Review: Burgerz (Trans Theatre Festival)

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Venue: Carriageworks (Eveleigh NSW), Jan 7 – 18, 2026
Playwright: Travis Alabanza
Director: Sam Curtis Lindsay
Cast: Travis Alabanza
Images by Dorothea Tuch

Theatre review
Travis Alabanza embarks on the deceptively simple task of making their first burger, a venture that is daunting from its very inception. Expectations loom large: rules to be followed, standards to be met, and a destination already mapped out for a journey that has barely begun. Conscious of the weight of these prescriptions, Alabanza invites a volunteer to join them on stage—specifically a straight white man. The choice is pointed rather than incidental, reflecting the reality that so many of the rules governing our lives, both in the UK where the work originated and here in Australia, are institutionalised by those who fit precisely that description.

A work that confronts both trans identity and lived experience as a person of colour, Burgerz is scintillating theatre that embeds danger at its very core. The volunteer does not appear briefly for light-hearted audience interaction; instead, he remains on stage alongside Alabanza for a substantial duration of the performance. This sustained presence heightens a palpable sense that “anything could happen”—a tension that lies at the heart of compelling theatre. More crucially, it mirrors the lived precarity of navigating heteronormative spaces as a trans person of colour, where the possibility of violence is never abstract, but ever-present, hovering in the background of even the most mundane encounters.

The risks Alabanza takes pay off emphatically. Immersed in an unrelenting atmosphere of vulnerability, the audience is held rapt, invested from the opening moments to the final beat. Alabanza’s exquisite wit and disarming charm ensure an unwavering alignment with them, while their intimate command of the material allows each unrehearsed moment of spontaneity—prompted by the surprise presence of a volunteer—to be met with razor-sharp sass and impeccable comic timing. Their capacity to generate genuine chemistry with a stranger is unequivocally extraordinary, resulting in a performance that is both singular and indelibly memorable.

Under Sam Curtis Lindsay’s direction, the work unfolds with instinctive precision, shaping a journey of unexpected texture and continual surprise, one that proves quietly and deeply emotional. The production remains consistently delightful while keeping audiences alert to its shifting rhythms and tonal turns. Soutra Gilmour’s production design embraces a pop-inflected sensibility that complements Alabanza’s signature, calculated flippancy. Lighting by Lee Curran and Lauren Woodhead, together with sound design by XANA, steers the staging through finely calibrated transitions of mood and atmosphere, reinforcing the work’s emotional and theatrical dexterity.

A man once hurled a burger at Alabanza in a public space, an act intended as humiliation and degradation. Alabanza can do everything within their power to reclaim and reframe the incident and its significance, yet a harder truth remains: it is not personal reckoning alone that must shift, but the conditions that permit such acts to occur. We watch Alabanza sink into deep contemplation, meticulously interrogating and dismantling the forces that render the world both resolutely and insidiously exclusionary.

What ultimately comes into focus is an irrefutable understanding that meaningful change requires collective responsibility. We are bound together by the inevitability of shared existence, and the work of recognising—let alone sustaining—one another’s humanity remains the most profound challenge of simply being here.

www.greendoortheatrecompany.com

Review: A Chinese Christmas 给我婆婆的情书 (KXT on Broadway)

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Venue: KXT on Broadway (Ultimo NSW), Dec 10 – 20, 2025
Playwright: Trent Foo
Director: Monica Sayers
Cast: Trent Foo, Jolin Jiang, Tiang Lim
Images by Robert Miniter

Theatre review
It is Christmastime, and Heeba finds himself tasked with hosting the family’s annual celebration. In an effort to imbue the occasion with meaning beyond ritual and excess, he summons his Chinese ancestors—less as a supernatural flourish than as a means of interrogating what might truly make the season resonate, and of reflecting on his own sense of self at a moment when the holiday’s frivolity threatens to overwhelm its substance.

