Review: House Of Rot (Hayes Theatre)

Posted in Theatre by

Venue: Hayes Theatre Co (Potts Point NSW), Jun 23 – 28, 2026
Director: Dino Dimitriadis
Cast: Paul Capsis, Adam Noviello, with Victoria Falconer
Images by Gianna Rizzo

Theatre review
Much like the women of the celebrated documentary Grey Gardens, Addy and their parental counterpart exist in a state of mutual captivity—inseparable, yet hardly serene. House of Rot unfolds principally through torch songs and standards drawn from the past century, with dialogue kept to a bare minimum.

Though its form is fundamentally cabaret, its theatrical scope renders it far more substantial than the category typically permits—a distinction owing much to Leila Enright’s economically incisive dramaturgy. Brockman’s lighting, in particular, demands recognition for the artistic elevation it brings; consistently mesmerising, it possesses the rare capacity to arrest time itself—an effect crucial to a narrative about two people locked in a vicious cycle of tender devotion and bitter dependency. We behold them frozen, unable to advance, yet we are compelled to discern whatever sublimity resides in their stasis.

Victoria Falconer’s musical direction harnesses the transcendental power of song, reshaping familiar numbers into freshly romantic configurations that cohere into a unified whole. The result is a work that either articulates a meaningful narrative—subject to each spectator’s personal interpretation—or, at minimum, facilitates a visceral experience that proves both persuasive and resonant, propelled by an unmistakable sense of deliberate intention. Falconer remains onstage throughout, providing flawless accompaniment while also delivering the show’s prologue and epilogue.

Paul Capsis inhabits the parental figure with a baroque sensibility, wielding a singular fusion of the macabre and the glamorous. The effect is not merely visually arresting but emotionally penetrating; Capsis conveys instantaneous gravitas through every gesture and saunter, even when the rational mind struggles to assign immediate meaning to these portrayals. Such impact derives not solely from the visual plane, but from vocal capacities now the stuff of legend—enthralling precisely because of their steadfast refusal of conventional prettiness. Adam Noviello, though not yet possessing the seasoned depth to fully match a living legend, nevertheless sings with comparable skill, albeit in a wildly divergent register.

Nicol & Ford’s costumes distil the essence of the Edies into a contemporary idiom, evoking eroded wealth, regrettable choices, and unvarnished beauty to ensure we fall in love with these characters anew. Dino Dimitriadis’s direction does more than retell the saga of entwined aristocratic Americans; by placing Capsis and Noviello in parallel, Dimitriadis transposes the Grey Gardens mythology into a narrative of intergenerational queerness—one that speaks to the inheritance of trauma alongside more wondrous bequests.

House of Rot interrogates how a community ought to move forward in a world that, while ostensibly growing more accommodating, also seems to demand the shedding of cultural particularities. It aches for queer people to claim a luminous future, yet warns with a tremor in its voice that we must not surrender every trait that makes us who we are—must not melt ourselves down to be palatable to those who have never once, not for a single heartbeat, considered loosening their grip on power. To do so would be to lose not merely our history, but the very pulse of what makes us consequential and irreplaceable.

www.hayestheatre.com.au | www.greendoortheatrecompany.com

Review: The Roommate (Ensemble Theatre)

Posted in Theatre by

Venue: Ensemble Theatre (Kirribilli NSW), Jun 19 – Jul 25, 2026
Playwright: Jen Silverman
Director: Lee Lewis
Cast: Lucy Bell, Belinda Bromilow
Images by Brett Boardman

Theatre review
Sharon, newly divorced, finds herself unmoored—liberated from the obligations of marriage and motherhood yet utterly unprepared for autonomy. Having spent decades in Iowa as wife and mother, she has never cultivated an identity beyond servitude; the sudden absence of duty leaves her not merely free but adrift, hollowed out by a life lived in reflexive deference to others. Into this vacuum steps Robyn, a transplant from New York whose existence—vivid, self-determined, almost voluptuously full—represents a universe Sharon can scarcely comprehend, let alone inhabit. The collision between these two women proves both transformative and darkly comic; what begins as an education becomes an emancipation.

In The Roommate, Jen Silverman crafts a narrative that transcends the familiar midlife-awakening template. The play interrogates the architecture of submission—how the rules imposed upon Sharon were never benign conventions but instruments of subjugation, internalized so thoroughly that freedom itself becomes disorienting. Silverman understands that metamorphosis is not merely political but physical: a woman relearning her own appetites, her own voice, her own capacity for transgression. Director Lee Lewis approaches Sharon’s trajectory with evident relish, mining the text for its comic exuberance while never trivializing the radical nature of her reinvention. The production recognizes that joy, here, is itself a political act—the pleasure of a body and mind finally claiming ownership of themselves.

