How Not to Make It In America Holden St Theatre The mythology of the young artist heading to New York to make it big is one that theatre returns to again. Emily Steel’s How Not to Make It in America , presented at by Theatre Republic, begins squarely within that familiar dream: a hopeful Australian actor arrives in Manhattan determined to carve out a life on the stage. Set in 2001, the story follows Matt, a naïve young performer buoyed by the encouragement of an acting teacher who tells him his talent is “like gold dust.” What follows is less a success story than a catalogue of missteps. His high-school sweetheart leaves him, his visa runs out, and the city that once seemed full of promise becomes increasingly inhospitable. Complicating matters further is the historical moment in which the story unfolds. Matt’s personal struggles occur against the backdrop of the September 11 attacks - an event that irrevocably altered New York and the world beyond it. The play positions this seismic moment as part of the landscape through which Matt’s journey unfolds, but the relationship between the global tragedy and the protagonist’s personal story remains underdeveloped. Performed by James Smith, the production asks much of its central performer. Smith shifts between an array of characters using small physical adjustments and vocal changes to sketch the various figures who populate Matt’s New York experience. Acting teachers, fellow performers, landlords and acquaintances appear briefly before giving way to the next encounter. Smith handles the transitions with precision, demonstrating the kind of theatrical dexterity that solo storytelling demands. The script itself also moves confidently through a sequence of anecdotes and encounters, building a portrait of a young man navigating the bewildering realities of life in a city that rarely slows down. Yet for all its structural skill, the material occasionally feels tethered to an earlier moment in theatre-making. The tone and narrative shape - the hapless dreamer outside Australia, the awkward encounters, the string of humiliations that become comic set pieces - have the flavour of a well-worn older Fringe format. The story’s perspective on ambition and failure, while sincere, sometimes carries the sense of having been shaped in a different theatrical era. More challenging is the construction of the central character. Matt is portrayed as impulsive, often naïve to the point of foolishness, and frequently oblivious to the consequences of his actions. While such traits can form the basis of compelling comic anti-heroes, here they create a certain distance between character and audience. It becomes difficult to invest emotionally in a protagonist whose choices repeatedly undermine the sympathy the story seeks to generate. The shadow of September 11 further complicates the narrative. The attacks appear as a contextual marker - a moment that alters Matt’s trajectory - yet the script does little to explore the emotional or social reverberations of the event itself. As a result, the historical gravity of the moment sits somewhat awkwardly beside the personal misadventures of the central character. That imbalance occasionally leaves the audience unsure where the show’s emotional centre lies. Is this primarily a coming-of-age comedy about youthful ambition, or a reflection on a moment when the world changed irreversibly? Whether that memory resonates fully with contemporary audiences may depend on how much patience they have for a protagonist whose lessons arrive slowly - and whose dreams, like the city he hopes to conquer, prove far less forgiving than he imagined. Review by Kate Gaul

The Soaking of Vera Shrimp Holden St Theatre There is something quietly disarming about a show that announces itself as both a science lesson and a story about grief. The Soaking of Vera Shrimp , a 40-minute solo work leans into that curious combination with a gentle confidence that suits the intimate scale of the production. Performed in one of Adelaide Fringe’s smaller venues, the show unfolds like a story shared across a kitchen table rather than a conventional theatrical event. The space is close, the atmosphere informal, and the audience quickly becomes part of the imaginative world being constructed. The premise is wonderfully strange. During a monumental rainstorm, Vera Shrimp discovers she possesses an unusual gift: she can read raindrops. Each drop of water, having travelled across the world and touched countless surfaces, has absorbed fragments of human emotion. By examining the water, Vera can sense these feelings - grief, joy, anger, longing - carried invisibly within the rain. At first the device feels almost whimsical, a charming piece of pseudo-scientific invention that allows the performer to weave together small stories about the lives contained within a single storm. The show moves fluidly between playful explanation and narrative speculation, inviting the audience to consider the emotional residue that might linger in something as ordinary as rainfall. But the premise soon takes on greater weight. As Vera’s own family falls apart the ability to read emotional traces in water becomes less of a curiosity and more of a burden. Suddenly the world is saturated with feeling, and the boundaries between scientific curiosity and emotional survival begin to blur. It