unmothered - Adelaide Fringe 2026

Unmothered

Goodwood Theatre

In the intimate setting of Goodwood Theatre and Studios, unmothered arrives at Adelaide Fringe as a quietly resonant piece of feminist musical theatre - one that favours tenderness and memory over spectacle. Created by new South Australian indie company Dead Darling Theatre, the work unfolds as a lyrical song cycle tracing three generations of women: grandmother, mother, and daughter. It follows the daughter’s life from childhood into adulthood.  It is a combination of spoken scenes, music and recollection, allowing the past to seep gently into the present.

The premise is deceptively simple: a daughter attempts to understand the emotional distance between the women who came before her. unmothered explores far more than family biography. It probes inherited silence - how trauma, regret and love are passed between generations, often without language to name them. The show asks a quietly radical question: what does it mean to break cycles of harm when the very people who raised you were themselves shaped by the same patterns?

The production leans into a deliberately understated aesthetic. The stage design is gentle and domestic: a couch, scattered lamps, and a sense of a living room that exists somewhere between memory and imagination. Lamps glow like fragments of recollection, illuminating moments that surface and dissolve again. Around this modest centre the action circles, as if the characters are continually revisiting the same emotional ground from different angles. The production sits very well on the Goodwood Theatre stage.

Behind the performers sits a four-piece band - visible throughout the performance -creating a soundscape that floats between folk and indie tones. Composer and writer Amelia Rooney performs on lap-steel guitar and vocals, joined by Jordan Holmes on acoustic guitar, Jack Wake-Dyster on piano and Steph Teh on cello. Their presence is more than accompaniment; the musicians are embedded in the storytelling, the score rising and receding like waves of memory. Music often carries what the characters themselves cannot articulate, with songs sliding seamlessly into dialogue and back again.

Rooney’s score is particularly effective in these transitions. The songs emerge organically from the narrative, sometimes like an internal monologue, sometimes like a chorus echoing the past. The effect is dreamlike: conversations overlap, memories bleed into one another, and time collapses so that childhood, adolescence and adulthood share the same stage. Critics have described the work as an “unforgettable modern musical,” and the phrase captures something of its hybrid form - part play, part recital, part collective remembering.

The performances anchor this fluid structure with clarity and emotional depth. Jordan Bender, as  Daughter, moves deftly across different stages of life without obvious markers, allowing posture, tone and text to signal age. Katrina Ryan’s Mother shifts from weary pragmatism to aching vulnerability, capturing a woman who longs to nurture but fears repeating the wounds she inherited.

But it is Lisa Lanzi as Grandmother who leaves the deepest imprint. Lanzi carries the character with a composed physical presence - upright, guarded, occasionally brittle. She embodies a generation shaped by restraint, a woman who often cannot find the words that later generations desperately need. Her performance is compelling precisely because of this tension: we sense the love beneath the silence, even when it arrives too late to be spoken aloud.

This layered portrayal is central to the show’s emotional impact. Rather than vilifying any one generation, unmothered reveals how each woman is both victim and inheritor of the past. In moments where the three appear together on stage - sometimes literally speaking over one another - the production captures the strange simultaneity of family memory: the way multiple histories occupy the same space.

What ultimately distinguishes unmothered is its restraint. In a festival often defined by high-energy spectacle, Dead Darling Theatre offers something quieter and more reflective.

The result is an intimate, thoughtful hour of theatre that lingers after the final chord fades. By bridging generational female perspectives with honesty and care, unmothered reminds us that the past is never entirely past - it sings through us, whether we recognise the melody or not.

Review by Kate Gaul