Lucy Bell delivers a performance of remarkable dexterity as Sharon, charting the character’s evolution from desperate, almost feral hunger to something approaching sovereignty. She locates the absurdity inherent in Sharon’s naïveté without condescending to it, and grounds the later acts of rebellion in genuine emotional stakes. There is both levity and gravitas in this portrait of self-discovery; Bell renders Sharon’s awakening not as a gentle blooming but as something more disruptive, more voracious.

As Robyn, Belinda Bromilow offers a necessary counterweight—less exuberant than Bell, perhaps, but possessed of an authenticity that prevents the dynamic from collapsing into caricature. Robyn is not merely the catalyst for Sharon’s transformation but a woman undergoing her own quiet excavation, similarly engaged in the arduous work of self-definition.

The production design by Simone Romaniuk operates with astute visual economy, evoking the American landscape through carefully calibrated contrasts—costume and spatial details that externalize the friction between Robyn’s cultivated cosmopolitanism and Sharon’s unexamined provincialism. Matt Cox’s lighting provides understated but precise atmospheric modulation, tracing the characters’ shifting psychological registers without ostentation. Madeleine Picard’s compositions, deployed during scene transitions, maintain narrative momentum with inventive sonic textures that sustain our anticipation for each new development.

What resonates most profoundly is the play’s recognition that Sharon’s ignorance has been structurally cultivated—partly self-imposed, yes, but largely enforced by a hegemony that reduces her to fungible labor, a minor component in an indifferent apparatus. Yet The Roommate refuses easy binaries of victimhood and liberation. Robyn, too, is in flight from a past that no longer fits; her apparently charmed existence conceals its own disillusionments. The feminist dimension of Silverman’s work is unmistakable but never didactic—her argument extends beyond gender to encompass anyone reduced to instrumentality, anyone whose self-possession has been systematically eroded. The play ultimately insists that claiming one’s life is not a single dramatic rupture but a continuous, often comic, occasionally terrifying process of becoming.

www.ensemble.com.au

Review: Straight Panic (ATYP)

Posted in Theatre by

Venue: The Popsy (Sydney NSW), Jun 16 – 27 , 2026
Playwright: Lachlan Parry
Director: Lily Hayman
Cast: Andrew Fraser, Emma Kew, Esha Jessy, Pierse Cant, Evelina Singh
Images by Phil Erbacher

Theatre review
Set in Sydney, 2005, three discrete locales stage simultaneous scenes of casual, despicable homophobia—communities unwittingly laying bare their prejudices for the audience’s scrutiny. Straight Panic, Lachlan Parry’s triptych of short plays, interrogates the extent to which attitudes toward gay people have—or conspicuously have not—shifted across two decades. Though characters and settings diverge, Parry’s exuberant wit remains the production’s through-line, unmistakable and relentless. Director Lily Hayman leans fully into the text’s intentional absurdity, yielding a production memorable for humour that oscillates between the brazenly broad and the unexpectedly subtle.

The ensemble of five proves uniformly winning: each performer deploys confidence and exuberance to animate distinct personalities, rendering all three narratives urgently contemporary. Their chemistry is palpable, their collective delight infectious; the audience succumbs readily to their charm. Soham Apte’s production design achieves elegance through restraint, facilitating narrative clarity without unnecessary embellishment. Tyler Fitzpatrick’s lighting and Daniel Hertern’s score operate with comparable efficiency—accomplished, unostentatious, and entirely effective.

Straight Panic may refrain from delivering its political thesis with strident force, yet it demonstrates that certain behaviours resist sanitisation regardless of the humorous gloss applied. Across these narratives, we witness the evolution of public discourse: while private sentiment remains unknowable, the vocabulary of prejudice has acquired constraints. This is not progress in its ideal form, perhaps, but it is progress nonetheless—and not to be dismissed.

www.atyp.com.au

Review: Truck Driver (Sydney Opera House)

Posted in Theatre by

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)

Posted in Theatre by

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)

Posted in Theatre by

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)

Posted in Theatre by

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)

Posted in Theatre by

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)

Posted in Theatre by

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)

Posted in Theatre by

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