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Bed Bug The Crawford Room Bed Bug  is what happens when heartbreak mutates. Not a gig. Not theatre. Not quite a rave.Something messier. More intimate. Slightly unhinged. Bed Bug  is a live unravelling: a heartbreaking, experimental electronic-folk concept work that traces the collapse of a decade-long relationship and the grotesque, fascinating metamorphosis that follows. It sits in that deliciously unstable space where performance becomes emotional weather. Created by Jack Brett, with music production by DINNERLADYYY, weaving a live electronic undercurrent that shimmers, fractures and carries the work into something more volatile, Bed Bug  dissects the sticky, destructive patterns of human behaviour. Even in its darkest turns, the work remains alert to the possibility of transformation. The result is a performance that is entirely inhabited. Brett is a charismatic and deeply watchable performer. There is something both alluring and unsettling in the way he holds eye contact with the audience: intimate, exposed, slightly dangerous. He has the voice of a broken angel - tender, bruised, and capable of sudden force. On guitar, keys, loops and tin whistle, he builds a miniature epic from fragments, textures and pulses. The sound world is rich and engulfing, moving from poetic fragility to full-bodied electronic surge. The show’s references make sense: Kafka hovers here, as does the contemporary alt-pop lineage of confessional composition. But Bed Bug never feels derivative. It has its own feverish logic. Brett’s background as a music, performance and visual artist is evident in the work’s total composition, as is the breadth of his collaborative life - from Sleep Walking Animals  to his internationally touring work with storyteller Casey Jay Andrews. This is a maker who understands atmosphere and how to use it to destabilise an audience, then draw them closer. What lingers is not only the sonic sophistication — though there is plenty of that — but the sense of emotional risk. This is tricky to categorise, and all the better for it. Looking around the room, it is clearly reaching the theatrical adventurers - those audiences hungry for work that slips between genres and resists easy packaging. For me, that makes Bed Bug  exactly the kind of work a festival like this should hold close: ambitious, strange, musically arresting, and utterly unafraid of its own intensity. This is an evening of music, performance and images that will last a long time in memory. Review by Kate Gaul

Sexy Ghost Boy Upstairs at Duke of York Hotel Sexy Ghost Boy  begins with instructions. A ritual. A dare. “Begin with a circle. Work your way up, slowly. Bravely. The Macarena happens to completion. Scream.” It is ridiculous. It is precise. It is, in its own way, completely serious. From this opening invocation, the audience is initiated into a world where the absurd and the intimate collide, summoning the titular spirit: from New Zealand, an award-winning, hilariously f***able apparition who exists somewhere between clown, seducer and existential threat. Sexy Ghost Boy is less a character than a force - erratic, disarming and deeply attuned to the strange rituals that govern our bodies. Blending clowning, burlesque and performance art, the show interrogates the micro-neuroses and unspoken rules that shape our understanding of sex. It is not interested in eroticism as such, but rather in the awkward choreography that surrounds it: the hesitations, the over-performed confidence, the internal scripts we rehearse and repeat. Through a series of escalating physical and comedic sequences, Sexy Ghost Boy exposes the fragile mechanics of desire, turning them inside out with gleeful abandon. What makes the work land is its commitment to precision within chaos. The performance may feel anarchic, but it is underpinned by sharp technical control. Each gesture is calibrated, each awkward pause extended just long enough to tip into discomfort before snapping back into laughter. The audience is constantly caught between complicity and resistance, unsure whether to lean in or recoil. There is a particular pleasure in the way the performer manipulates tone. One moment, the space is filled with broad, almost childlike physical comedy; the next, it shifts into something quieter and more unsettling. The burlesque elements play deliberately with expectation, teasing the possibility of seduction before undermining it with absurdity. What emerges is a kind of anti-eroticism -desire rendered strange, clumsy and unmistakably human. There is also something distinctly generous at the core of the performance. For all its provocation and irreverence, Sexy Ghost Boy never feels cruel. Instead, it invites the audience into a shared recognition of vulnerability -the absurd lengths we go to in order to connect, to be seen, to be desired. It is also, refreshingly, difficult to categorise. Looking around the room, it’s clear the show has found its audience: theatrical adventurers of multiple identities, open to risk, absurdity and delight. That, perhaps, is what makes it such an ideal Fringe work. It resists neat definition, instead creating a space where different sensibilities can collide and coexist. There is something quietly heartening in that - an acknowledgement of the breadth of audiences willing to meet work on its own strange terms. Having already built a reputation across New Zealand, where it picked up multiple fringe awards including the Organised Chaos Award (Auckland Fringe) and the Bizarre and Charming Award (Hastings Fringe), the work arrives in Australia with a clear sense of its own identity. It is confident in its strangeness, unapologetic in its tone, and finely tuned to the rhythms of live audience engagement. What lingers after the performance is not a single image or moment, but a sensation: of having been pulled through something unpredictable and oddly revealing. The show does not offer neat conclusions or moral resolutions. Instead, it leaves us with the echo of its central provocation - what if the rituals we cling to around sex and intimacy are themselves the strangest performance of all? Sexy Ghost Boy  is chaotic, disarming and unexpectedly incisive. A work that understands that sometimes the most honest way to approach desire is not through seduction, but through laughter - and the courage to look directly at the absurdity of being human. Review by Kate Gaul

