Endgame ★★★★ The radical pleasure of simply hearing Beckett’s extraordinary text. There is something unexpectedly thrilling about simply hearing Endgame. In Flabbergast Theatre’s production of Samuel Beckett’s canonical work, the four performers inhabit the strange, exhausted world of Hamm, Clov, Nell and Nagg with such conviction that the production feels less like a staging of a classic than a temporary entry into another universe. The performances are extraordinary: physically precise, emotionally inhabited and, above all, vocally assured. Beckett’s writing has a musicality that can be flattened by familiarity. Here, the vocal chops of the performers bring that music to the surface. The rhythms, repetitions, pauses and abrupt shifts in register are not merely delivered with deliberation; they are played. It is more than a masterclass in vocal delivery. It is a reminder of how extraordinary it is to actually hear Beckett’s text. And that, without being perjorative, is one of the great pleasures of this production. The language is allowed to do the work. There is no need to decorate it or over-explain it. The performers trust the words, and the words land. The production itself is comparatively modest. The setting is deliberately ordinary, and the physical world does not attempt to compete with Beckett’s bleak, stripped-back universe. That restraint serves the performers well. There is nowhere to hide, and nowhere for the audience's attention to go except to those in front of us. The circumstances of the performance are less helpful. The venue is frankly awful. Endgame requires concentration, and the physical conditions make that concentration harder than it needs to be. But the opportunity remains a rare one: to encounter a canonical work performed with this degree of aplomb. Flabbergast brings considerable physical and vocal intelligence to Beckett without smothering the text beneath theatrical cleverness. For all the talk of innovation and disruption around canonical theatre, sometimes the most radical thing is simply to hear a great text spoken extraordinarily well. Review by Kate Gaul

Brit Barron: CHURCH ★★★★ Barron knows how to run a church - she just isn’t preaching the same gospel anymore. Brit Barron is a gorgeously engaging performer. She has the rare ability to make a room feel smaller, warmer and more intimate within minutes of stepping onstage. In CHURCH, she takes us inside the world she grew up in — evangelical Christianity, megachurch culture, faith, sexuality and the complicated business of leaving a belief system that has shaped your entire understanding of the world. The story may be extraordinary in its detail, but much of it is not entirely unfamiliar. For anyone who has grown up around evangelical Christianity, there are plenty of recognisable moments: the certainty, the rituals, the language, the songs, the rules, the intensity of belonging to a community that believes it has the answers. Barron knows this world from the inside and tells her story with warmth, wit and a generous lack of bitterness. And she is a spellbinding storyteller. There is something wonderfully bright about the way Barron tells CHURCH. She doesn't wallow in the trauma of her past or turn her experience into a simple story of good versus evil. Instead, she is interested in the contradictions — what faith gave her, what it took away, what she still misses and what she absolutely does not. The result is a show that is funny and heartfelt without becoming sentimental. The central conceit is delicious: Barron effectively gives us a church service, using the language, rituals and theatricality of evangelical worship to tell her own story. She knows exactly how to work a congregation because she used to do it professionally. There is something deliciously subversive about watching those skills being repurposed for comedy. And then there is the music. Live music! What a Fringe bonus. The terrific live musicianship adds enormously to the atmosphere and gives the show a warmth and energy that recorded music simply couldn't replicate. Music is a powerful theatrical tool because it can make a room feel communal almost instantly. Here it also becomes part of the story, a reminder that the things we leave behind aren't necessarily things we stop loving. Barron's exploration of queerness is central, but CHURCH is not a show that requires you to share her experience to enjoy it. You don't have to be queer, religious, ex-religious or particularly interested in evangelical Christianity to get something from this show. At its heart it is about belonging: the desire to find your people, the pain of discovering that the community you belong to may not have room for all of you, and the possibility of creating something new when you walk away. There is also a generosity to Barron's performance that I really liked. She is not standing onstage asking us to pity her or demanding that we agree with every conclusion she has reached. She invites us in. She makes us laugh, tells us what happened and allows us to sit with the messier questions. CHURCH deserves a large audience. It has a great performer, a fascinating story, terrific live music and a theatrical conceit that genuinely works. And no, you absolutely do not have to be a lesbian to enjoy this one. Come for the comedy, stay for the gospel, and leave with a little more understanding of what happens when faith, identity and belonging collide. Review by Kate Gaul

