Tag Archives: play

Review: Tootsie (Teatro)

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Venue: Teatro (Leichhardt NSW), May 26 – Jun 21, 2026
Book: Robert Horn
Music & Lyrics: David Yazbek
Directors: Cameron Mitchell
Cast: Andrew Bevis, Chris Huntly-Turner, Brendan Irving, Elena Kokubo, Donna Lee, Lachlan O’Brien, Tyran Stig, Alana Tranter.
Images by Robert Miniter

Theatre review
Michael Dorsey, an actor of considerable talent but negligible employability, seizes an unexpected opportunity when an audition calls specifically for a woman. His decision to adopt the persona of Dorothy Michaels sets in motion a cascade of consequences far more triumphant than he could have anticipated. This stage adaptation of the 1982 film Tootsie—sharing both its title and its essential premise—derives considerable vitality from David Yazbek’s effervescent, jaunty score and, perhaps more crucially, from Robert Horn’s exceptionally nimble book, which manages to render the narrative with a contemporary sensibility that largely obviates the mustiness one might expect from a four-decade-old property. That a story of this vintage could be resuscitated without appearing anachronistic or, worse, tone-deaf in the current cultural climate is no small feat; the production merits particular praise for its interrogation of gender inequity through a lens that feels immediate rather than merely dutiful.

Under Cameron Mitchell’s direction and choreography, the work sustains its entertainment value without sacrificing narrative coherence, navigating its inherently preposterous premise with such assurance that one scarcely questions the plausibility of the central deception. Mitchell possesses the rare capacity to suspend disbelief not through obfuscation but through the sheer force of theatrical conviction, rendering the absurd eminently digestible.

Where the production falter is in its visual execution. The design elements, regrettably, undermine rather than elevate the material. Angela White’s costumes and Helen Thatcher’s wigs suffer from a conspicuous parsimony, appearing neither flattering nor sufficiently polished to support the illusion upon which the drama depends. Dan Potra’s set, painted in a disconcerting and rather aggressive shade of red, has a rough-hewn, provisional quality that feels more workshop than finished production. Peter Rubie’s lighting design offers a measure of redemption, imparting occasional visual sophistication to the proceedings, though it ultimately stops short of genuine ingenuity or surprise.

In the formidable role of Michael/Dorothy, Andrew Bevis shoulders an almost impossible burden and, unfortunately, delivers a performance that falls short of the role’s demands. His vocal work proves inconsistent, and more damagingly, he lacks the magnetism necessary to anchor so outsized a character. The romantic chemistry between his Michael and Julia, portrayed by Elenoa Rokobaro, is essentially nonexistent—a deficiency rendered all the more conspicuous by Rokobaro’s own transcendent vocal performance, which stands as one of the production’s undeniable glories. The supporting ensemble, by contrast, is uniformly superb. Tyran Stig and Alana Trantner emerge as particular treasures, creating indelible characterizations distinguished by vocal excellence and a comic timing that feels both spontaneous and impeccably wrought.

The art of drag, it must be acknowledged, has undergone a profound evolution since Tootsie first appeared, migrating from the margins of subcultural expression to occupy an unprecedented position in mainstream consciousness. Its potency resides in what it reveals about the constructed nature of gender—the fluidity of identity itself—and in its implicit argument for a radical, unconditional acceptance that transcends the arbitrary taxonomies by which we so often classify one another. In 2026, one might reasonably expect this narrative to plumb such themes with greater depth and daring, particularly given its determination to remain accessible to family audiences. Yet if this staging does not fully exploit the rich thematic territory now available to it, it nonetheless succeeds in being genuinely delightful, navigating its material with a lightness of touch that thankfully avoids the pitfalls of either creepiness or regression. That, in itself, is no inconsiderable achievement.

www.teatroitalianforum.com.au

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: 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

Review: The Lion King (Capitol Theatre)

