Lacrima - Sydney Festival

Lacrima

Ros Packer Theatre

Lacrima arrives at Sydney Festival as a true festival work of scale: expansive, technically complex, politically alert, and emotionally devastating. It is theatre that understands ceremony as a surface, and labour as the truth beneath it.

Conceived and directed by French director Caroline Guiela Nguyen, Lacrima asks a deceptively simple question: what labour lies beneath ceremony? This is a postcolonial tale from inside the world of haute couture. The production traces the making of a single wedding dress for British royalty, following the delicate threading of pearls, the painstaking embroidery, and the relentless pursuit of perfection demanded by power that never shows its face. The dress becomes a dramaturgical vessel - at once an object of beauty, continuity, and national symbolism, and a site of extraction, pressure, and quiet harm. In a white robed room with a dominant screen amongst others, at its centre and workbenches lining the walls, the play lifts the veil on the true cost of fashion.

Nguyen’s great skill is to refuse a single point of view. Instead, the stage becomes a living chorus: multiple screens, live camera feeds offering intimate close-ups of hands at work - fabric, thread, pearls - while faces hover in fragile, human proximity. There are demands, impossible deadlines, insistence on excellence. Power is everywhere and nowhere.

The production spans ateliers in Paris and Alençon, and workshops in Mumbai, creating a clear geopolitical map of the global North and global South. Luxury is consumed in one hemisphere, while pressure, exhaustion, and risk accumulate in another. Lacrima never simplifies this into a binary morality tale. Instead, it allows ambition, pride, devotion, and desire to coexist with exploitation. The system endures precisely because people care about the work.

Threaded through the epic scale of the dress’s creation is a domestic story of anger, emotional abuse, and breakdown. This is not framed as an aberration but as a mirror: the same logics of pressure, silence, and endurance play out in private as in global systems of labour. Stakes rise quietly. Damage accrues not through spectacle but through repetition, proximity, and the inability to step away.

Language sits at the heart of this work. Lacrima moves between French, English and Tamil, and it doesn’t smooth those differences over or translate everything for comfort. The use of multiple languages isn’t about ticking an inclusivity box; it’s how the piece is built. As Caroline Guiela Nguyen suggests, the space is shaped by the people who are present. Onstage and in the audience, people hear their own languages spoken clearly and with respect. Communities rarely centred in theatre aren’t just talked about here - they are physically present, and they actively shape the world of the play It is sometime hard to keep up – what and where to look.  It is sophisticated theatre-making that trusts its audience deeply.

The cast - brilliantly, and refreshingly - is largely composed of older actors. Their presence brings gravity, history, and a sense of lived experience. These performances are restrained, exacting, and devastating in their understatement. No one is performing “victimhood”; instead, we witness competence under strain, pride under pressure, and dignity stretched thin.

Ultimately, Lacrima is a searing meditation on ambition, continuity, and exploitation -on how systems persist by rendering labour invisible while fetishising its results. It is intellectually rigorous, emotionally precise, and formally bold. As festival theatre goes, this is complex, humane, and uncompromising: a work that insists we look closely at what we celebrate, and who pays for the beauty we consume.

Review by Kate Gaul