is a compelling metaphor, and one that lends itself well to the show’s blend of storytelling and performance. The structure moves between demonstration and confession: part lecture, part personal account, part imaginative experiment. The performer delivers the material with unmistakable commitment. This is a performance style that leans unapologetically toward what might be called capital-A Acting - emotional clarity, carefully shaped gestures, and moments of heightened feeling that are presented directly and without irony. For some audiences that sincerity will be exactly the point. The show’s emotional openness is central to its appeal, particularly within the cosy intimacy of the venue where every shift in tone feels amplified. The themes of love, grief and resilience are handled with sincerity throughout. The show occasionally edges toward sentimentality. The performance style leans strongly into feeling, which may not appeal to viewers who prefer a lighter touch or greater understatement. Yet the production’s generosity is difficult to resist. There is something refreshing about a piece that embraces its own earnestness so openly. The creative team appear less interested in irony than in the simple act of sharing a story about perseverance and emotional connection. Within the context of the Adelaide Fringe - a festival filled with spectacle, comedy and experimentation - The Soaking of Vera Shrimp  offers a gentler kind of theatrical encounter. It is small in scale, sincere in tone, and anchored by a performer clearly invested in the material they are delivering. For audiences willing to surrender to its sentiment and imaginative premise, the show provides a sweet and quietly moving theatrical experience. Like the raindrops Vera studies so carefully, it gathers small fragments of feeling and invites us to notice them. Review by Kate Gaul

My Grandpa Doesn’t Follow Me on Instagram: A Guide To Trans-generational Road-Tripping The Mill Some stories arrive onstage with a clear theatrical architecture. Others unfold more like a long car journey: winding, unexpected, occasionally uncomfortable, and ultimately intimate. Yoz Mensch’s My Grandpa Doesn’t Follow Me on Instagram: A Guide To Trans-generational Road-Tripping  belongs firmly to the latter category - a solo storytelling work that travels lightly but lands with surprising emotional weight. The premise is deceptively simple. Mensch and their grandfather embark on a road trip from Cornwall to the Scottish Highlands. One grandparent, one grandchild, and an unspoken truth travelling quietly between them. The journey becomes both literal and emotional terrain: motorway service stations, anonymous hotel rooms, awkward silences, and small moments of shared humanity that gather significance over time. Drawn from hundreds of real Instagram Stories posted during the trip, the performance cleverly uses the digital trace of the journey as both narrative device and emotional counterpoint. What was publicly shared online - the landscapes, the jokes, the passing oddities of travel - becomes the scaffolding for a more complicated private story. What remains unsaid, or deliberately hidden, begins to pulse beneath the surface. Many in the audience will already sense the central tension: this is also a coming-out story. Yet what is striking about Mensch’s approach is the intelligence and restraint with which that thread is handled. The revelation is not positioned as a theatrical climax or dramatic confrontation. Instead, it exists as a quiet but constant presence, a truth carried in the car alongside a phone, snacks and overnight bags. Mensch treats the subject with notable restraint, allowing the complexity of intergenerational love to sit alongside the anxiety of disclosure without forcing the narrative toward easy catharsis. Mensch is an engaging and quietly charismatic storyteller. There is a remarkable ease with which they invite the audience into the world of the journey, speaking with the relaxed intimacy of someone recounting a memory to friends rather than delivering a carefully constructed theatrical monologue. That conversational tone proves disarming. The audience leans in. What emerges gradually is not simply a travelogue but a meditation on generational distance - the curious tenderness and strain that can exist between people who love each other deeply yet inhabit very different worlds. Much of the show’s charm lies in the lovingly recreated characters encountered along the road. Motel clerks mainly, each appears with gentle comic detail and some could be extended into much longer scenes. Mensch sketches them with quick physical shifts and subtle vocal changes, building a gallery of vivid roadside encounters. There is a consummate performance skill at work here that sneaks up on the audience. What initially appears casual and improvisational reveals itself as carefully calibrated storytelling. Beats land precisely. Moments of humour are allowed to bloom before quietly curdling into something more reflective. Yoz is a natural clown and their ability to perfectly time a pause and allow laughter to ripple (or, indeed tears to flow) is one of the show’s greatest strengths. At its heart, My Grandpa Doesn’t Follow Me on Instagram explores the delicate emotional choreography involved in hiding parts of oneself from the people we love