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Venue: Capitol Theatre (Sydney NSW), from Apr 18, 2026
Book: Roger Allers, Irene Mecchi
Music & Lyrics: Elton John, Tim Rice
Director: Julie Taymor
Cast: Nick Afoa, Daniel Frederiksen, Winston Hillyer, Jamie McGregor, Emily Nkomo, Aphiiwe Nyezi, Dev Raval, Rutene Spooner, Wilhemina Umeh-Nicholas, Mat Verevis, Benn Welford, Ezra Williams, Buyi Zama
Images by Daniel Boud, Cylla von Tiedemann

Theatre review
While The Lion King’s meditations on destiny and legacy possess a timeless resonance, it is the contemporary allegory of a narcissistic, inept ruler yielding to a leader of integrity and benevolence that strikes its most urgent chord today. We watch Scar lay waste to the kingdom, yet our spirits soar when Simba returns to reclaim his birthright and restore harmony to the ravaged land. In our present climate, this is precisely the fairy tale we require.

Nearly three decades since its debut, this stage adaptation not only reverberates with renewed significance; its peerless theatrical craftsmanship remains as spectacular as it is refined. The puppetry and mask work continue to stand unrivaled within the Broadway tradition, its sweeping vision no less breathtaking and hypnotic in an era where LED screens have become commonplace, often reducing live performance to a pseudo-virtual spectacle.

Under music director Laura Tipoki, the score surges with greater power than ever, stirring the soul and elevating the spirit. Aphiwe Nyezi and Dev Raval share the role of Simba, both commanding the stage with extraordinary physicality and magnetism. Buyi Zama proves unforgettable as Rafiki, her formidable presence and vocal brilliance captivating us from the moment the curtain rises. Jamie McGregor mines the comedy of Timon with expert precision, his puppetry skills not only conjuring a fully realized character but also delivering the evening’s most riotous laughter. Daniel Frederiksen’s Scar is appropriately inscrutable, deploying both vocal menace and physical stillness to forge a figure of genuine villainy.

We may no longer inhabit a world where sovereignty is conferred by bloodline alone, yet we remain acutely aware of the necessity for principled individuals to occupy positions of power and advance the common good. The selfish will always covet the crown; our enduring duty is to unite in keeping them from seizing it, and to cast them down should they ascend.

www.thelionkingmusical.com.au

Review: 3 Billion Seconds (KXT on Broadway)

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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.

www.kingsxtheatre.com | www.blinkinglighttheatre.com

Review: An Iliad (Sydney Theatre Company)

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Venue: Wharf 1 Sydney Theatre Company (Walsh Bay NSW), Apr 13 – Jun 28, 2026
Playwright: Lisa Peterson, Denis O’Hare (translated by Robert Fagles)
Director: Damien Ryan
Cast: David Wenham
Images by Daniel Boud

Theatre review
Adapted from Homer’s foundational epic, Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare’s An Iliad distils the siege of Troy to its devastating essence: the fatal confrontation between Achilles and Hector, and through their collision, an anatomy of conflict that transcends its Bronze Age origins. This adaptation adopts a telescopic vantage, favouring the sweep of history over the psychologies that could reveal architectures of the individual soul. The result is a work of considerable erudition that too often keeps its audience at the very distance it seeks to condemn.

Damien Ryan’s direction mirrors this chronicler’s impulse, maintaining an objective, almost scholarly remove even as the production stages the full, bloody magnitude of human sacrifice. We witness the apparatus of war meticulously arranged—its rituals, its mathematics of mortality, its perverse machinery of honour—but the emotional current frequently runs beneath the surface, visible yet untouchable. Sentiment is artfully composed; feeling, however, remains tantalisingly out of reach.

David Wenham, as The Poet, is the production’s undeniable gravitational centre. He commands the space with an effortless gravity that insists we treat this millennia-old narrative not as archaeological artefact, but as living testament. It is a performance of exquisite paradox: simultaneously casual and naturalistic, yet expansively theatrical, even operatic in its reach. Wenham achieves that rare alchemy where the actor’s own artistic intelligence becomes as captivating as the tale he unfolds. If the adaptation occasionally keeps us at arm’s length, Wenham’s magnetism draws us relentlessly back into the circle of the story.