Trent Foo’s Dickens-inspired A Chinese Christmas is a vulnerable and tender offering, the work of a young artist searching for cultural anchorage within a milieu still stubbornly centred on whiteness. While the piece would benefit from a more cohesive and dynamically structured narrative, its gentle ruminations on heritage, belonging, and identity possess an undeniable charm, one that lingers well beyond the festive trappings.

Monica Sayers’ assured direction offers much to engage with, shaping a production that approaches its subject with striking honesty and humour. The work articulates, with sensitivity and clarity, the experience of existing in-between worlds, while reanimating traditional concepts in ways that feel newly resonant rather than merely inherited.

Amy Lane’s inventive set design situates the audience within a liminal realm, almost purgatorial in its effect, while Cat Mai’s lighting deepens the atmosphere, heightening the production’s ghostly, otherworldly qualities with deft theatricality. Equally accomplished is Jolin Jiang’s music and sound design, which balances the ethereal with a distinct sense of Chineseness with notable finesse, enriching the experience through textures and tones too often flattened or dismissed as simply “foreign.”

Jiang performs a substantial portion of her score live on stage, embodying the ethereal presence of Lady Dai with striking precision and interpretive acuity. Foo is abundantly charismatic and energetic, infusing the central role with a valuable soulfulness that imparts to it a keen sense of purpose. As Heeba’s grandmother, Tiang Lim is quietly memorable, her graceful presence serving as an evocative embodiment of ancestral lineage and inherited memory.

In an increasingly secular world, Christmas persists as a day of collective observance—less a commemoration of a deity’s birth than an occasion for connection, with kin both biological and chosen. It becomes a moment to engage with tradition, to acknowledge the journeys that have unfolded, and to situate oneself more consciously within the present.

In this hallucinatory episode, Heepa encounters the past, the present, and that which is yet to come, not through the moralistic scaffolding of Dickensian redemption, but via a framework shaped by intersecting destinies. These convergences render tangible and meaningful the ways in which one might navigate an existence that honours those to whom one remains, forever, inextricably bound. Here, remembrance itself becomes an act of love, and for Heepa, moving forward with resolve means carrying them gently—at once inheritance and solace.

www.kingsxtheatre.com | www.instagram.com/fooframeproductions

Review: Beautiful Thing (Qtopia)

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Venue: Qtopia (Darlinghurst NSW), Dec 3 – 13, 2025
Playwright: Jonathan Harvey
Director: Finn Stannard
Cast: Poppy Cozens, Max Dÿkstra, Michael Hogg, Willa King, Jake Walker
Images by Alexandra Tiernan, Yingying Zhang

Theatre review

It is challenging enough for two teenage boys to fall in love, but the lower-socioeconomic circumstances into which Jamie and Ste are born make the prospect exponentially more fraught. Jonathan Harvey’s seminal Beautiful Thing may be more than thirty years old, yet not a moment of it feels antiquated. Still resonant and urgent, the play continues to illuminate a vital social discourse while remaining every bit as entertaining and affecting as it ever was.

Under the direction of Finn Stannard, this production proves a genuine delight, distinguished by its keen focus on the intimacies between characters and its palpable tenderness toward individuals navigating their own distinct hardships. The set, designed by Laila McCarthy and Zoe Young, is both convincing and versatile, while Raphael Gennusa’s unadorned lighting design shifts quietly, guiding us gently through the changing moods of each scene.

Jake Walker engenders genuine empathy as Jamie, delivering a persuasive portrait of youthful innocence edged with quiet longing. Max Dÿkstra may veer toward understatement as Ste, yet his restraint never obscures the depth of the young man’s turmoil, which remains palpable throughout. Their mutual friend Leah is vivaciously inhabited by Poppy Cozens, whose irrepressible sass and streak of mischief punctuate the play with welcome irreverence. Equally playful is Willa King as Jamie’s mother, Sandra; she injects the production with invaluable verve and humour, while capturing with striking precision the realities of a single mother navigating the precarity of the lower working class. Her boyfriend Tony, portrayed by Michael Hogg, may not always land the comedic beats, but he compensates with a deft sensitivity that emerges at precisely the moments the drama most requires.