most. The generational gap between Mensch and their grandfather becomes a kind of emotional geography the show navigates with care. How much truth can be shared? What remains unsaid to preserve love? The performance never pushes these questions too aggressively. Instead, Mensch allows them to hover in the background like the changing scenery outside a car window, always present, occasionally breathtaking, sometimes difficult to look at directly. By the time the journey reaches the Scottish Highlands, the audience has travelled a considerable emotional distance as well. The show’s unexpected and joyous conclusion does not resolve every tension, nor does it attempt to offer easy answers. Instead, it leaves us with the lingering sense that connection between generations is always a negotiation: imperfect, loving, and deeply human. In an era when social media promises constant connection, My Grandpa Doesn’t Follow Me on Instagram  gently reminds us that the people closest to us may still be the ones who know the least. It is a funny, tender, and unexpectedly haunting piece of storytelling. It is proof that sometimes the most compelling theatre begins with a simple question: what happens when we finally tell the story we’ve been quietly avoiding? Review by Kate Gaul

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

Theatre of Deams Adelaide Festival Theatre   When Hofesh Shechter last appeared in Adelaide with Grand Finale  in 2019, audiences were left reeling from its apocalyptic force. With Theatre of Dreams , Shechter returns with something more seductive: a plunge into the subconscious where theatre itself becomes a portal, a ritual, and occasionally a hedonistic private party we are partly invited to witness. Theatre of Dreams  is a must-see at this year’s Adelaide Festival. It is rare to witness performance of such consummate, electrifying calibre. The opening moments immediately establish the work’s extraordinary technical command. Curtains glide across the stage, sweeping in and out with a precision that is choreographic. Anyone (like me!) who loves a curtain in theatre will find themselves quietly delighted here. These are not decorative drapes; they are active collaborators in the dramaturgy. They reveal, conceal, and reshape the stage picture in an ongoing choreography of revelation and concealment.  Dancers slip behind them, re-emerge through them, or flicker into view only briefly before vanishing again. It creates the feeling that much of the action is always happening just out of sight. This sense of partial visibility becomes one of the work’s central pleasures. Theatre of Dreams  feels layered, architecturally. Scenes unfold like nested rooms in a dream. Something is always occurring behind a curtain, inside a shadow, or just beyond the edge of the light. The audience becomes complicit in filling the gaps. Shechter’s own musical score - a heavy, pulsing, cinematic composition - anchors the work with a relentless physical rhythm. The bass vibrates through the space. It is music designed not merely to accompany dance but to inhabit the body of the audience. At times it feels closer to a club environment or ritual gathering. At others our shared heartbeat. Within this sonic architecture, the dancers move with Shechter’s unmistakable choreographic language. The ensemble often operates like a single organism: a collective body surging forward, recoiling, fracturing and reforming. Large groups pulse in unison, torsos shaking, shoulders driving forward, feet stomping into the floor with grounded force. A celebration that foregrounds diverse body types and movement languages, drawing the dancers into a single irresistible pulse. What is striking is the coexistence of ecstasy and danger within the movement vocabulary. Moments of ferocity sit beside passages of sensuality and strange tenderness. The dancers oscillate between wild release and controlled precision, creating a kinetic atmosphere that is thrilling. The energy is intense, but it is not frightening. Instead, it is compelling, drawing the viewer deeper into the piece’s peculiar dream logic. The visual world of the production amplifies this atmosphere. Smoke drifts through the stage picture, lighting flickers between darkness and sudden bursts of saturated colour, and the moving curtains continually reshape the space into a sequence of portals. This is a theatrical rabbit hole through which both dancers and audience fall deeper into an interior landscape. Watching Theatre of Dreams  often feels less like observing a performance than like entering someone’s subconscious. The closest analogue might be the sensation of being inside a David Lynch film - except this is unmistakably Shechter’s dream. The atmosphere is thick with mystery and suggestion. Figures appear, dissolve, and reassemble. Groups gather as though in secret ceremony, their collective motion suggesting rituals whose meaning remains tantalisingly just beyond comprehension. At times the stage feels like a private celebration unfolding in front of us: a strange, ecstatic gathering where the participants share knowledge that the audience can only glimpse. There are moments that resemble a party, others that evoke a ritual, and still others that feel like fragments of half-remembered dreams. The choreography allows moment to accumulate, creating a dense