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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Venue: Belvoir St Theatre (Surry Hills NSW), Oct 3 – Nov 1, 2026 Playwright: Grace Chapple (from the novel by E.M. Forster) Director: Hannah Goodwin Cast: Kate Atkinson, Tom Conroy, Tomáš Kantor, Hayley McElhinney, Nathalie Morris, Patrick Williams, Luke Wiltshire, Charles Wu Images by Brett Boardman
Theatre review There is little doubt about the enduring significance of E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View. Its examination of class and its suppressive force, particularly in relation to women, alongside its critique of women’s complicity in upholding patriarchal values, allows the novel to retain considerable contemporary resonance more than a century after its publication. In this stage adaptation, Grace Chapple wisely foregrounds the novel’s quietly radical feminist undercurrent, and much of the dialogue glitters with a welcome modern wit. Yet for all the charm of Forster’s prose, one suspects the source material was never entirely suited to the stage: a slender plot, more texture than event, strains to sustain a full evening of theatre.
Chapple endows each character with endearing particularity, and the cast is easy to follow; even so, the narrative grows rather lacking in its later stretches, precisely when one expects tensions to crest. Director Hannah Goodwin’s instinct, then, to compensate with sheer theatricality, is well founded. It is her mischievous reimagining of key scenarios, in tandem with choreographer Elle Evangelista, that supplies this production’s visceral pleasures. A tennis match, a lakeside swim, an impromptu road trip — these sequences abandon dialogue altogether and surrender instead to the irreducible magic of live performance, to wonderful effect. Madeleine Picard’s sound design and Grace Ferguson’s music amplify these moments of heightened theatricality beautifully, while Amelia Lever-Davidson’s lighting conjures unexpected textures against a disappointingly drab set by Zoë Atkinson, who fares far better with costumes that evoke the period elegantly without ever encumbering the performers.
As Lucy, Nathalie Morris is immediately likeable and impressively attuned to both the comedy and pathos of the role. Yet the abrupt psychological transformations her character undergoes remain difficult to fully comprehend. Her love interest, George, is played by Luke Wiltshire with an appealing vulnerability. More immediately memorable, however, are the production’s comic crowd-pleasers, with Kate Atkinson, Tomáš Kantor and Hayley McElhinney displaying exquisite timing and an instinctive understanding of the humorous possibilities of their characters. It is ultimately the production’s entertainment value, rather than the dramatic force of its source material, that makes the strongest impression.
At the story’s conclusion, we witness a woman breaking free from the shackles that have entrapped so many women for centuries. Lucy’s experience, however, is presented as an exception: her freedom appears to be the consequence of her individual courage to love, a courage that enables her to escape the constraints imposed upon her. But there is something troubling about this formulation. It is not that women have historically lacked courage. The more difficult truth is that courage alone is rarely sufficient to overcome the deeply entrenched forces that constrain women’s possibilities for genuine fulfilment.
Lucy changes the circumstances of her own life, largely through an act of individual defiance. But this is where the story feels less convincing from a contemporary feminist perspective. Emancipation cannot depend solely upon the exceptional courage of an individual woman to resist the structures around her. It is far more often through solidarity, collective action and the dismantling of those structures themselves that meaningful liberation becomes possible. Lucy may find her way out, but the question that lingers is what happens to all the women who she leaves behind.
Venue: Roslyn Packer Theatre (Sydney NSW), Sep 29 – Oct 31, 2026 Playwright: Steven Moffat Director: Simon Phillips Cast: Ty Arnott, Brooklyn Davies, Huw Higginson, Alex Lee, Helen Thomson, Tim Walter, and Ben Wood. Images by Prudence Upton
Theatre review The play’s prologue issues an early warning of sorts, deriding those who read publications such as The Guardian and suggesting that politically engaged people, particularly those on the left, derive a peculiar pleasure from being outraged by the news they consume. In doing so, Steven Moffat seems to announce that The Unfriend is deliberately apolitical, positioning itself outside the anxieties and ideological conflicts of the contemporary world before proceeding to make us laugh without engaging with any of the concerns that occupy us as real people.
Debbie and Peter meet Elsa while on holiday and, in an unfortunate lapse of judgement, invite her to stay at their English home. When they subsequently discover that Elsa is suspected of six murders, they have ample reason to reconsider their hospitality, yet find themselves incapable of actually disinviting their American guest. There is, perhaps, something enduringly recognisable in the British tendency towards excessive politeness, but comedy built around the inability to say no has arguably exhausted itself. The joke has been rehearsed so many times that its once-awkward charm has long since given way to trite familiarity.
Director Simon Phillips appears entirely conscious of the broadness of the comedy he has inherited. An extended sequence of toilet humour not only refuses to apologise for its vulgarity but positively revels in it, as though the production were declaring that this is precisely what we have come to see. There is no pretension, Phillips seems to insist, but neither is there any ambition towards intellectual or aesthetic sophistication. The production embraces its coarseness with an almost defiant lack of embarrassment.
