does not simply disappear when we do; it persists in the lives of others, in the structures we sustain and in the conditions inherited by those who follow us. To recognise this is to understand karma not merely as a spiritual abstraction, but as an ethical principle of consequence and responsibility. How profoundly different our lives might be if we understood that nothing we do is entirely self-contained, and that the world we bequeath to others is inseparable from the choices we make today.

www.oldfitztheatre.com.au | www.empresstheatre.com.au

Review: Next To Godliness (New Theatre)

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Venue: New Theatre (Newtown NSW), Oct 6 – 31, 2026
Playwright: Alastair Brown
Director: Madeleine Withington
Cast: Sonya Kerr, Alice Livingstone, Alisha O’Brien, Nathan Farrow, Brendan Kater, Jessica Carter, Sophie Newby, Harrison Collis-Oates
Images by Bob Seary

Theatre review
We descend into the underworld, where cleaners must scrub away evidence before the police arrive, and a contract killer plies her trade for both profit and pleasure. Next to Godliness by Alastair Brown offers a day in the lives of three women on the wrong side of the law. The criminal underbelly is ordinarily rich territory for drama, but this comedy yields precious few genuine laughs, and its plot never ignites.

Director Madeleine Withington marshals her performers with commendable precision, and the production maintains a consistent visual elegance, yet neither can compensate for the frailty of the writing. Tom Bannerman’s set design is handsomely proportioned and meticulously finished, its textures lending an aura of mystery, while Julian Dunne’s lighting is admirably dynamic, shading the storytelling with hints of menace and drama. The cast of eight display a dedication that is nothing short of admirable; even in the absence of wit or narrative momentum, they attack the material with boundless energy and unwavering commitment.

Next to Godliness aspires to be a portrait of colourful characters in unorthodox occupations. One could draw a parallel based on the curious kinship between criminals and artists: the former takes from society, the latter gives to it, yet both stand similarly beyond the boundaries of conventional life. A further truth is that artists so often command less respect than rogues, despite the fact that so much of life’s pleasures flow from their work.

www.newtheatre.org.au

Review: Stocktake (25A Belvoir)

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Venue: Belvoir St Theatre (Surry Hills NSW), Oct 4 – 25, 2026
Playwright: Jess Zlotnick
Director: Tasha O’Brien
Cast: Lib Campbell, Lucy X Dunning, Bridget Haberecht, Megan Kennedy, Kate Skinner
Images by Jane Coates

Theatre review
In one of the thousands of women’s clothing stores scattered throughout Australia’s shopping malls, a group of employees is required to conduct a stocktake after hours. Nobody particularly wants to be there, but the realities of economic survival demand that people suppress their own inclinations, grit their teeth and endure, if only to ensure that there is food on the table.

Jess Zlotnick’s Stocktake is a searing indictment of the plight of the working class under contemporary late-stage capitalism, although it is equally likely to be remembered for its riotous comedy. Clearly informed by lived experience at the lower rungs of the retail hierarchy, Zlotnick’s writing is as keenly observed as it is wildly imaginative. The play marries an acute understanding of low-wage precarity with surreal manifestations of systemic oppression, exposing the increasingly grotesque consequences of oligarchic power in a world where economic inequality continues to deepen.

Director Tasha O’Brien brings an uncompromising sense of gravity to a production that makes no attempt to disguise its solidarity with the working class. At the same time, she finds inventive ways to exploit the increasingly absurd circumstances, ensuring that the material remains as theatrically engaging as it is politically charged. The result is a work that insists we laugh even as the full indignity of our circumstances unfolds before us. O’Brien renders the injustices experienced by wage earners with admirable clarity, while layering each indignity with such irreverent humour that the production becomes both comedically irresistible and politically inescapable.

The visual elements of the staging are somewhat less assured. Hampered by obvious budgetary constraints, production design by Alice Vance and lighting by Caity Cowan do not always achieve the sophistication the material might warrant, although these limitations do little to diminish the overall effectiveness of the production. Harry Reid’s sound design is a particular strength, establishing an unsettling sense of metaphysical distortion that helps persuade us of the increasingly outlandish phenomena unfolding within an otherwise unremarkable clothing store.

