Cold War 2.0 - Sydney Fringe 2026

Cold War 2.0 (Dopplegangster)

"Then something comes along that jams the filing cabinet."

As much as I want to avoid putting this into words, Doppelgangster’s Cold War 2.0 was one of those undeniable Fringe experiences.

Perhaps this is what happens when you're just back from Edinburgh Fringe. You spend several weeks training yourself to move from theatre to theatre, day after day, until the business of seeing things becomes almost as physical as making them. Back in Sydney, that instinct hasn't quite left you. You find yourself following your feet. They know where to go.

Mine took me to Doppelgangster.

And then I wanted to write about it. Which feels slightly ridiculous.

There is a particular absurdity in trying to turn a live theatrical encounter into a few tidy paragraphs. Especially when the work itself refuses to behave tidily. I have written plenty of reviews, and I understand the usefulness of them. But occasionally a piece of theatre makes the whole exercise feel inadequate: what exactly are we meant to do with something that is less a proposition to be assessed than an experience to be survived, absorbed and argued with afterwards?

Cold War 2.0 is difficult to summarise. It is loud, anarchic, funny, political, stupid, clever, deeply theatrical and, at times, completely bewildering. It throws ideas, images, arguments, songs, paranoia, history, technology, bodies and the audience itself into some kind of punk centrifuge and lets us work out what survives.

I don't think I need to tell you what it is about. Other people have already had a go, with varying degrees of certainty, and that uncertainty seems entirely appropriate. One response embraces the work's collision of punk, politics and theatrical chaos; another essentially admits that the experience initially left them baffled and irritated, before realising that the bafflement was part of what the work had done to them.

That feels about right.

What I will say is that I have enormous respect for Tobias Manderson-Galvin, Aquilla Sorensen and the Doppelgangster gang.

Because this is handmade theatre.

Not handmade in the precious sense. Handmade in the sense that you can feel the people who made it. You can feel the risk. The argument. The intelligence. The bad idea that somehow became a good one. The willingness to let something get messy rather than sanding all the edges off it so that an audience - or a reviewer - can comfortably consume it.

This is increasingly rare.

The thing about Fringe, particularly after Edinburgh, is that it becomes easy to start looking at theatre as product. You see so much of it that you develop a shorthand. You can feel yourself reaching for the mental filing cabinet: excellent performer; interesting idea; strong writing; beautiful design; perhaps twenty minutes too long; not for me.

Then something comes along that jams the filing cabinet.

Cold War 2.0 did that for me.

My post show response on the Sydney Fringe website was considerably less articulate. I called Doppelgangster “wonderful, unpredictable artists” and described the work as handmade and anarchic. I said it reminded me of being back at university in the 1980s - wild, smart and brilliant, and very, very loud.

I'm also not sure I can improve on it.

Except perhaps to say that the word I keep coming back to is undeniable.

It is satisfying that Doppelgangster describe Cold War 2.0 as a “living-wake redux” of their earlier Cold War. That is their phrase, not mine, but it got me thinking about what Dopplegangster seems to do so well: take things that are already dead, finished, canonised or supposedly understood, and refuse to leave them alone.

There’s an interesting echo of this in Doppelgangster’s relationship with the Ibsen Scope Foundation. They have received an Ibsen Scope Grant for their work, and their current project continues that conversation with Ibsen’s When We Dead Awaken.

An electrifying progression. The new work takes an old canonical text that has been sitting safely in the theatre graveyard and drags it back into the present.

A nifty piece of continuity between two projects? It could be description of the artistic impulse itself.

Don't leave it dead.

Don't leave it finished.

Don't leave it where we found it.

That Doppelgangster is selected for the Ibsen Scope Grant is substantial recognition for an Australian independent company. The 2026 grant round selected just five projects internationally from 207 applications across 65 countries. The Ibsen Scope jury cited qualities including playfulness, boldness and originality: qualities that feel entirely legible in Cold War 2.0.

Having spent an hour with Doppelgangster and Cold War 2.0, I can't imagine anyone else making it. Perhaps that is the thing I want to hold onto.

Not whether Cold War 2.0 is “good”.

Not whether I understood all of it.

Not even whether I liked all of it.

But that feeling of encountering artists who have developed such a particular theatrical language, and who are still prepared to push it somewhere that might fail. That is a very good reason to follow your feet.

Review by Kate Gaul