Tag Archives: theatre

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 21, 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: Cluedo (Theatre Royal)

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Venue: Theatre Royal (Sydney NSW), Apr 11 – May 10, 2026
Playwright: Sandy Rustin (based on the screenplay by Jonathan Lynn)
Director: Luke Joslin
Cast: Octavia Barron-Martin, Rachael Beck, Laurence Boxhall, Lib Campbell, Olivia Deeble, David James, Nat Jobe, Genevieve Lemon, Joshua Monaghan, Adam Murphy, Grant Piro
Images by Jeff Busby

Theatre review
Six guests converge upon a secluded estate for an mysterious gathering, wherein Wadsworth, the obsequious butler, reveals their shared predicament: each has suffered extortion at the hands of the nefarious Mr. Boddy, whose abrupt murder initiates an evening of escalating pandemonium.

Despite its contemporary provenance—adapted by Sandy Rustin a mere six years ago from the iconic board game and its 1985 cinematic counterpart—this production of Cluedo exudes a decidedly antiquated sensibility, trafficking in broad farcical conventions and groan-inducing “dad jokes” delivered with such thudding deliberateness, that their artlessness appears almost intentional.

Alas, director Luke Joslin’s deployment of high camp, while tonally apt, cannot disguise this relentless barrage of puerile humour into genuine wit, though the proceedings maintain a vigorous kinetic energy that helps sustains audience attention. The ensemble operates with choreographed cohesion, rendering exuberant chaos with polished finesse; Grant Piro’s Wadsworth epitomizes this aesthetic—an unapologetic homage to the vaudevillian excesses of the 1970s and 80s, all nostalgic bombast without the faintest whisper of nuance.

James Browne’s scenic and sartorial designs emerge as the production’s redemption, conjuring vintage grandeur while deploying spatial ingenuity to navigate the mansion’s proliferating chambers with surprising dexterity. Sean Peter’s soundscape amplifies the counterfeit melodrama at every turn, augmenting the unrelenting slapstick with sonic hyperbole, while Jasmine Rizk’s lighting design bathes both architectural splendor and character eccentricities in flatteringly dramatic illumination.

Though Cluedo ultimately offers scant entertainment value, the consummate skill and craftsmanship underlying its execution—the meticulous professionalism permeating every discipline—provides its own peculiar, modest gratification.

www.cluedoplay.com.au

Review: Gutenberg! The Musical! (Hayes Theatre)

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Venue: Hayes Theatre Co (Potts Point NSW), Apr 10 – May 10, 2026
Creators: Anthony King, Scott Brown
Director: Richard Carroll
Cast: Stephen Anderson, Ryan González
Images by John McRae

Theatre review
Bud and Doug are conducting a backer’s audition—a hallowed, anxiety-drenched ritual of the American theatre—to an intimate assembly that they pray includes angel investors with Broadway connections. That these two hope to leap from this modest presentation to the Great White Way represents either breathtaking entrepreneurial courage or delusional hubris; in the delicious friction between those poles lies the show’s particular charm. Conceived two decades ago by Anthony King and Scott Brown, Gutenberg! The Musical! operates on a deceptively slender premise, its book and lyrics unremarkable on the page. Yet as Richard Carroll’s production demonstrates, material that reads as slight becomes transcendent when filtered through the alchemy of exacting performance.

This is camp elevated to high art—unapologetically exuberant, intellectually irreverent, and executed with rigorous precision masquerading as spontaneity. Stephen Anderson and Ryan González navigate the two-hander format with such virtuosic ease that they effectively erase the text’s deficiencies through the sheer force of their charisma. They possess that rarest of theatrical gifts: the ability to make the audience complicit in the illusion, transforming spectators into enthusiastic conspirators. Their technical proficiency—vocally immaculate, comically razor-sharp—serves a deeper purpose: they convince us that Bud and Doug’s quixotic dream deserves to succeed, if only because the passion propelling it is so infectious.

They receive impeccable support from Zara Stanton, whose work at the keyboard as accompanist and music director provides more than musical infrastructure; her presence completes the trio with an understated wit that mirrors the leads’ symbiotic rapport. Shannon Burns’ choreography excavates humour from physicality, generating kinetic comedy within the stringent limitations of the space—proving that inventive staging requires merely bodies in motion, not architectural spectacle. Lochie Odgers’ scenic design and Lily Mateljan’s costumes embrace aesthetic economy not as constraint but as dramaturgical choice, authentically evoking the scrambled, duct-taped urgency of fledgling theatrical development. Only Veronique Benett’s lighting design luxuriates in complexity; her dynamic, intricate compositions assert the transformative power of illumination when other visual elements remain deliberately, appropriately threadbare.