Appearing alongside him, musician Helen Svoboda performs much of the score live, to marvellous and haunting effect. In concert with Brady Watkins’ sound design, her compositions imbue the production with a visceral grandeur that makes tangible the true scale of the narrative. Alexander Berlage’s lighting matches this ambition with sweeping, monumental tableaux—shafts of amber and sudden abysses of shadow—yet never sacrifices intimacy for spectacle; his illumination is sombre, his darkness articulate, reinforcing the production’s cumulative gravity. Charles Davis’ production design is memorably austere, its disciplined sparseness thrown into relief by a single, totemic cart that The Poet drags through the narrative’s sombre hush, stacked to towering heights with the accumulated relics of a civilisation—each object a vessel of memory, each layer another stratum of war’s inexorable geology.

And here, perhaps, lies the work’s most unsettling power. We do not need to look to antiquity to find Troy in flames. Since 7 October 2023, Israel has killed more than 72,000 people in the Gaza region; concurrently, an estimated 48 are killed every day in Iran since the beginning of the recent US invasion. These are not aberrations or historical parentheses—they are the continuous present. Peterson and O’Hare’s adaptation reminds us that Homer’s poem has never really been about a war that happened, but about a war that keeps happening, under different names and different flags, across every century that congratulates itself on having progressed beyond bronze swords and walled cities. When Wenham’s Poet finally falls silent, what lingers is not the glory of heroes, but the terrible recognition that Achilles and Hector are not behind us. They are merely waiting in the wings. They always have been.

www.sydneytheatre.com.au

Review: English (Seymour Centre)

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Venue: Seymour Centre (Chippendale NSW), Apr 9 – May 2, 2026
Playwright: Sanaz Toossi
Director: Craig Baldwin
Cast: Pedram Biazar, Nicole Chamoun, Neveen Hanna, Minerva Khodabande, Setareh Naghoni
Images by Richard Farland

Theatre review
In a modest classroom in Karaj, 2008, where the air itself seems thick with unspoken anxiety, Marjan presides over a small cohort of Iranians preparing for the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) examination. They arrive bearing different destinies but share a common condition: displacement. Sanaz Toossi’s English excavates the immigrant experience with surgical precision, revealing how language acquisition becomes both lifeline and loss, a means of escape that simultaneously erases.

Toossi’s work operates in the confluence of colonized trauma and pragmatic survival; it deftly weaves exploration of love for a homeland and the quiet grief of witnessing it unravel. The play captures the immigrant experience with astonishing complexity, yet articulates with remarkable clarity the intricate and often agonizing challenges of forging a sense of home in foreign, unfamiliar terrain. Under Craig Baldwin’s direction, the production holds the audience spellbound from start to finish—devastating in its most searing dramatic moments, yet threaded throughout with sharp, scintillating wit. It achieves the rare feat of being both thoroughly entertaining and profoundly resonant, offering the kind of theatre that feels deeply, viscerally satisfying. For those with personal ties to the themes Toossi explores, English becomes nothing less than cathartic.

The ensemble executes this vision with extraordinary nuance. As Marjan, the eminently watchable Nicole Chamoun navigates the character’s post-colonial consciousness through restraint rather than histrionics—her trauma articulated in the tightening of a jaw, the careful modulation of vowels that betray her own complicated relationship with the English she peddles. Setareh Naghoni’s Elham embodies the paradox of the proud exile: armoured with abrasive humour yet perpetually vulnerable, her hard-headedness serving as both defence mechanism and prison.