In 1993, few could have imagined that same-sex marriage would become a lived reality within a single generation, yet history has a way of revealing humanity’s capacity for radical progress. For many queer youth, particularly those in the West, growing up beyond the strictures of heteronormativity has grown markedly less daunting with each passing decade. Living in poverty, however, remains a far more stubborn barrier to liberation, especially in an era marked by worsening wealth disparities that entrench disadvantage as swiftly as social attitudes evolve. It is a sobering reminder that equality in law does not instantly translate to equality in life — and that love, though triumphant, still has to fight for its footing.

www.qtopiasydney.com.au | www.companyofdramaticarts.com

Review: Pretty Woman (Theatre Royal)

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Venue: Theatre Royal (Sydney NSW), Nov 30, 2025 – Mar 1, 2026
Book: Garry Marshall, J.F. Lawton
Music & Lyrics: Bryan Adams, Jim Vallance
Director: Jerry Mitchell
Cast: Michelle Brasier, Ben Hall, Doug Hansell, Samantha Jade, Tim Omaji
Images by Daniel Boud

Theatre review
Vivian is a sex worker hired for a week by Edward, a corporate high-flyer briefly in town for business. The two appear to share almost nothing in common, save for an unspoken desire to abandon the very careers that have come to define them. Yet they spark instantly, and against all expectations, find themselves tumbling into a romance neither had anticipated. The musical adaptation of the 1990 blockbuster Pretty Woman retains all the swooning charm of the original, with a score by Bryan Adams and Jim Vallance that lands comfortably within the Broadway tradition—perhaps not as indelibly memorable as the genre’s greatest hits, but melodic and satisfying all the same.

The production, directed by Jerry Mitchell, makes no attempt to reinvent the wheel, yet offers ample pleasures for those drawn to theatrical verve and straightforward sentimentality. Samantha Jade is an endearing Vivian, imbuing the role with a touch of soulfulness that helps counterbalance the show’s unmistakably sanitised veneer. As Edward, Ben Hall may be short on effortless charisma, but he delivers each vocal line with precision and grace. And where the central couple falls short in chemistry, Tim Omaji steps in with exuberance to spare; in his dual turns as Happy Man and Mr Thompson, he injects the evening with irresistible pizazz and a buoyant joie de vivre.

At its heart, Pretty Woman is a story about people who have stopped expecting anything good to come their way, and who suddenly find themselves confronted with the possibility of something better. Both Vivian and Edward begin from places of quiet resignation, navigating lives that feel predetermined and constrained. Their unlikely romance becomes a small but potent reminder that even in moments coloured by hopelessness, human connection can open a path toward renewal. The show’s enduring appeal lies in this simple promise: that love, however improbable, can interrupt despair and, just briefly, allow two lost souls to imagine a different future.

www.prettywomanthemusical.com.au

Review: Dial M For Murder (Ensemble Theatre)

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Venue: Ensemble Theatre (Kirribilli NSW), Nov 28, 2025 – Jan 11, 2026
Playwright: Jeffrey Hatcher (from the original by Frederick Knott)
Director: Mark Kilmurry
Cast: Garth Holcombe, Madeleine Jones, Kenneth Moraleda, Anna Samson, David Soncin
Images by Phil Erbacher

Theatre review
Margot is conducting an affair, unaware that her husband Tony is quietly engineering her murder. Yet in Dial M for Murder, even the most meticulous schemes refuse to unfold as intended, giving rise to a cascade of unforeseen twists. Jeffrey Hatcher’s adaptation of Frederick Knott’s seminal play and film may not conform to the conventions of a traditional whodunnit, but it possesses all the hallmarks of an investigative classic—suspenseful, cunningly constructed, and keeping us on tenterhooks as we strain to anticipate its final reckoning.

