Tag Archives: drama

Review: First, Do No Harm (KXT on Broadway)

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Venue: KXT on Broadway (Ultimo NSW), Jun 24 – Jul 4, 2026
Playwright: Grace Malouf
Director: Charley Allanah, Grace Malouf
Cast: Kate Bookallil, Barry French, Richard Hilliar, Josh Merten, Shan-Ree Tan
Images by Laura Elaine

Theatre review
Alexei is an Olympic hopeful whose swimming career has begun to falter at just nineteen years of age. He harbours a secret that is compromising his athletic performance, yet revealing it would invite controversy of the most personal kind. As the burden of concealment becomes unbearable, the truth can no longer remain hidden.

Grace Malouf’s First, Do No Harm transcends its ostensible sporting milieu to interrogate a far more fundamental proposition: the sovereignty of the body itself. The drama excavates the reverberations of a single individual’s corporeal self-determination, tracing how such a decision propagates through the social fabric with disquieting complexity. Malouf’s dramatic structure may lack formal daring, yet it grips with undeniable force; what it sacrifices in stylistic flair, it repays in intellectual and emotional depth. The work avoids theatrical showmanship, but its careful thought is unmistakable, emerging from an unflinching engagement with a subject that remains, in contemporary discourse, not only relevant but urgent.

Co-directed by Malouf and Charley Allanah, the production forgoes imaginative spectacle for an almost austere directness—an approach that, rather than diminishing the work, forges an uncommon intimacy with its audience, engaging both intellect and affect with precision. The staging distills narrative to its essential elements; this reduction, though occasionally risking oversimplification, ultimately crystallises the play’s conceptual preoccupations with remarkable efficacy.

Holden Jane Cohle’s production design requires more work to invite visual interest, while Theodore Carroll’s lighting offers occasional moments of striking inventiveness, even if such flourishes are used sparingly. Ellie Wilson’s sound design is likewise understated, but it rises effectively to the demands of the drama at key emotional moments.

Josh Merten inhabits Alexei with a passion that never tips into histrionics, grounding an ostensibly implausible psychological condition in emotional authenticity. His performance renders the extraordinary not merely credible but viscerally immediate. Richard Hilliar, as Alexei’s father and villain of the piece, Robert, constructs a figure of compelling contradiction—simultaneously antagonistic and vulnerable, comprehensible yet beyond easy absolution. Kate Bookallil, Barry French, and Shan-Ree Tan complete the ensemble with commendable proficiency.

The ordeal Alexei endures may be deeply unsettling, yet the play insists on a challenging idea: however objectionable his desires seem, only he has the right to decide. First, Do No Harm shows us how much we tend to believe that our own views entitle us to govern how others live. The production offers a vital reminder that the most durable achievement of democratic life lies not in consensus, but in our mutual tolerance—the willingness to allow one another the liberty to inhabit our own lives.

www.kingsxtheatre.com

Review: House Of Rot (Hayes Theatre)

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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: Shooting Hedda Gabler (Seymour Centre)

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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: W (Old Fitz Theatre)

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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: Cadaver Synod (KXT on Broadway)

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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

Review: The Birds (Belvoir St Theatre)

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Venue: Belvoir St Theatre (Surry Hills NSW), May 16 – Jun 7, 2026
Playwright: Louise Fox (from the story by Daphne de Maurier)
Director: Matthew Lutton
Cast: Paula Arundell
Images by Pia Johnson

Theatre review

In Louise Fox’s stage adaptation of The Birds, the opening scenes find Tessa repelling fifty invading avian assailants from her home with fierce, maternal resolve. By the second day, the sky has darkened with swarms bent solely on human annihilation. In this contemporary reimagining of Daphne du Maurier’s 1952 narrative, Fox not only shifts the protagonist from husband to wife but also transposes the story’s psychic register—from post-war unease to the distinctly modern terrors of ecological collapse and technological dominion. Working within the conceit of horror fantasy, Fox crafts a vividly absorbing meditation on the paralysis that accompanies our present awareness of impending, seemingly inevitable catastrophe.