Minerva Khodabande’s effortless charm as Goli provides necessary luminosity, her youthful exuberance offering fleeting respite from the production’s heavier thematic weight, while the elegant Pedram Biazar’s turn as Omid maintains a dichotomy of warmth and opacity that complicates the narrative’s moral architecture, suggesting that escape always exacts its own particular tariffs. Most shattering is Neveen Hanna’s Roya, whose separation from her Canadian grandchildren becomes a meditation on intergenerational rupture. Hanna navigates the character’s desperation with such authenticity that her moments of comic relief—delivered with impeccable timing—land with twice the force, reminding us that grief and laughter often share the same respiratory system.

The technical elements eschew spectacle in favour of psychological acuity. Spencer Herd’s lighting design maintains a quotidian warmth during instructional scenes, then shifts during transitions to more expressionistic palettes that externalize the characters’ interiority. Hamed Sadeghi’s compositions function as aural set changes, traversing genres to evoke Iran’s cultural landscape while underscoring the disorientation in the very act of relocation. Soham Apte’s set and Rita Naidu’s costumes embrace a deliberate anti-theatricality; their unvarnished naturalism strips away distraction, forcing our attention onto the micro-gestures and linguistic stumbles that constitute the drama’s true intentions.

For many migrants, the journey begins long before their own lifetime. Where we find ourselves today is shaped not only by our individual choices and circumstances but also by the movement of ancestors who, generations earlier, sought better tomorrows for their children and their children’s children. Yet in the very act of building better lives, we often lose the language—or the permission—to speak of the hardships and ruptures that come with being pushed away from one’s homeland. English, however, refuses that silence, turning a searching gaze toward both the pain and the hope that bind so many of us together.

www.seymourcentre.com | www.outhousetheatre.org

Review: Eden (Qtopia)

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Venue: Qtopia (Darlinghurst NSW), Apr 7 – 18, 2026
Playwright: Kate Gaul
Director: Kate Gaul
Cast: Karrine Kanaan, Lara Lightfoot
Images by Natalia Ladyko

Theatre review
In a parched country town where the heat seems to calcify tradition, Dan and Kit stand at the precipice of adulthood, shedding the protective guilelessness of childhood to confront a more sinister revelation: womanhood here is not merely circumscribed but surveilled, and the silence of those around them—neighbours, family, the very landscape—feels less like innocence than complicity. When a woman’s body surfaces by the river under circumstances the town seems determined to ignore, the water’s edge becomes a threshold. The girls recognize, with the slow horror of dawning consciousness, that their home is not merely backward but actively dangerous, its beauty a camouflage for violence.

Kate Gaul’s Eden wears its politics lightly, or rather, embeds them in the marrow of its aesthetic. Working within the registers of Australian Gothic—where the land itself is a protagonist, ancient and indifferent, bearing both sacred lore and the scar tissue of colonization—Gaul conjures a world where the metaphysical bleeds into the mundane. Lyrical and at times overly opaque, Eden possesses a surface simplicity that renders it unexpectedly inviting. Though it sacrifices overt agitational urgency, Eden proves potent as an impressionistic piece, compensating with raw theatrical vitality.

Karrine Kanaan and Lara Lightfoot bring their characters to life with amusing exuberance, emerging as warmly compelling presences whose effortlessly captivating chemistry deepens our investment in the narrative. Nate Edmondson’s music stands as an unequivocal highlight, amplifying the play’s metaphysical unease while maintaining a relentless grip on the narrative’s forward motion, ensuring that even as we contemplate the cyclical nature of time and trauma, we remain breathlessly attentive to the fate of these young women.

Some places are defined by arrival, others by the doggedness of those who stay. Country towns ossify around their permanent residents, demanding that newcomers dissolve into the prevailing chemistry; cities, by contrast, offer themselves as mutable terrains, melting pots where identity might be recast rather than inherited. Time has proven itself circular, history always seeming an infinite loop rather than an arrow, yet it is hard not to think of progress as linear. Dan and Kit will inevitably arrive at their destined authentic selves, yet that metamorphosis appears contingent upon an exodus from this unforgiving terrain.

www.qtopiasydney.com.au | www.sirentheatreco.com