Marvellously taut direction from Mark Kilmurry, laced with a gentle, sly humour, yields a thoroughly engaging night at the theatre. While Kilmurry’s treatment of this 1952 tale is not especially inventive, it has no difficulty holding us captive throughout. Each plot revelation is unveiled with delectable finesse, delivering the kind of satisfaction that reminds us why this genre endures so effortlessly.

Nick Fry’s handsome set design allows for fluid, elegant movement, while presenting a sophisticated colour palette that evokes the period yet remains visually appealing. His costumes, impeccably realised, convincingly embody the refinement of the English upper class. Matt Cox’s lighting, with its warm amber glow, flatters the stage picture and injects a quietly simmering dramatic tension. Madeleine Picard’s music, lush and evocative of mid-century cinema, proves sumptuous throughout, ever attuned to deepening the atmosphere of intrigue.

Anna Samson and Garth Holcombe embody, with remarkable acuity, a couple burdened by secrets. Both deliver finely detailed performances that steer the narrative through its dizzying succession of twists, offering a delectable touch of extravagance that never tips into excess. Madeleine Jones and David Soncin provide compelling support, but it is Kenneth Moraleda’s turn as Inspector Hubbard that proves especially irresistible. He infuses the role with a distinctive quirkiness, lending the production an added spark that elevates its overall charm. At the end, the production is an excellent reminder of how perversely delightful it can be to revel in a story woven from such unabashedly heinous acts.

www.ensemble.com.au

Review: Born On A Thursday (Old Fitz Theatre)

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Venue: Old Fitzroy Theatre (Woolloomooloo NSW), Nov 28 – Dec 14, 2025
Playwright: Jack Kearney
Director: Lucy Clements
Cast: Deborah Galanos, James Lugton, Owen Hasluck, Sharon Millerchip, Sofia Nolan
Images by Phil Erbacher

Theatre review
April returns to her family home in Western Sydney after several years in Denmark, only to find that the landscape she left behind has shifted in ways no one is willing—or equipped—to articulate. In Jack Kearney’s Born on a Tuesday, the family’s chronic ineloquence becomes a kind of endurance test: months pass, crises mount, yet they orbit around their wounds with quiet desperation, unable to summon the intimacy or vulnerability required for meaningful connection. The result is a drama in which very little seems to occur, and although it captures certain truths about Australian parochialism, the writing rarely deepens those insights into a fully satisfying theatrical experience.

Lucy Clements’ direction lends the production an unmistakable gravity, keeping us attuned to the persistent despondency saturating April’s household, but that solemnity never quite translates into emotional engagement. These characters are not unsympathetic, yet we are seldom invited far enough into their inner lives to feel invested in their journeys.

The performances, however, are uniformly strong. Sharon Millerchip, as April’s mother Ingrid, delivers an impressively layered portrayal, marked by meticulous detail and a striking naturalism. Sofia Nolan’s April is earnest and committed, though the evasive quality of the writing often constrains her. Owen Hasluck brings a welcome charisma to April’s brother Isaac, while Deborah Galanos and James Lugton infuse their neighbour characters with a vividness and vitality that guard the piece from tipping entirely into gloom.

Soham Apte’s set design and Rita Naidu’s costumes evoke the suburban milieu with precision, yet offer just enough chromatic lift to keep the stage visually compelling. Veronique Benett’s lighting and Sam Cheng’s sound design are both applied with discernment, subtly shaping atmosphere and shading in tensions. Together, they support a production that strives to give weight to the many things ordinary people seem, all too often, unable to put into words.