theatrical texture. This accumulation is where the work achieves its most remarkable quality. With its scale - twelve dancers, a powerful score, sophisticated technical design - the lighting, music, choreography, and those endlessly shifting curtains combine into a single, immersive theatrical organism. Theatre of Dreams  is wild and undeniably spectacular, but its deeper achievement lies in the way it invites the audience into an ambiguous interior world - one governed by rhythm, instinct and sensation rather than narrative. Shechter has created a theatrical dream that pulses with its own logic, its own heartbeat, and its own mysterious sense of life. Like all compelling dreams, it leaves the audience both exhilarated and slightly uncertain about what exactly they have witnessed - only that, for a moment, they were inside it. Review by Kate Gaul

Please … Continue? Dom Polski Centre     Please… Continue?  by Remy Rochester and Angus Onley is a playful, surreal dance-theatre duet that explores the shifting choreography of human connection. Balancing pedestrian familiarity with moments of abstract physical invention, the work invites audiences into a world where relationships flicker between attraction, resistance and possibility. The piece begins with a simple arrangement: two chairs and a table. The dancers enter from behind us, dressed in blazers that subtly frame the environment as an office, waiting room, or another of the anonymous shared spaces that structure our everyday lives. These minimal elements immediately establish a recognisable social landscape. Yet what unfolds within it quickly becomes stranger and far more fluid. Simply lit and danced against a pulsing score this is a terrific fringe piece. Rochester and Onley use their jackets as playful extensions of the choreography, shuffling them impatiently, shrugging them on and off, and deploying them as physical punctuation for the emotional rhythms between the two characters. Their interactions begin with small gestures of awkwardness: glances diverted, movements interrupted, each performer attempting to take a seat at the table while subtly blocking the other. The energy between them is palpable. Through precise dancerly gestures and micro-interactions, the performers begin to blur the audience’s sense of what kind of relationship we are witnessing. Is it attraction? Competition? Repulsion? Or some combination of all three? The choreography thrives inside this ambiguity. Gestures move from avoidance to connection, hesitation to magnetism, with each new exchange complicating the emotional terrain. Rochester and Onley’s duet skilfully navigate the awkwardness, chemistry, resistance and possibility that shape human relationships, allowing the audience to witness a spectrum of connection that feels both recognisable and surreal. Technically, the pair are beautifully matched. The choreography demands both precision and responsiveness, particularly in the intricate partnering that emerges as the duet develops. Rochester and Onley shift each other’s weight, spiral through lifts, and swing across the stage with a sense of daring momentum and definite skill. At times they tumble and roll across the floor while maintaining an intimate connection, coiling around each other without sacrificing the speed or clarity of the movement. What’s not to love? What begins as tentative social choreography gradually builds toward something more emotionally charged, with the performers caught between their impulse to retreat and a growing desire to move closer. Rochester brings undeniable charisma to the stage. Their presence radiates energy and a clear creative vision. Yet the strength of Please… Continue?  lies equally in the dynamic partnership between Rochester and Onley. Their physical dialogue feels attentive and responsive, each performer listening closely to the other’s body as they negotiate the unfolding dance. P lease… Continue?  ultimately embraces the fragile uncertainty at the centre of human relationships. Through playful theatricality and sophisticated choreography, Rochester and Onley offer a heartfelt homage to not knowing - and to the beautifully absurd ways we continue reaching for one another anyway. Review by Kate Gaul

The Wild Unfeeling World The Courtyard of Curiosities - The Yurt The   Wild Unfeeling World   is a witty, inventive and unexpectedly tender reimagining of Moby Dick  from multi-award-winning writer and storyteller Casey Jay Andrews. Casey Jay Andrews is always a must-see for me and this beautiful show is no exception! Taking Herman Melville’s vast seafaring epic and re-anchoring it in the everyday landscapes of contemporary London, Andrews creates a work that is both intimate and exhilarating, proving that the story of obsession, longing and impossible pursuit still resonates deeply in the modern world. Most audiences have at least a passing familiarity with Moby Dick : the white whale, the captain bent on revenge, the mythic struggle between human will and the unknowable forces of the world. But Andrews gently disarms that expectation from the outset. In an informal introduction, she reminds us that this version is not really about a whale at all. Instead, The Wild Unfeeling World  reframes the narrative through the life of Dylan, a burnt-out twenty-something who finds herself lying on the rooftop of a