The production invites a familiar meditation: musical theatre depends upon entertainers who can suspend disbelief through sheer force of personality, and we are rightfully grateful for the ephemeral wonders they bestow. Yet Gutenberg! The Musical! also underscores the distinction between the immediate gratification of laughter and the lingering resonance of meaning. The evening delivers the former in abundance; whether it transcends into the latter remains debatable. Still, if laughter proves the best medicine, then this production administers a potent dosage, leaving its audience indisputably invigorated—if not permanently altered—by the encounter.

www.hayestheatre.com.au

Review: Anastasia (Sydney Lyric Theatre)

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Venue: Sydney Lyric Theatre (Sydney NSW), Apr 7 – Jul 18, 2026
Book: Terrence McNally
Music: Stephen Flaherty
Lyrics: Lynn Ahrens
Director: Darko Tresnjak
Cast: Rhonda Burchmore, Rodney Dobson, Nancye Hayes, Georgina Hopson, Joshua Robson, Robert Tripolino
Images by Jess Busby

Theatre review
Paris, 1927. The Dowager Empress Romanov languishes in aristocratic exile, her imperial dreams finally extinguished after decades of yearning for a granddaughter presumed lost to the Bolshevik firing squads. When a young woman emerges from revolutionary Russia claiming—perhaps mendaciously, perhaps miraculously—to be the sole surviving heir of the defunct dynasty, the stage is set for a reckoning that is as much psychological as political.

Anastasia, the 2016 Broadway confection adapted from its animated predecessor, arrives freighted with expectations of cloying sentimentality—the inevitable collision of cartoon whimsy and theatrical spectacle. Yet under Darko Tresnjak’s discerning direction, with a book by the late Terrence McNally, the production confounds such prejudices. Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens’s score may hew to the melodic conventions of the Great White Way, eschewing avant-garde experimentation for accessible romanticism, but the storytelling itself exhibits a gratifying intellectual seriousness. Alexander Dodge’s sumptuous set design and Aaron Rhyme’s innovative video projections satisfy the visual appetites of contemporary audiences, yet the narrative never panders, never traffics in theatrical sleight-of-hand to manipulate easy emotions. The result is a work of genuine dramatic substance artfully disguised as frivolous entertainment—subversion through sophistication.

This Australian mounting further distinguishes itself through an exemplary ensemble. Georgina Hopson, in the title role, delivers vocal performances of crystalline precision while suffusing her characterization with a soulful gravity that compels genuine emotional investment rather than passive spectatorship. As her suitor and conspirator Dmitry, Robert Tripolino combines rakish charm with choreographic crispness, rendering the role with charismatic authority. Particularly compelling is Joshua Robson’s Gleb, the Bolshevik antagonist; his portrayal plumbs unexpected emotional depths, transforming what might have been mere villainy into a meditation on ideological fanaticism and human cost. The production’s aesthetic ambitions reach their apotheosis in a second-act interpolation of Swan Lake, performed with breathtaking technical prowess by Sophia Bae, Davis Giotopoulos Moore, and Keian Langdon—a sequence that temporarily suspends the narrative to achieve something approaching pure visual poetry.

The production’s ultimate triumph lies in its implicit rebuke to the condescension that permeates so-called “family entertainment.” Where creators routinely infantilize their audiences and shield younger viewers from life’s harsher truths, Anastasia proceeds from the radical premise that children—and adults—possess the capacity to apprehend darkness, loss, and historical trauma. The postponement of such reckonings serves neither art nor audience; rather, it produces cultural artifacts that mistake triviality for accessibility. In refusing this calculus, Anastasia achieves what the best popular art has always aspired to: the transformation of painful history into transcendent beauty, without sacrificing either truth or wonder.

www.anastasiathemusical.com.au

Review: Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead (Belvoir St Theatre)

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Venue: Belvoir St Theatre (Surry Hills NSW), Mar 28 – May 10, 2026
Playwright: Eamon Flack (from the novel by Olga Tokarczuk)
Director: Eamon Flack
Cast: Paula Arundell, Marco Chiappi, Gareth Davies, Emma Diaz, Alan Dukes, Nadie Kammallaweera, Colin Moody, Daniel R. Nixon, Pamela Rabe, Ziggy Resnick, Bruce Spence
Images by Brett Boardman

Theatre review
In Eamon Flack’s stage adaptation of Olga Tokarczuk’s 2009 novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, the protagonist Duszejko prowls her provincial Polish town prophesying that “the animals are taking revenge” in response to a spate of recent local deaths. Yet her warnings, delivered with messianic fervour, seem merely to reverberate against indifferent ears; the town dismisses the elderly woman’s agitation as the harmless eccentricity of advanced age. Flack’s rendering possesses unmistakeable whimsical charm, though at three and a half hours, its duration feels excessive rather than justified, lacking the narrative propulsion or emotional crescendo requisite for such temporal investment.