Beneath all that reluctance to engage in difficult conversations lies a dense accumulation of resentment. The characters in Born on a Thursday, young and old alike, understand that life is no bed of roses—that its curve balls can, in fact, be catastrophic. Yet we must still find ways to keep moving. To compound those hardships by shutting out the very people to whom we are bound by kinship is its own small tragedy, and one the play suggests may be the most Australian silence of all.

www.oldfitztheatre.com.au | www.newghoststheatre.com

Review: The Seagull (KXT on Broadway)

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Venue: KXT on Broadway (Ultimo NSW), Nov 21 – Dec 6, 2025
Playwright: Saro Lusty-Cavallari (after Anton Chekhov)
Director: Saro Lusty-Cavallari
Cast: Talia Benatar, Kath Gordon, Jason Jefferies, Deborah Jones, Saro Lepejian, Tim McGarry, Brendan Miles, Shan-Ree Tan, Alexandra Travers
Images by Robert Miniter

Theatre review
In Saro Lusty-Cavallari’s adaptation of The Seagull, the action is deftly relocated from late-19th-century Russia to the 2020 COVID lockdown in Bellingen, an idyllic township north of Sydney. Chekhov’s characters preserve their familiar longings and disappointments, and in this contemporary reframing it becomes unmistakably clear that the disillusionment of young theatrical hopefuls like Konstantin and Nina is far from an antiquated concern. Lusty-Cavallari reveals a marked vulnerability in this iteration of the classic, offering transparent glimpses of autobiography woven through an updated tale that engages meaningfully with the inner workings—and inner wounds—of Sydney’s theatre world.

Although its context is reimagined, this production maintains a striking fidelity to Chekhov’s spirit, arriving—somewhat unexpectedly—at a tone that feels almost traditional for a genre no longer in vogue. Lusty-Cavallari’s exuberant humour, threaded generously throughout, reshapes a well-worn tale of existential drift into something distinctly bittersweet, and, thankfully, thoroughly engaging and enjoyable.

Konstantin is rendered with remarkable intricacy by Saro Lepejian, who layers nuance upon nuance to create a character of great authenticity and warmth, allowing us to grasp him with unusual depth and familiarity. Alexandra Travers is equally compelling as Nina, lifting the archetype of the innocent ingénue into a figure of luminous humanity; her final scenes prove disarmingly profound and affecting under Travers’ interpretation. Also notable is Tim McGarry’s wonderfully idiosyncratic Pyotr, delivered with exquisite comic timing and an assured lightness of touch, earning some of the production’s most memorable laughs.

Kate Beere’s set and costume design provides elegant, uncluttered solutions that allow the intricate emotional dynamics to remain firmly in view. Aron Murray’s lighting is exquisitely attuned to each fluctuation in tone, guiding us seamlessly into not only the work’s dramatic intensities but also its well-timed moments of levity, which together render the production genuinely delightful.

It may feel incongruous to watch Chekhov’s characters driven to the point of shooting themselves in a contemporary Australian setting, yet the deep-seated malaise that fuels such despair remains clearly recognisable in our present moment. These upper-middle-class figures seem perpetually unable to attain what they long for, even as they dismiss what is already theirs—a conundrum that, now more than ever, echoes uncomfortably through many of our own lives.

www.kingsxtheatre.com | www.montaguebasement.com

Review: Congratulations, Get Rich! 恭喜发财, 人日快乐 (Sydney Theatre Company)

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Venue: Wharf 1 Sydney Theatre Company (Walsh Bay NSW), Nov 21 – Dec 14, 2025
Playwright: Merlynn Tong
Director: Courtney Stewart
Cast: Zac Boulton, Seong Hui Xuan, Merlynn Tong, Kimie Tsukakoshi 
Images by Prudence Upton

Theatre review
It is opening day at Mandy’s new karaoke bar, and she is plainly on the verge of collapse. It also happens to be her thirty-eighth birthday—a milestone that terrifies her, for both her mother and grandmother died at precisely that age. Amid this psychological unravelling, those very forebears return as ghosts from the afterlife or underworld, appearing as if to mock her dread and deepen her sense of inevitability. Congratulations, Get Rich! by Merlynn Tong, probes the intertwined notions of curses and legacies—ideas often treated as distinct but revealed here to be inseparable. Mandy fears repeating history, even as she begins to recognise, somewhere beneath the panic, that her own hard-won successes might yet rewrite the story her family has carried for generations.

