Everything I Know About This Water Bottle - Old Fitz

Everything I Know About This Water Bottle

Old Fitz

Children born in Australia today inherit a world of extraordinary access—electricity, healthcare, and the internet. Yet they also inherit species extinction at ten times the safe level, and chemical pollution forty-eight times beyond planetary limits. In wealthy nations, we know our prosperity has come at a price: climate instability, collapsed biodiversity, and polluted oceans. Poorer countries may not damage the planet as much, but nor do they prosper.

Everything I Know About This Water Bottle is a solo work written by Michael Andrew Collins and produced by essential workers. Collins may be new to some audiences, but his reputation is already solid. His play Furthest West was nominated for the 2015 Patrick White and Silvergull awards, Body Farm for the 2016 Griffin Award, and he won the inaugural Foundation Commission (2017) from Australian Theatre for Young People, where his commissioned play Impending Everyone premiered at the Stables Theatre in 2018.

Essential workers have a sharp eye for the fresh and intriguing, and this production is no exception. Directed by Violette Ayad, it has a deliciously light touch. Morgan Moroney’s design has a lo-fi analogue charm—cassette players, eclectic lights, chalkboard, and VHS. Set in 2052, the work follows Aris (Ariadne Sgouros), an acclaimed “dead cinema” creator, delivering a lecture-style story about how we—and the water bottle—arrived here. The piece travels imaginatively from the Mesozoic era to Ms Hinkley’s year five class, through first loves, heartbreaks, horse-toy factories, recycling plants, and climate disasters, before arriving at the Old Fitz, years later.

Moroney’s lighting is, as ever, first-rate—proof that poetry and beauty don’t require high-tech spectacle. A thoughtful dramaturgical thread runs through the recurring use of the GPO, prompting reflection on the human legacy of life on Earth. Zoe Hollyoak (Producer) and Madeleine Pickard (Sound Designer) complete a strong creative team.

Ariadne Sgouros brings dry wit and an alluring matter-of-fact delivery to the role, anchoring the piece with intelligence and restraint. The writing is teasingly clever as it slowly reveals where—and when—we are. At sixty minutes, it feels just a touch too long for a work that doesn’t fully probe the harsher realities of our plastic existence, but there is much to admire in its artistry, invention, and craft.

Review by Kate Gaul

Review by Kate Gaul

Image: Phil Erbacher