Venue: KXT on Broadway (Ultimo NSW), Apr 17 – May 2, 2026
Playwright: Maud Dromgoole
Director: Dominique Purdue
Cast: Izabella Louk, Victor Y Z Xu
Images by Phil Erbacher

Theatre review
Daisy and Michael’s environmental conscientiousness is so absolute that the prospect of procreation could only ever encroach upon their lives by sheer accident. In Maud Dromgoole’s 3 Billion Seconds, we observe the couple’s increasingly frantic—and disquieting—efforts to assimilate their impending parenthood into their meticulously carbon-neutral existence. The play’s conceptual architecture is formidable, wielding acerbic indictments against the prevailing hypocrisies that pervade contemporary ecological discourse. Yet the production’s dark humour is rendered overly solemn under Dominique Purdue’s direction, which privileges the grotesque over the comic, perhaps sacrificing levity for its own ideological earnestness. Nevertheless, Purdue’s instinct for theatrical spectacle and visual dynamism remains incontrovertible, yielding a staging of considerable visual excitement.

Mia MacCormick’s set design proves astute in its deployment of a sandpit as the production’s locus, a choice that amplifies the piece’s kinetic energy whilst furnishing a tactile materiality that resonates poignantly with its ecological preoccupations. Caity Cowan’s lighting design operates with commendable dynamism, demonstrating both laudable ambition and considerable intricacy. Cameron Smith’s soundscape ensures the audience remains oriented through the production’s rapid-fire succession of scene transitions.

Performers Izabella Louk and Victor Y Z Xu are unquestionably committed to the material, maintaining an admirable focus throughout; yet a shortage of interpretive nuance and a certain intellectual superficiality in their characterisations ultimately diminish the production’s capacity to captivate, even if the narrative’s ethical through-line remains unimpeachably intact.

Those who elect to bear children will invariably marshal a multiplicity of justifications, just as those arguing against can advance an equally formidable array of objections. Ultimately, the principle of bodily autonomy must remain inviolable. Our collective opposition ought to be directed not toward individual choice but toward the billion-dollar industrial complexes that profit immeasurably from a discourse that displaces culpability onto private citizens—entities infinitely more complicit in our present environmental cataclysm than any single parent could ever be.

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