The writing is wildly inventive, holding us rapt from the first moment to the last. Unpredictable and delightfully eccentric, it balances sincerity with a sense of the marvellously outlandish. Courtney Stewart’s direction brings together rich cultural specificity and deep emotional truth, guiding a story that moves between Singapore and Australia while allowing its layered meanings to reverberate across cultural lines. At times the humour edges toward the contrived, yet the production’s unwavering commitment to its distinctive tone renders even its most exaggerated moments disarmingly persuasive.

James Lew’s production design is richly considered, weaving symbolism into a visual language that is at once grounded and strikingly theatrical. His work carries a pleasurable sense of extravagance, yet never loses sight of the social resonances that inform each aesthetic choice. Gabriel Chan’s lighting is similarly exuberant, though one occasionally wishes for greater nuance to draw us further into the emotional terrain. Guy Webster’s sound design, gloriously amplified and unabashedly heightened, proves an ideal match for the work’s supernatural comic register. Particularly noteworthy are the original songs that Tong weaves into the piece, rendered delightfully camp through Alex Van den Broek’s playful, uninhibited music direction.

An exceptional ensemble anchors the production, with Tong herself embodying Mandy with indefatigable verve and an arresting emotional intensity. Kimie Tsukakoshi delivers a masterfully layered performance as the grandmother—precise, commanding, and utterly persuasive in her traversal of time and space. As Mandy’s mother, Seong Hui Xuan is unassailably authentic, capturing the poignant duality of a woman who bequeaths her daughter both profound anxieties and an equally steadfast resilience. Zachary Boulton shines as Xavier, Mandy’s partner in life and business, his impeccable comic timing offering welcome buoyancy whenever the domestic tensions threaten to overwhelm. The ensemble as a whole is remarkable for its discipline and cohesion, contributing to a staging distinguished by its tightness, clarity, and shared purpose.

The three women of Congratulations, Get Rich!, spanning three generations, trace a lineage of womanhood that feels both linear and perpetual—distinct lives that nonetheless echo one another with a clarity suggesting something almost divine in the continuity of mothers and daughters. Across cultures, whether East or West, women are routinely diminished, yet time and again reveal themselves to be far more powerful than the structures that seek to contain them. Mandy’s ancestors may have been claimed too early by the worlds that shaped them, but their struggles permeate unmistakably into the present. Mandy, however, stands on different ground, no longer bound by their limitations—and poised, at last, to carry the story further.

www.sydneytheatre.com.au | www.laboite.com.au

Review: Cowbois (Seymour Centre)

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Venue: Seymour Centre (Chippendale NSW), Nov 20 – Dec 13, 2025
Playwright: Charlie Josephine
Director: Kate Gaul
Cast: Matthew Abotomey, Zachary Aleksander, Jules Billington, Emily Cascarino, Faith Chaza, Branden Christine, Clay Crighton, Nelson Fannon, Lana Filies, Nicholas Hiatt, Henry Lopez, Aimie McKenna, Edward O’Leary, Jane Phegan, Rory Spinks, Leon Walshe
Images by Alex Vaughan

Theatre review
Set in the Wild West of 1883, Charlie Josephine’s Cowbois introduces us to Jack, a fugitive whose sudden arrival in a quietly dwindling frontier town—its menfolk having vanished into the goldfields—sparks a quietly radical upheaval. Encountering only women, the handsome outlaw quickly finds that their initial suspicion melts away, even as he is forthright about being trans. Josephine’s 2023 play is a wonderfully fantastical reimagining of the Western, an exuberant, if at times didactic, meditation on gender, desire, and the myths that shape them.