Paula Arundell commands the stage alone, her eminently sympathetic presence grounding the surreal narrative in an air of authenticity. She renders Tessa with such sustained credibility that the audience remains unwaveringly allied with her struggle, compelled to will her survival even as circumstances turn increasingly phantasmagoric. Director Matthew Lutton leans into the text’s genre elements, drawing spectators into Tessa’s escalating dread while prompting reflection upon our individual and collective relationship to the disquieting features of our current moment. Yet the production occasionally suffers from Lutton’s largely restrained approach; a work of such unbridled imagination might have flourished under a more audacious, extravagant directorial hand.

Kat Chan’s production design opts for elegant simplicity—largely effective, though the text’s expansive vision clearly invites a more spectacular scenic realization. Niklas Pajanti’s lighting memorably punctuates the drama’s most harrowing junctures with startling precision, but it is J. David Franzke’s sound design and composition that truly conjure the atmosphere of foreboding, rendering the murderous flock’s malevolent presence viscerally, irrefutably real.

The birds’ ferocious, overwhelming assault mirrors the paralysis induced by our contemporary predicament—not merely environmental and technological crises, but the relentless barrage of political conflict and warfare. In an era saturated with information, we find ourselves perpetually stupefied and disempowered by the unceasing torrent of horrors arriving from every quarter. Tessa’s distinction lies in her refusal of passivity; confronted with hopelessness, she can do nothing but resist. It is a lesson that resonates with urgent, uncomfortable clarity.

www.belvoir.com.au | www.malthousetheatre.com.au

Review: Sonder (Old Fitz Theatre)

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Venue: Old Fitzroy Theatre (Woolloomooloo NSW), May 15 – 23, 2026
Book & Lyrics: Riki Lindsey
Music: Mitchell Sloan
Director: Alexander Berlage
Cast: Riki Lindsey
Images by Jessie Obialor

Theatre review
Romeo wrestles with existence and desire alike; as a gay Māori man, he must continually authenticate himself—to his community, and to his own fractured sense of self—demanding recognition of his validity and worth. Sonder, a sixty-minute solo musical, renders this pilgrimage toward wholeness in lyrical, densely autobiographical terms. Conceived by Riki Lindsey, who authors both book and lyrics, the work situates its protagonist at the volatile crossroads of multiple prejudices, tracing an arc of empowerment that culminates in his reclamation of warrior rituals and the Indigenous martial discipline of Mau Rākau.

There is, undeniably, an authentic emotional core here; Lindsey draws from lived experience with an integrity that prevents the material from ever feeling false. Yet truthfulness and dramatic sophistication are not synonymous. While the revelations possess genuine depth, their articulation remains disappointingly uncomplicated—descriptions that tread familiar ground without excavating further, a narrative voice that too often settles for the pedestrian rather than the piercing. The piece knows what it wishes to say, but not always how to bring complexity or inspiration to what it is saying.

Mitchell Sloan’s score compounds this predicament. His electronic compositions pulse with an urgent, driving rhythm, yet that propulsiveness rarely penetrates beneath the surface. The music gestures at intensity without achieving intimacy; it keeps us alert but never truly implicated, underscoring the obvious rather than illuminating the obscured.

Visually, Alexander Berlage—who also assumes duties as set and lighting designer—constructs an arresting world. Taking his conceit from the image of a shattered mirror, he erects towering shards of reflective metallica that ascend and descend with choreographic precision, functioning at times as surrogate ensemble. The effect is undeniably ravishing, but ravishment is not the same as communion. Over the hour, the gleaming surfaces begin to feel less like an invitation and more like a barrier; the atmosphere grows chilly, and we find ourselves drifting from the narrative orbit, admiring the architecture while our emotional engagement steadily atrophies.

As performer, Lindsey carries the entire edifice with a gravity that occasionally buckles under its own weight. The work’s absolute renunciation of humour, its unrelenting earnestness, risks transfiguring a story of self-possession into something resembling self-absorption. Without tonal modulation, the struggle for authenticity begins to feel hermetically sealed, a private ordeal displayed rather than a shared crisis opened to the audience.