Elsa is played by the eminently accomplished Helen Thomson, who demonstrates an impressive ability to extract comedy from almost anything, however banal or clichéd the material. Alex Lee and Tim Walter bring considerable energy to their portrayals of the painfully polite couple, supplementing their characters’ social awkwardness with an appropriate absurdity that helps sustain the increasingly implausible narrative. Ty Arnott and Huw Higginson likewise make the most of their eccentric characters, producing moments of genuine theatrical pleasure even when the comic mechanisms themselves remain conspicuously and toe-curlingly obvious.
The set design by Isabel Hudson is also worthy of commendation. Its immaculate evocation of middle-class respectability provides the production with a visual sumptuousness that compensates, to some extent, for the cheapness of the comic devices employed in the action itself. The contrast is almost revealing: the stage looks substantially more elegant than the material unfolding upon it.
Ben Phillipe wrote in 2021 that “if you have a life that leaves you fool proof to politics, your politics approximate to ‘privileged.’” For many of us, the present is experienced as a period of genuine emergency, making it difficult to accept the notion of political neutrality as an innocent artistic position. When artists, or indeed anyone with a public platform, declare themselves apolitical, it can instead suggest a position of sufficient privilege to permit looking away, to disregard the forces of social and political disintegration taking place around them.
The problem is not simply that such detachment can appear complacent. It is that the idea of being untouched by politics is itself a political luxury. We live within structures in which our lives are inevitably interconnected, and the rot permitted to fester in one part of society rarely remains contained there. More troubling still, indifference to the persecution of others risks creating the conditions in which authoritarian and fascistic tendencies can become increasingly emboldened. The targets may change, but the machinery of persecution does not require a permanent target; once one group has been exhausted, another can readily be found.
The Unfriend may therefore succeed on its own terms as an uncomplicated comedy, but its insistence on keeping politics at arm’s length becomes increasingly conspicuous. What the production treats as an escape from contemporary anxieties can also be understood as an unwillingness to confront them. In a moment when so much of public life is defined by precisely the political concerns the play chooses to dismiss, that refusal to engage begins to feel less like neutrality than a statement in itself.
Venue: Ensemble Theatre (Kirribilli NSW), Sep 18 – Oct 18, 2026 Playwright: Eloise Snape Director: Anthea Williams Cast: Di Adams, Leeanna Walsman, Shirong Wu Images by Prudence Upton
Theatre review The CEO of Eco Engines finds herself trapped inside her company’s AI-operated lift alongside two employees. The claustrophobic setting is tense enough, but it is the recent fatal accident involving one of Eco Engines’ autonomous vehicles that truly exposes the fault lines between them. Eloise Snape’s The Elevator is set in the near future, at a moment when the proliferation of robotics is accelerating and corporations seize every opportunity to automate in pursuit of profit, with scant regard for the ethical consequences left in their wake.
Snape’s decision to confine three women with radically different perspectives inside a malfunctioning lift creates fertile ground for an interrogation of some of today’s most pressing technological and moral dilemmas. The play is astute in its examination of accountability, corporate power and artificial intelligence, but much of its comedy fails to land. Anthea Williams’ direction is similarly unable to unlock the script’s humour, leaving the first half feeling laboured and occasionally awkward. Once the production relinquishes its obligation to be funny and allows its darker instincts to take over, it becomes something considerably more compelling.
Leeanna Walsman’s Margot, the CEO, is perhaps a touch too naturalistic, never quite locating the heightened absurdity of a ruthless executive in crisis mode. Yet her final monologue is extraordinary, delivering the production’s emotional and intellectual climax with breathtaking force. Shirong Wu brings irresistible effervescence to Alison, the company’s PR specialist, injecting buoyancy into scenes that might otherwise collapse under the weight of exposition. As maintenance worker Ollie, Di Adams is somewhat restrained emotionally, but her grounded presence lends the play an essential moral gravity.
Kelsey Lee’s set and lighting design cleverly overcome the visual limitations of a story confined entirely to a lift. Through meticulously calibrated shifts in colour, intensity and atmosphere, she creates imagery of surprising richness and variety within an inherently static environment. Daniel Herten’s sound design is equally effective, its ominous undertones gradually intensifying until they become an almost subliminal expression of the characters’ mounting dread.
From the outside, it is easy to imagine that Margot could simply refuse the responsibilities that violate her conscience. Yet the play’s more unsettling insight is that she no longer believes refusal is available to her. She has travelled too far down a path that now feels irreversible, where technological progress and commercial expansion have become moral absolutes rather than choices.
The Elevator ultimately suggests that it may already be too late to appeal to the conscience of tech oligarchs, many of whom appear consumed by self-aggrandising visions of inevitable technological and economic advancement. If there is hope of averting the nightmare scenarios that accompany our most prominent innovations, it lies not with those building the machines, but with governments willing to regulate them and with a public prepared to insist on accountability before progress becomes truly irreversible.