multi-storey car park in Southwest London at 4.30 in the morning, watching jumbo jets rumble through the crisp dawn sky. Dylan is struggling through a series of personal setbacks that have arrived with disorienting speed: work, home and stability all slipping out of reach. Faced with the mundanity and quiet suffocation of modern despair, she embarks on an oddly ambitious quest - to walk across London to the Sea Life aquarium, attempting to reconnect with some sense of wonder through the power of childhood nostalgia. Within the intimate setting of the Yurt, Andrews performs with a handful of simple objects and minimal design. A painted blue tarp becomes an incoming wave, while simple items - a box labelled “notebooks, sketchbooks, etc.” a model boat, lots of small cats – all help tell the story of Dylan’s unravelling world. In words and objects Andrews conjures an entire cityscape and emotional universe, demonstrating a remarkable ability to transform small details into vivid theatrical imagery. Part of the pleasure of the piece lies in the deceptively casual storytelling style Andrews adopts. We gather to hear a story told by someone who understands both its absurdity and its emotional weight. With warmth and calm authority, Andrews is our captain, guiding the audience through Dylan’s wandering thoughts and strange encounters. Along the way, the narrative drifts through seemingly unrelated observations - desire paths across grass, the number of planes currently in the sky, risk-assessment forms, the psychology of object permanence. These digressions quietly mirror the way an anxious mind moves, circling outward before slowly revealing the deeper emotional currents underneath. Andrews gently pulls the audience into Dylan’s interior landscape, making us walk beside her as she navigates a city that feels at once enormous and isolating. The piece balances humour, philosophical reflection and emotional vulnerability with impressive control. Melvillean themes of obsession and pursuit remain present, but they are reframed through contemporary experiences of burnout, uncertainty and loneliness. Dylan’s quest becomes less about conquering an external monster and more about confronting the quiet, stubborn feeling that life’s meaning has slipped just beyond reach. Yet the beauty of T he Wild Unfeeling World  lies in its refusal to remain trapped in despair. As the story unfolds, small acts of connection appear - strangers, animals, fleeting moments of kindness. The play’s bittersweet conclusion may depart from Melville’s original narrative, but Andrews replaces tragedy with something far more resonant - the fragile hope that comes from simply asking for help. The work reminds us that even in the depths of anxiety and uncertainty, there is always someone willing to reach out a hand. Through skilled storytelling, gentle humour and deeply human insight, Casey Jay Andrews transforms an ancient literary obsession into a quietly powerful meditation on resilience, connection and the courage it takes to keep going Review by Kate Gaul

Skank Sinatra: The Name on Everybody’s Lips Presented by Jens Rada and Theatre TravelsThe Lark, Adelaide Fringe Some performers sing cabaret; Jens Rada’s Skank Sinatra devours it whole. Directed by Carly Fisher, this production once again demonstrates her instinct for good taste and focus. After years orbiting one another creatively, Jens Rada and Fisher’s paths finally collided in 2025 when Skank Sinatra  headlined Qtopia Sydney’s Pride Fest igniting what feels like a powerhouse partnership of theatrical flair and creative ambition. Several things are undeniable about the sensation that is Skank Sinatra. Skank is the creation of artist Jens Rada, and Rada is a formidable talent - actor, singer, drag artist and clown. With a clear strategy and a skilled team behind him, this is an artist who could easily fill major playhouses. Watching the show, I found myself wondering what the ideal role for Jens - or Skank - might be in a major musical or play. “Skank Sinatra: The Name on Everybody’s Lip”s  is a pastiche cabaret, accompanied by the charismatic pianist Josh Delperio who, Skank reminds us, proves that yes, they sing live. The repertoire spans from “Luck Be a Lady Tonight” to “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina,” while Rada loosely guides us through the “rules of cabaret,” peppered with anecdotes from his Danish, South African and Australian heritage. Like the great cabaret performers before them, Skank Sinatra understands that the form lives somewhere between confession, glamour and mischief. Because this is also a drag performance, costume changes are expected though these are tricky for a solo performer. To solve the problem, the show inserts recorded imagined dialogue between Skank and Judy Garland while the artist changes offstage. It’s the weakest device in the show. And really, Skank isn’t alone: why not let the excellent Delperio continue the entertainment from the keys? Still, this work springs from the imagination and craft of a major Australian artist with obvious audience appeal. What I want, however, is to feel more. When Skank launched into Stephen Sondheim’s Being Alive , the evening suddenly opened. Here was the possibility of something deeper but the song was quickly tossed aside in service of lighter, capital-E Entertainment. Perhaps a truly original Sondheim interpretation belongs in another show. Yet the ingredients for that more searching work are already present here, flickering through Skank’s performance. I want this artist to dig deeper, to make the work matter. To let us glimpse the artist beneath the mask. For now, “ Skank Sinatra:The  Name on Everybody’s Lip”s  is a lively, glittering cabaret gem. The name may not be on everybody’s lips yet - but it will be. Go. Review By Kate Gaul