Sonder bathes itself in luminous beauty, yet that very radiance seems designed to dazzle rather than disclose. We remain outsiders, permitted to observe, even to marvel, but never to enter. Curiosity is kindled; emotional investment is not.

www.oldfitztheatre.com.au | www.instagram.com/berlage.andco

Review: Romeo & Julie (KXT on Broadway)

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Venue: KXT on Broadway (Ultimo NSW), May 8 – 23, 2026
Playwright: Gary Owen
Director: Claudia Barrie
Cast: Claudia Barrie, Estelle Davis, Alex Kirwan, Linda Nicholls-Gidley, Christopher Stollery
Images by Phil Erbacher

Theatre review
At the precipice of adulthood, Romeo and Julie ought to be standing before a horizon of possibility. Instead, their world has narrowed dramatically: Romeo is already a single father to a new born, and the weight of that responsibility has collapsed the future into something far more constricted. Gary Owen’s Romeo & Julie interrogates the unequal distribution of choice—how circumstance, class, and timing dictate who gets to dream and who must simply survive. The play immerses us in the agonizing decisions forced upon the young when desire and duty pull in opposite directions, and it situates these private struggles within a broader social context rich enough to provoke genuine debate about some of life’s most consequential questions.

Yet for all its thematic substance, the production does not always compel. Owen’s text can feel dramatically under-powered, lacking the tension or wit necessary to fully transfix an audience through its quieter passages. What rescues these lulls is Claudia Barrie’s direction, which invests every scene with a palpable gravity. Even when the narrative turns dreary, we never lose sight of the stakes; Barrie ensures that the pressure bearing down on these young lives remains visceral and real.

The design elements sustain this tension between hardship and hope. Geita Goarin’s set occupies a liminal space between realism and fantasy, yet it never abandons its grounding in working-class authenticity. Dr. Emily Brayshaw’s costumes achieve something similarly deft, using elegant simplicity to conjure ordinary Welsh lives without excessively romanticising them. Topaz Marlay-Cole’s lighting lends the production genuine theatricality, though the transitions between scenes occasionally falter in smoothness. Josh Anderson’s music is sensitively deployed, drawing us into the story’s sentimental undercurrents, even if the score’s handling of the closing scenes’ heightened emotion wants for greater refinement.

At the centre of it all, Estelle Davis and Alex Kirwan deliver performances that are as credible as they are captivating. Both actors possess an instinctive charisma that wins our empathy without begging for it, and they navigate their characters’ individual predicaments with laudable nuance. Together, they cultivate a chemistry that feels effortlessly lived-in; their conversational rhythms are genuine, lively, and utterly persuasive. Supporting them, Claudia Barrie, Christopher Stollery, and Linda Nicholls-Gidley render the milieu of contemporary Wales with vivid specificity, while allowing the production to resonate on a universal register. Their work ensures that the story’s emotional geography feels at once local and intimately familiar.

The politics of parenthood, of course, remains an inexhaustible minefield. Society will forever quarrel over the “right” age, the “right” conditions, the “right” reasons to bring a child into the world—or to refrain from doing so. These debates are as old as civilization and nearly as contentious. But if the production leaves us with one non-negotiable conviction, it is this: the authority over one’s own body and its reproductive capacities belongs, inalienably, to the individual. Everything else may be argued; that single prerogative should not.

www.kingsxtheatre.com | www.madmarchtheatreco.com

Review: 84 Charing Cross Road (Ensemble Theatre)

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Venue: Ensemble Theatre (Kirribilli NSW), May 1 – Jun 13, 2026
Playwright: Helene Hanff (adapted by James Roose-Evans)
Director: Mark Kilmurry
Cast: Blazey Best, Katie Fitchett, Angela Mahlatjie, Brian Meegan, Erik Thomson
Images by Prudence Upton

Theatre review
84 Charing Cross Road preserves the correspondence between the New York writer Helene Hanff and her London bookseller Frank Doel, an epistolary friendship sustained across the Atlantic from 1949 to 1968 without the two ever meeting. James Roose-Evans’s stage adaptation distills two decades of letters into a meditation on bibliophilia and human connection, evoking a vanished world in which anticipation was measured in weeks, and every transaction carried the imprint of a distinct, recognisable personality.

Under Mark Kilmurry’s direction, the production navigates the delicate terrain between sentiment and melancholy with considerable grace. The director elicits from Hanff and Doel’s words a wistful humour that never collapses into mere quaintness, allowing the ache of unfulfilled proximity to resonate beneath the comic surface. Nick Fry’s design conjures the post-war era with persuasive authenticity, though a more expansive delineation of the American quarter of the stage would liberate the action from its occasional spatial congestion. Matt Cox’s lighting bathes the proceedings in the amber glow of half-remembered afternoons, while Madeleine Picard’s score drifts through the narrative like a half-heard melody, lulling the audience into a bittersweet reverie.