Kate Gaul’s direction is spirited and mischievously playful, though the production would benefit from a brisker pace and humour honed to a finer edge. As Jack, non-binary actor Jules Billington delivers a riveting, impassioned performance that swiftly earns our allegiance. Equally compelling are fellow non-binary performers Faith Chaza and Clay Crighton, each articulating masculinity in strikingly different—yet equally resonant—forms.

Production designer Emelia Simcox excels across both costumes and sets, supplying everything necessary for us to recognise the genre’s familiar iconography while elevating it with a visual flair that sustains a satisfying sense of theatricality. Brockman’s lighting shifts deftly between warm, atmospheric glow and bursts of exuberant spectacle, lending the production an invigorating dynamism. The action is further enriched by an expansive soundtrack devised by Crighton, whose intricately crafted soundscape transports us wholly into the world the play conjures.

It is long overdue that queer audiences are offered stories in which inspiration and hope arise from something other than supplication or suffering. Such visions, like those in Cowbois, may demand audacious leaps of imagination, but they constitute an art we richly deserve. By coupling truth with fantasy, we begin to fashion new modes of self-determination, claiming the right to decide how we are seen—and, ultimately, how we choose to be.

www.seymourcentre.com | www.sirentheatreco.com

Review: The True History Of The Life And Death Of King Lear & His Three Daughters (Belvoir St Theatre)

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Venue: Belvoir St Theatre (Surry Hills NSW), Nov 15, 2025 – Jan 4, 2026
Playwright: William Shakespeare
Director: Eamon Flack
Cast: Ahunim Abebe, Peter Carroll, Tom Conroy, James Fraser, Charlotte Friels, Colin Friels, Raj Labade, Brandon McClelland, Conor Merrigan-Turner, Sukhbir (Sunny) Singh Walia, Alison Whyte, Charles Wu, Jana Zvedeniuk
Images by Brett Boardman

Theatre review
The “orange menace” has been re-elected, ruling from the White House with narcissism more brazen than ever, even as he appears to drift into senility on the cusp of eighty. We may be tempted to call these times unprecedentedly strange, yet Shakespeare wrote King Lear centuries ago—proof enough that the spectacle of a deluded sovereign is hardly new. Perhaps it is merely our overly idealistic sensibilities that persuade us that today’s disorder is somehow exceptional.

Directed by Eamon Flack and bearing the charmingly elaborate title The True History of the Life and Death of King Lear & His Three Daughters, this production is an unambiguous showcase of exceptional performance, even if its visual world feels short on ambition. Bob Cousins’ set design and James Stibilj’s costumes appear deliberately nondescript, yet their quiet elegance remains unmistakable. The music, however, is a sheer delight: intricately composed by Steve Francis and Arjunan Puveendran, with live accompaniment that draws out every atmospheric nuance, pulling us wholly into the narrative at each turn.

Leading man Colin Friels inhabits the psyche of the titular character with unwavering conviction, offering a performance marked by sustained authenticity, even if he does not always command the stage with equal magnetism. It is, perhaps, the supporting cast who linger more vividly in the mind, many of them seizing their moments with flashes of astonishing brilliance that hold us rapt. Raj Labade as Edmund, Brandon McClelland as Kent, and Alison Whyte as Gloucester, to name but a few, distinguish themselves with performances whose precision and vitality give the production much of its dramatic force.

It was, after all, in this very year of 2025 that we witnessed the emergence of the No Kings movement and the two massive protests it inspired. We need no elaborate justification for its urgency, but King Lear seems to articulate perfectly our present sentiments with tragic precision. In its portrait of power unmoored from wisdom, the play reminds us that the call to dismantle the crown is not a novelty of our age, but a lesson humanity keeps forgetting—until the kingdom burns again.

www.belvoir.com.au