Look at the State of the Carpet – Old Fitz Theatre Created by Stephanie Hart and Lenny Ann Low Peeling back the onion on life with grit, wonder and perhaps a cup of tea, Look At The State Of The Carpet , we are told in the blurb, is a searing four-act play from the minds of two self-proclaimed idiots. Stephanie Hart and Lenny Ann Low return with a brand-new work about friendship, artistic difference and the strange contortions required to sustain both - including pushing their chins deep into their necks. Formed from more than thirty years of friendship and an unexpectedly deep reservoir of camaraderie, the work is both challenging and charming. Founding members of Throttle  and long-time collaborators with Frumpus , Hart and Low bring decades of devised performance experience, having previously appeared at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Adelaide Fringe, Performance Space, Carriageworks and the Museum of Contemporary Art. What emerges here is a living archive of a friendship forged through decades of experimental performance. The show leans into absurd clowning: dark, strange and consistently funny. Costumed like 19th-century troubadours in hitched calico skirts, waistcoats and top hats adorned with plumes and frilled collars, the pair also operate their own onstage tech - a decision that proves to be a constant source of hilarity and mild alarm (you really do have to be there). They take their time. They look us in the eye. Something is happening, though we’re not always sure exactly what. Watching them work, you sense the unspoken rhythms of long collaboration - the tiny shifts of breath and glance that keep a piece like this alive. Audience participation adds further unpredictability. On the night I attended, “Senior Bob” took a fall and blood was spilled - yet the show continued on its determinedly crooked trajectory, an example of the particular elasticity of live performance that Hart and Low understand so well. The performance unfolds through a series of memorable images: Lenny Ann Low hidden by, then emerging from beneath, a towel that briefly becomes a medieval mantle; a bird held carefully on a branch; Hart coughing up a dead bird; a pile of clothes accumulating like the sediment of shared years - and, of course, the much-referenced carpet itself, which does indeed eventually appear. There is something quietly radical in watching senior artists embrace nonsense with such commitment. In an era when so much theatre strives for polish and narrative clarity, Hart and Low remind us that the anarchic spirit of devised performance - messy, unpredictable and gloriously human - still has teeth. It also feels like a reminder of a lineage in Sydney performance: mischievous, handmade theatre that once thrived in small rooms and stubbornly refuses to disappear. Beneath the absurdity lies a quietly moving portrait of what it means to keep making work — and keep making each other laugh — over a lifetime. Cryptic, chaotic and frequently thigh-slappingly funny. Recommended. Review by Kate Gaul (I attended a preview performance.)

Brand New Dress The Loading Dock At Qtopia Sydney, Andy Freeborn’s “ Brand New Dress”  arrives as both confessional and quest narrative: a cabaret tracing their non-binary journey through a fantasy landscape of knights, kings and dragons. Dungeons & Dragons reveals itself as a kind of frame; it provides a dramaturgical scaffold for transformation - armour donned and shed, monsters named and battled, sovereignty reclaimed. It’s a clever metaphorical engine, even if not every quest lands with equal force. Freeborn is, first and foremost, a formidable vocalist. The instrument is thrilling - elastic across registers, emotionally articulate, and capable of moving from crystalline musical-theatre lyricism to a rougher, confessional belt. Musically, the show leans unapologetically into Broadway idiom. I don’t claim scholarly fluency in the canon, but there are clear echoes of Stephen Sondheimand at times the lush, romantic sweep of Rufus Wainwright hovers in the melodic architecture - praise that is not lightly given. There is also a streak of theatrical bravura that suggests a future kinship with Tim Minchin: piano-led, intellectually agile, capable of holding a large audience in thrall. Yet for all its musical sophistication, “ Brand New Dress”  is most compelling when it strips back. Freeborn’s earlier rock cabaret, “ Everything is Sh t! *”, earned attention for its unflinching excavation of family trauma and queer becoming; that same appetite for candour is present here. A graduate of the Australian Institute of Music (Music Theatre), Freeborn has also worked as a composer and musical director across independent productions, building a reputation as a multi-hyphenate creator rather than a singular performer. That breadth shows in the structural ambition of this work: motifs recur, narrative threads braid, and the dramaturgy strives for cohesion rather than mere anecdote. A usual at Qtopia Sydney when the show relies on (thankfully few) recorded accompaniments the show flattens.  