KIN   The Crawford Room Rooted in dancer and musician Erin Fowler’s exploration of her Irish ancestry, KIN  is an intimate and elemental work-in-progress that sits somewhere between music gig, ritual and dance theatre. It is a piece shaped by grief, ancestral dislocation and the uneasy terrain of Australian cultural in-betweenness. In its current form, it already holds a quiet power. At the centre of the work is a yearning to understand inheritance: what has been passed down, what has been lost, and what it might mean to belong on this land as someone shaped by colonial histories. KIN  asks these questions with sincerity and care, resisting easy resolution. Instead, it offers fragments - songs, gestures, stories, invocations - that gather into an evocative meditation on memory, womanhood and cultural absence. Much of the work’s force comes from its music. The three-part harmonies of Erin Fowler, Tess Fowler and Jessica Bigg are solid, haunting and deeply affecting. Their voices seem to hold both personal grief and something more collective: a longing for connection, for lineage, for forms of cultural continuity that feel real rather than inherited through cliché. The work explicitly reaches beyond the familiar shorthand of white Australian identity - “footy, snags and Aussie larrikins” - in search of something more meaningful, more truthful, and more embodied. This search is where KIN  i s at its most compelling. It gives presence to the “White Cultural Void” without becoming abstract or didactic. Instead, the themes are grounded in the body: in women’s voices, women’s rituals, and the subtle ways history lodges itself physically and emotionally. The embodied movement language is evocative and restrained, allowing gesture and presence to do the work rather than over-explaining. There is a sense throughout that the performers are not illustrating an argument but living inside a set of real, unresolved questions. Detailed narration helps thread these ideas together, and the personal storytelling is genuinely engaging. Fowler’s reflections open broader questions about shame, inheritance and habitation: why we are here, how we came to be here, and how we might live more honestly in relation to the land beneath us. These are big questions, and KIN  does not pretend to solve them. Its strength lies instead in its willingness to sit with discomfort, uncertainty and longing. As a work-in-progress, KIN  already possesses a clear tonal world. Its textures are carefully layered, and its shifts between song, speech and movement feel organic. The invitation for audiences to join in moments of shared song is particularly effective, creating brief but potent experiences of collective resonance. These moments open the work outward, transforming it from private reflection into something communal. What is already present is strong: an evocative performance language, a compelling personal frame, and a sincere engagement with difficult cultural and historical material. KIN  is a thoughtful and moving offering, intimate in scale, but expansive in the questions it asks. It leaves a lingering impression, not because it arrives at certainty, but because it invites us into the ache of searching. Keenly felt and genuinely engaging, this is a work worth watching as it continues to grow. Review by Kate Gaul

ODIE The Austral Emrys Quin’s ODIE is a ferocious, high-octane solo work that barrels through Australian masculinity, addiction, and identity with both savage humour and unsettling clarity. What begins as a larrikin yarn about State of Origin culture quickly mutates into something far darker and more psychologically fractured - part epic poem, part descent narrative, part cultural autopsy. Quin performs as Odie, a Queensland everyman whose voice is equal parts charisma and catastrophe. From the opening moments - inviting the audience into a drunken, blokey chant - the show establishes a seductive complicity. We laugh. We recognise the type. And then, almost imperceptibly, the ground begins to shift. The script is linguistically electric. Quin’s writing crackles with invention: dense, rhythmic, often grotesquely funny. His metaphors veer from the absurd to the poetic in a single breath - Sydney as a “diamond on a nipple,” violence as spectacle, empathy as “a pipe of lead.” This is language that doesn’t sit still; it lunges, spirals, and detonates. At times, the sheer velocity of ideas threatens to overwhelm, but that excess feels intentional, mirroring Odie’s overstimulated, substance-fuelled psyche. Structurally, the play unfolds across five acts -Violence, Substance, Prejudice, Gambling, Reckoning -each escalating Odie’s internal and external collapse. What is particularly striking is Quin’s theatrical imagination. A rugby match becomes mythic warfare; a yacht party morphs into a grotesque bacchanal with painted figures crawling off the walls; a casino transforms into a predatory organism devouring its patrons. These sequences are vivid, hallucinatory, and deeply stageable, offering a performer a playground of physical and visual possibility. Yet beneath the surrealism lies a sharply observed critique. ODIE  skewers a distinctly Australian mythology: mateship, blokiness, casual racism, and the normalisation of gambling and substance abuse. The character of the “Porklord”, a grotesque embodiment of corporate greed and nationalist hypocrisy, is particularly effective, exposing the commodification of identity and sport with biting satire. Importantly, Quin does not let Odie off the hook. The play’s greatest strength is its refusal to romanticise its protagonist. Odie’s charm is inseparable from his cowardice, his humour from his complicity. Moments of recognition, particularly in the scenes with Tangaroa Katoa, are quietly devastating, revealing the cost of silence and the ease with which prejudice is excused as “banter.” The final act pivots into something unexpectedly intimate. Stripped of spectacle, Odie is forced to confront the truth about Penny, a relationship he has mythologised to avoid facing his own failures. This revelation lands with real emotional weight, grounding the play’s earlier excesses in something painfully human. The closing interaction, poised between despair and the possibility of change, resists easy resolution. It is messy, unresolved, and powerful for it. As a solo performance, ODIE demands extraordinary stamina and precision. The performer must navigate rapid tonal shifts, embody multiple voices (including Odie’s own internal organs), and sustain a relentless pace. When it lands, the effect is exhilarating; when it tips into overload, it risks losing clarity. A slightly tighter calibration of rhythm - particularly in the middle sections - could allow key ideas to resonate more fully. ODIE is an audacious and distinctive work. It is rare to encounter a script that is this linguistically muscular, this theatrically ambitious, and this culturally incisive all at once. Quin has crafted a piece that is as entertaining as it is confronting holding up a mirror to an Australia that is both familiar and deeply unsettling. This is not a comfortable night at the theatre. But it is a compelling one. Reveiw by Kate Gaul

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