The five-woman ensemble impresses through its collective commitment to this proletarian indictment. There are discernible disparities in performance experience and technical proficiency, but the cast’s collective achievement is consistently compelling. Together, the performers create a theatrical experience whose force derives less from individual virtuosity than from the cumulative power of their shared endeavour, lending the work a resonance that extends beyond the circumstances of its characters.

In an era of unprecedented billionaire wealth and the prospect of the world’s first trillionaire, it is tempting to succumb to political despondency, to assume that the battle has already been lost and that the 99 per cent is powerless to alter a trajectory seemingly destined for catastrophe. Stocktake, however, repeatedly reminds us that its women retain a measure of agency, even when the choices available to them are profoundly constrained. They must continually make decisions, often between alternatives that offer little more than different forms of deprivation. Such choices can appear futile, their outcomes dictated by a system that makes survival itself contingent upon submission.

Yet it is precisely through this recurring insistence on the necessity of choice that the play offers glimpses of what courage might mean under such conditions. Courage emerges as the fragile determination to act when every available option appears inadequate, and when the prospect of meaningful change seems increasingly remote. In a world determined to diminish us, surrendering the possibility of resistance would amount to accepting the very conditions from which we long to escape. Perhaps it is useful to imagine courage as something almost supernatural, a miraculous instrument capable of delivering us from circumstances that otherwise seem insurmountable.

www.belvoir.com.au

Review: Islander (ATYP)

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Venue: The Popsy (Sydney NSW), Oct 6 – 17 , 2026
Creator: Amy Draper
Book: Stewart Melton
Music & Lyrics: Finn Anderson
Director: Hayden Tonazzi
Cast: Georgia Laga’aia, Rebecca Ordiz
Images by Robert Catto

Theatre review
On the remote Scottish isle of Kinnan, a young girl named Eilidh discovers a beached whale calf, and fails to save it. Soon after, a mysterious stranger named Arran washes ashore from the very waters the whale departed, and an improbable friendship takes root between them. Islander, a 2017 musical written for two performers with a score composed almost entirely of the human voice, unfolds from this slender premise into something altogether more affecting.

Finn Anderson’s songs are wonderfully imaginative, possessing a transcendent quality that seems to reach out and hold the audience. Lauren Shaw’s musical direction is thrilling in its unpredictability, and together with Otto Zagala’s atmospheric sound design and Cameron Bartle’s exquisite sound engineering (a technical feat deserving of particular praise) the production’s aural landscape proves quite remarkable. The plot, drawn from Scottish folklore, is genuinely engaging, though when it reaches its dramatic apex, events take on a sudden, hurried momentum that leaves one somewhat disoriented; the abrupt shift in pace introduces a trace of incoherence into what had been, until then, a carefully measured narrative.

Visually, the set is spare, comprising a simple circular platform, but it is in the costumes that production designer Angelina Daniel makes her strongest impression, crafting pieces that speak to our affinity for the aesthetic traditions of the Pacific region. Tim Hope’s lighting could perhaps afford to be more extravagant, yet there is an unmistakable melancholy woven into his design that resonates beautifully with the production’s ecological undertones. Director Hayden Tonnazi imbues the staging with an emotional intensity that renders the experience genuinely compelling; there is a crispness to every element that keeps the audience rapt throughout.

Performers Georgia Laga’aia and Rebecca Ordiz are nothing short of astonishing. Their precision is matched only by their flawless chemistry, one senses a rigour of rehearsal behind every gesture, every harmony, and their storytelling is so assured that surrendering to it feels effortless.

Beyond the stage, the production carries an urgent resonance. The state of our ecology is, by any honest measure, in disarray. We are but one species among millions, yet the scale of our impact is immeasurably outsized. To witness the consequences of that impact, is to confront an uncomfortable truth: we are custodians of this planet, whether we accept the mantle or not. That we have so often behaved as plunderers instead is, beyond question, a profound shame.

www.atyp.com.au