Without more time in the theatre the sound balance just isn’t achieved. For an artist of this calibre, the choice reads as pragmatic rather than aesthetic and it diminishes the immediacy the material deserves. There is no denying the scale of the talent on display. Hailing from Adelaide, Freeborn feels destined for platforms beyond the black-box cabaret circuit - one imagines a future berth at the Adelaide Cabaret Festival as a serious musical storyteller. More than that, one can plausibly envisage them fronting an orchestra, piano centre-stage, commanding a festival house with the assurance of a seasoned auteur. “Brand New Dress”  is not a perfect work. It is, however, an urgent and generous one - a show that situates queer self-fashioning within epic narrative and insists that the act of putting on a dress can be as mythic as slaying a dragon. The question is less whether Andy Freeborn has arrived than how expansively they will be allowed to grow. The raw materials - voice, intellect, theatrical instinct - are indisputably there. Review by Kate Gaul

The Performers The Loading Dock   In the small black box that is The Loading Dock Theatre, cabaret duo Dolly Diamond and Skank Sinatra arrive like seasoned vaudevillians who have seen every backstage corridor and survived them all. “The Performers”  is less a tightly structured show than a rolling, gloriously unruly conversation between two entertainers who understand that the art of cabaret lies as much in timing and temperature as in repertoire. They loosely frame the evening around the inevitable debt accrued from surviving the Edinburgh Fringe - will they or won’t they ever clear it? There’s a wink to “ The Producers” , of course: the delicious theatrical fantasy that failure might somehow be more lucrative than success. It’s a knowing conceit that gives shape to the chaos without ever pinning it down. From the outset, the format is intimate - the audience close, the lighting warm and forgiving. The proximity suits the pair’s chosen style for “The Performers”.  Dolly Diamond, all arch poise and razor timing, works the room with the assurance of someone who has long since mastered the power of a raised eyebrow. Skank Sinatra, a polished diva with a taste for mischief, counters with a looseness that feels dangerous in the best way. Their chemistry is less duet than duel: affectionate, competitive, conspiratorial. Yet beneath the barbs is unmistakable respect - two colleagues who clearly admire each other’s craft and know exactly how to set the other up for a punchline or a high note. The patter is the engine. Generational jokes ricochet between them - references pinging from pre-digital nostalgia to TikTok-era absurdity. There’s a running undercurrent about ageing, relevance and the indignities of staying fabulous. Dolly leans into the grande dame persona, tossing off lines with studied disdain; Skank punctures pomposity before it can fully inflate. The audience isa cross-section of queer elders, allies and bright-eyed newcomers:  all become witness and accomplice, drawn into the rhythm of tease and retort. Where the evening falters is in its technical execution. The amplified sound production does the material few favours. Lyrics frequently blur into muffled syllables, particularly during duets when harmonies and text should land with clarity and punch. In cabaret, text is everything. At times, the performers appear to compensate physically, pushing expression and gesture to ensure meaning cuts through where amplification does not. It is a testament to their skill that so much still lands. There’s an undeniable sense that both artists are simultaneously celebrating and skewering the musical canon they inhabit. The intimacy of The Loading Dock Theatre both elevates and constrains the show. There is genuine pleasure in seeing performers of this calibre at such close quarters: the raised eyebrow, the whispered aside, the quicksilver shift from sincerity to satire all land with conspiratorial thrill. Yet there is also the sense that the stage is simply too small for the ambition at play. These personas - so fiercely drawn, so theatrically expansive - yearn for a larger canvas. If the sound were sharper and the space grander, the evening would ascend from delightful to dazzling. But there is something refreshingly unvarnished about “ The Performers” . It resists slickness. The show feels alive, responsive, occasionally chaotic - which in cabaret is often a virtue rather than a flaw. This time around, Dolly and Skank understand that the audience is not there for perfection; they are there for presence. And presence they deliver in abundance.    Review by Kate Gaul