While Flack’s direction and writing illuminate the everyday absurdities of rural existence, the production never compels us to commit intellectually or viscerally to its philosophical preoccupations, however weighty they may appear. One hungers for gravitational pull—for the narrative elements to coalesce into something of genuine resonance—but such synthesis remains elusive. Leading lady Pamela Rabe, although unable to elicit our empathetic alignment with Duszejko’s anxieties, commands respect through sheer stamina; her virtually uninterrupted presence constitutes a dazzling accomplishment of concentration and performative integrity.

The ten-member supporting ensemble, regrettably, operates largely under capacity. Though each actor enjoys fleeting opportunities to demonstrate competence, only a minority are granted material of genuine substance. Foremost among these is Daniel R. Nixon, whose portrayal of Dizzy injects the production with a welcome colourfulness, enlivening this bleakly comic vision of Poland with idiosyncratic vitality.

The technical execution, conversely, rises above. Romaine Harper’s scenic design undergoes constant metamorphosis, transporting us through the many locales of Duszejko’s adventures, with remarkable fluidity. Though deceptively minimalist in conception, the transformations occur with such seamless efficacy as to constitute their own form of theatrical alchemy. Ella Butler’s costuming largely hews to archetypal fidelity, yet a sequence depicting a town fête erupts into delightful sartorial eccentricity, offering moments of genuine visual pleasure. Morgan Moroney’s lighting design proves even more remarkable, not merely illuminating Duszejko’s external environs but rendering her psychological interiority with great nuance, achieving repeated moments of visual transcendence. Alyx Dennison’s sounds and music complete this sensorial immersion, conjuring a Poland at once fantastical and earthbound—capable of elevating our consciousness toward wonder whilst maintaining an unwavering connection to the narrative’s ecological substrata.

Nature’s vengeance, it seems, is not mere metaphor but manifest reality. Climate catastrophe signals tectonic ecological shifts that we interpret as apocalyptic only because humanity occupies the centre of our own narrative; conceivably, the planet has simply determined that its most pernicious pest requires elimination, undertaking transformations calculated for its own perpetuation rather than ours. Compounding this existential precarity, humanity accelerates its own dissolution through interminable warfare and the unconscionable and accelerating rapacity of unfettered capitalism—systems that devour the very populations upon which they depend. The cosmos will persist, indifferent; the duration of humanity’s insignificance within that vast continuity remains the only uncertainty.

www.belvoir.com.au

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

Review: The River (Sydney Theatre Company)

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Venue: Sydney Opera House (Sydney NSW), Apr 8 – May 16, 2026
Playwright: Jez Butterworth
Director: Margaret Thanos
Cast: Andrea Demetriades, Ewen Leslie, Miranda Otto
Images by Daniel Boud

Theatre review
Nestled within the secluded confines of an English fishing cabin, a man confronts the ghost of unspeakable trauma—its spectral presence materialized in the image of a woman adorned in scarlet. Jez Butterworth’s The River emerges as a theatrical enigma of remarkable density, its narrative currents flowing through multiple interpretive channels while remaining anchored, perhaps most profoundly, in the murky depths of grief and regret. Though deliberately provocative in its withholding of certainties, the text is exquisitely wrought, offering precisely sufficient ambiguity to ignite the spectator’s imaginative faculties without descending into pedestrian opacity.

Margaret Thanos’ direction rises to meet this sophistication with an aesthetic of curated chicness—self-consciously stylish yet perhaps overly circumspect in its understated approach, occasionally sacrificing visceral immediacy for cerebral detachment. Anna Tregloan’s production design evokes flowing water through cascading ribbons and a minimalist hut-like structure—spare yet evocative, providing all necessary visual cues without distraction.

Damien Cooper’s lighting palette conjures the requisite haunting, vaguely sinister atmospherics essential to the piece’s creeping psychological dread, though one wishes for occasional modulation toward more flattering illumination to deepen our sympathetic attachment to the personalities portrayed. Sam Cheng’s sound design achieves moments of genuinely transcendent beauty—ethereal and devastating in its restraint—yet could benefit from greater dynamic range, allowing orchestral crescendos to match the text’s moments of heightened dramatic intensity rather than maintaining consistent atmospheric delicacy.