Blazey Best brings to Hanff a luminous, irascible charm; convincing as a woman for whom books are not merely objects but necessities of existence, and her yearning to traverse the ocean and stand in the shop at 84 Charing Cross Road is often palpable. Erik Thomson offers a grounded, gentlemanly Doel, though his restrained interpretation muffles a quirkiness that might have rendered the production more vigorously alive.

Yet the play’s true power lies beyond nostalgia. It is, finally, a quiet indictment of our own era. In watching Hanff and Doel forge an intimate community through the slow commerce of ink and paper, one cannot escape the chill of recognition: we surrendered that world with barely a murmur, trading the friction of human encounter for the frictionless efficiency of the algorithm. Amazon, which began at the end of the previous century by selling books, has since metastasised into an all-consuming leviathan, dissolving the very intermediaries—booksellers, correspondents, confidants—through which we once discovered one another. The letters crossing the Atlantic in Hanff’s time were acts of faith in the possibility of being known; what crosses our screens now are transactions optimised for solitude. To leave the theatre is to feel the weight of that exchange, and to realise that we have traded something essential for a convenience we never truly needed.

www.ensemble.com.au

Review: Toxic (Qtopia)

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Venue: Qtopia (Darlinghurst NSW), Apr 20 – May 9, 2026
Playwright: Nathaniel J Hall
Director: Gavin Roach
Cast: Bash Nelson, Patrick Phillips
Images by Robert Catto

Theatre review
In Nathaniel J Hall’s Toxic, two young men in their twenties tumble into love with the heedless velocity of youth, cohabiting almost as swiftly as they collide. The play examines that familiar phenomenon wherein the young pledge themselves to profound domestic entanglement before they have sufficiently mapped the interior territories of their own selves. Yet Hall constructs his narrative with a necessary circularity: the fissures that eventually fracture the relationship become, paradoxically, the very instruments through which each man comes to know himself. The work suggests that heartache and anguish are not merely unfortunate by-products of intimacy but necessary instruments of maturation—painful, inexorable rites without which genuine adulthood remains elusive.

Hall’s writing possesses a confessionary candour, and its unbridled artistic honesty is to be admired. Yet for all its visceral authenticity, the revelations contained within Toxic seldom startle; the territory it maps feels familiar, even anticipated. One appreciates the vulnerability on display without ever quite being astonished by it.

Director Gavin Roach attempts to generate theatrical voltage through excess, foregrounding the sex and narcotics that lubricate the men’s bond. These elements are staged with reasonable explicitness, yet rather than elevating the material into the transgressive or the revelatory, the production ultimately feels pedestrian—a conventional narrative dressed in the costume of debauchery, unable to transcend its own sensationalism.

As the couple, Bash Nelson and Patrick Phillips bring a focussed, muscular energy to the stage, committing themselves to the physical and emotional demands of the roles with undeniable dedication. Where they falter is in the subtler intricacies of the psychology they are charged with interrogating. The subterranean currents of individual neurosis are insufficiently excavated, nor do they render the shifting power dynamics between them with satisfying complexity. Consequently, the production’s explorations of human behaviour—its contradictions, its compulsions, its myriad ambivalences—remain somewhat at arm’s length. We observe the characters’ turmoil without being wholly drawn into its labyrinth.

The play’s underlying philosophy is perhaps its most resonant thread. We spend our lives attempting to circumvent emotional devastation, yet it is precisely through lacerating experience that we are forged. Hall’s protagonists have committed no transgression that would warrant the anguish they endure; their suffering arrives not as punishment but as the arbitrary, brutal tuition of existence. And herein lies the work’s most sophisticated tension: the hedonism they pursue—those nights of chemical and carnal abandon—reads simultaneously as evasion, a frantic attempt to outrun what must eventually be processed, and as a strange species of emancipation. For these two fortunate souls, who never quite tumble past the point of no return, debauchery becomes not merely escape but liberation—a messy, imperfect key to self-discovery. They emerge scathed but transformed, having learned that growth and agony are not opposites but conjoined twins, inseparable in the nature of a life fully lived.

www.qtopiasydney.com.au | www.instagram.com/a_hello_darling_production