Es & Flow The Old Fitz Theatre At this year’s Mardi Gras season, the Old Fitz Theatre continues its welcome habit of programming intimate queer storytelling. Jennifer Lunn’s Es & Flo  sits squarely in that lineage – an ensemble work about devotion, ideology, and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive time. Set in Cardiff, Es and Flo have secretly been in a relationship since they met at the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp in the 1980s. Now 71, Es’s memory is fading, and her unseen son Peter is attempting to separate the couple - first by introducing an unannounced carer, with the longer-term goal of moving his mother into residential care. Around this central relationship orbit Es’s daughter-in-law Catherine, the home help Beata, and Beata’s daughter Kasia, performed by Annie Byron, Eloise Snape, Fay Du Chateau, Erika Ndibe, Charlotte Salusinszky and Georgina Warren-Nwokol. Each character operates within some form of protective fiction - romantic, ideological, medical or social - and the drama emerges as those fictions begin to fracture. Though Es and Flo are fictional, the historical movement that binds them is very real. On 5 September 1981, 36 Welsh women marched from Cardiff as “Women for Life on Earth” in protest against the British government’s decision to store cruise missiles on UK soil. They arrived at RAF Greenham Common in Berkshire and established what became the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp. Within a year, more than 30,000 women had camped and demonstrated on site, creating one of the most significant feminist protest movements of the twentieth century. The play gestures toward that radicalism - women creating autonomous space, rejecting patriarchal authority, and forging community outside the state. The production’s white box (Designer Soham Apte) set briefly springs to life during scene transitions with blurred archival footage of the era, reminding us of the scale of that collective action. Yet Es & Flo  is less interested in reconstructing protest than in examining what happens after revolution - how ideals age inside ordinary domestic life. The question haunting the play is quietly devastating: what becomes of political certainty when memory itself becomes unreliable? Deceptively sweet, this domestic drama hits many of the painful beats of dementia storytelling. As Flo struggles to accept outside help, it becomes clear there is no right answer or easy option even without financial strain even being a factor. We recognise how hard it can be to watch a loved one slip away, and how powerful the desire not to become a burden can be. I found the thread of story supplied by Beata the Polish home care worker and her 9 year old daughter striking.  Neither Beata or Kasia invests in preserving Greenham’s mythology. Kasia shifts the drama from memory to continuity - from what these women once changed to what simply endures. Beata anchors it in material reality. As the migrant carer whose labour sustains their independence, she lives inside the systems they once resisted; her politeness and efficiency reads less as personality than necessity. Through her, the play reframes its politics: the legacy of revolution is not only the freedom to love openly, but the quiet reliance on others whose care makes that freedom liveable. Directed by Emma Canalese, the production at its best captures the intimacy of two people negotiating history in real time - a negotiation as emotional as it is factual. However, an uneven approach to accents distracts from emotional continuity; voices drift in and out of region and age, occasionally pulling the audience out of the world just as it begins to settle. Similarly, the tempo rarely shifts gear. Scenes accumulate at a comparable rhythm, and, without sharper dynamic variation, the play’s structural revelations lose impact. What should feel like ruptures barely arrive. There is also an uneasy tension in the portrayal of diminished capacity. Watching an actor in their seventies embody a character losing agency raises complicated questions - not about ability, but about how vulnerability is staged. At times the depiction leans toward representational shorthand, creating moments where the audience becomes aware of performance rather than personhood. The play invites empathy; occasionally the staging prompts distance. Lunn writes with a gentle wit that never entirely leaves her characters, even in decline. The play’s central idea - that memory is both sanctuary and distortion - feels particularly resonant in queer history, where personal testimony often substitutes for institutional record. Eloise Snape anchors this conceptual terrain effectively, with a particularly strong performance. She navigates a character defined by class awareness and economic authority, constructing a careful social mask: measured voice, managerial composure, the confidence of someone accustomed to control. As the play progresses, that composure thins. Snape allows tiny cracks to appear - hesitation before a name, a laugh held half a beat too long - until it becomes clear the authority, she wields is also a defence as she faces the truth about her own life and marriage. Her eventual recognition that she too is living inside a constructed narrative lands as the production’s most affecting moment. Still, Es & Flo  remains a thoughtful inclusion in the Mardi Gras program: a work less about queer identity as declaration than queer history as memory - fragile, revisable and shared. By the final moments, the play suggests that love may be the only truth surviving the collapse of all others - not factual truth, not ideological truth, but relational truth: the story two people agree to keep telling together, even when one may no longer remember how it began. Review by Kate Gaul Image: Robert Catto