Ewen Leslie delivers a formidable performance as the lead, laudably infusing light and shade into a narrative that seems determined to remain stubbornly macabre. Without the crutch of expository dialogue, Leslie’s remarkable nuance conveys immense complexity, inviting us into a story that feels inexhaustibly layered. Andrea Demetriadis delivers exceptional intensity in several exquisitely crafted dramatic set pieces—operatic in their theatricality yet always anchored in coherent dramaturgical logic. Miranda Otto adopts a more reticent approach by comparison, effectively conveying inexorable realism though one desires greater creative adventurousness to fully spark our imaginative inspiration.

Throughout the drama’s unfolding, spectators find ourselves suspended in productive suspicion, perpetually interrogating our own comprehension even as our instincts register the underlying truth with uncomfortable accuracy. We discover ourselves actively denying our intuitive grasp of events—much as the protagonist must navigate his existence without full honesty regarding his past, and consequently, his present. Survival may indeed necessitate temporary aversion from unbearable truths, yet such evasion can only serve as provisional strategy; the ancient dictum remains immutable, and it is ultimately truth above all else, that will set you free.

www.sydneytheatre.com.au

Review: Till The Stars Come Down (KXT on Broadway)

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Venue: KXT on Broadway (Ultimo NSW), Mar 27 – Apr 11, 2026
Playwright: Beth Steel
Director: Anthony Skuse
Cast: Jane Angharad, Peter Eyers, Amy Goedecke, Zoran Jevtic, Ainslie McGlynn, Kira McLennan, Brendan Miles, Jo Briant, Imogen Sage, James Smithers
Images by Braiden Toko

Theatre review
At Silvia’s wedding, the assembled family observes the ritual of good behaviour—upright postures, pleasantries exchanged with the precision of choreographed dance—only to find that the champagne, once flowing, dissolves the adhesive holding their performances together. Upheaval arrives not as surprise but as inevitability, and Beth Steel’s Till the Stars Come Down positions itself to excavate the sediment of grief, class anxiety, and generational fracture that such gatherings inevitably stir. Yet for all its archaeological ambition, the play remains frustratingly proximal to the surface, favouring the escalating rhythms of melodrama over the slower, more treacherous work of thematic investigation. Steel introduces fault lines that promise to rupture into revelation—economic precarity, maternal sacrifice, the performance of happiness itself—only to resolve them with a neatness that belies their complexity. The narrative plants its ambitions widely but harvests narrowly, leaving us not with the disturbing clarity of family truths exposed, but with the familiar aftertaste of soap opera: emotion without consequence, conflict without cost.

Director Anthony Skuse deserves credit for lending genuine gravity to the melodrama, grounding the characters’ anguish in palpable feeling even when their circumstances lean toward the mundane. The melancholy is further underscored by Layla Phillips’s music, whose interludes coax us into dwelling on the sorrow lurking beneath the festivities. James Smithers’s set, with its carefully appointed timber floor, evokes the familiar atmosphere of outdoor gatherings, though Charlotte Savva’s costumes, while fitting for the archetypes on display, could afford a more heightened theatrical sensibility. Topaz Marlay-Cole’s lighting captures subtle shifts in mood, yet it, too, might benefit from a more finely detailed approach.

The ensemble of ten—augmented by three additional performers as silent waitstaff—delivers performances ranging from adequate to genuinely compelling. Jo Briant as the family friend Carol and Zoran Jevtic as the groom Marek leave the strongest impressions, infusing their roles with an exuberance that feels refreshingly natural. As Hazel, one of the bride’s sisters, Ainslie McGlynn drives the play toward its feverish conclusion with remarkable theatricality, managing to conjure extraordinary moments from a role that the text itself often leaves thinly drawn.

Weddings are, of course, theatre in its most naked form: elaborate productions mounted to legitimise private feeling through public display. Yet as Steel’s play ultimately suggests—and as this production cannot quite overcome—the grandeur of the gesture often outpaces the depth of understanding beneath it. We enact conventions we have inherited but not examined, mistaking volume for truth, spectacle for significance. Till the Stars Come Down offers abundant commotion that resembles drama—shouts, tears, revelations hurled across the timber floor—but commotion alone cannot substitute for insight. The production leaves us with the hollow grandeur of the unrehearsed speech: moving in its immediacy, perhaps, but finally unable to articulate what it truly means to love, to lose, or to gather in the shadow of both.

www.kingsxtheatre.com | www.secrethouse.com.au