Venue: Old Fitzroy Theatre (Woolloomooloo NSW), Aug 21 – Sep 13, 2025
Playwright: Nathan Harrison
Director: Emma McManus
Cast: Nathan Harrison
Images by Lucy Parakhina
Theatre review
In Birdsong of Tomorrow, Nathan Harrison rhapsodizes about birds that trace their origins to the age of dinosaurs, and about songs that took flight millions of years before humans set foot on the earth. At once a meditation on time and change, on life and death, Birdsong of Tomorrow resounds most urgently as a plea for ecological preservation, emerging at a moment when humanity seems fatigued by its own fight to protect the earth.
Directed by Emma McManus, the show conveys tenderness and sensitivity, tempered by occasional ironic humour that keeps its earnestness from becoming overbearing. Harrison is an endearing presence, and his command of the text keeps us engaged with his message, even when the specificity of his interests sometimes veers into the overly niche. He is joined by Tom Hogan, whose inventive live musical accompaniment enriches the experience immeasurably.
Lights by Saint Clair ensure warmth, along with small doses of drama that provide a sense of theatricality. Surrounded by archaic forms of media technology, Harrison comments on temporal transformations, and the habitual wastefulness of modern life responsible for the degradation of our environment. Attuning ourselves to the song of nature offers no efficiency, no measurable productivity within a capitalist framework, revealing that the values we so readily embrace will, in the end, be our undoing.
Suzy Goes See 