The Galloping Cure ★★★★ A powerful musical fable about addiction that asks an intriguing question: when does music theatre become opera? The opioid crisis is a devastatingly rich subject for opera. Addiction, pain, pharmaceutical greed, desperation and the promise of an easy cure all lend themselves to the heightened world of music theatre. In The Galloping Cure, composer Missy Mazzoli and librettist Royce Vavrek, working from Karen Russell's original story and directed by Tom Morris, turn the crisis into a darkly comic contemporary fable. The setting is a fading American town where local doctor Theresa Hart works tirelessly to care for a community that is already hurting. Then Lucky Mack arrives — a charismatic showman with a brightly coloured carousel that promises to cure every ache. The first ride is free. Of course, there is a catch. Theresa's daughter Noy is captivated, and soon the whole town is swept up in the euphoric promise of Lucky's cure. What begins as pleasure and relief becomes dependence, and the cost of getting off the ride becomes increasingly horrific. The allegory is not subtle — nor does it need to be. The carousel is addiction, pharmaceutical exploitation and the seductive promise that pain can simply be made to disappear. Mazzoli's music is the star for me. There are memorable musical ideas that stay with you, alongside an atmosphere that moves between beauty, unease, repetition and something increasingly sinister. The score has the capacity to create the dreamlike, slightly nightmarish world that the story demands. But despite being billed as an opera, I found myself thinking that The Galloping Cure is perhaps more successful as a play set to music. There are four principal roles and an ensemble, but this is not opera in the grand, multi-voiced sense one might expect from the form. There are no great sprawling set pieces or extended passages of voices colliding and intertwining. Instead, the music frequently sits underneath and around the dramatic action, propelling the story and shaping its emotional atmosphere. That isn't necessarily a criticism. It is a contemporary form of music theatre, and there is much to admire in its accessibility. But I did find myself wanting the music and voices to take over more completely — to allow the opera to become something that only opera could be. The production is visually ambitious. Tom Morris and designer Rebecca Ringst create a strange, decaying world in which the carousel becomes both object and metaphor, with lighting, projection and movement contributing to the increasingly surreal atmosphere. But here I had another question. The production's most intriguing visual conceit is also its most literal: the plastic hobby horses. They are the carousel, but they are also the people being carried along by it — the object and the metaphor occupying the same space. And I wasn't always convinced that the hobby horses work best in the hands of the performers. There is something awkward about the actors manipulating them while simultaneously inhabiting the human characters. At times the theatrical device seems to ask the performers to be actors, puppeteers and objects all at once, and I wondered whether this might actually be a compelling argument for a more explicit division of labour: puppeteers alongside actors, rather than asking the actors to do both jobs. Because the metaphor is strong. The idea of a community literally mounting the machinery of its own addiction is theatrically powerful. I just wasn't always convinced that the human performers were the best people to animate it. Nevertheless, The Galloping Cure is an ambitious and timely work, with a terrific musical score and a production willing to take the opioid crisis somewhere strange rather than simply reproducing the facts of the epidemic. It has memorable music, striking imagery and a story that lands with increasing force. For me, the question is ultimately about form. The subject deserves opera. The music is good enough for opera. But I wanted the production to trust the operatic form even more. A compelling, beautifully designed and musically memorable new work — and an intriguing contribution to the continuing argument about what contemporary opera can be. Review by Kate Gaul

BOG WITCH ★★★★★ “Funny, tender and gloriously bonkers Bryony Kimmings makes the personal political and the bog theatrical.” Bryony Kimmings is a masterful theatre-maker. A consummate performer, storyteller and troublemaker, she takes the raw ingredients of her own life and spins them into a theatrical experience so exquisite it shines. Bog Witch (at Traverse Theatre) is, on the surface, the story of a woman who has had enough. Struggling with mental health, single motherhood, a sick child, money and the relentless demands of contemporary life, Kimmings uproots herself and her son from the city and moves to a tumbledown cottage in the countryside. Her mission is simple: reconnect with nature and, in the process, find a way to become happy and sane again. Of course, nothing is ever that simple. Kimmings is an unlikely eco-convert. She likes shopping. She likes Deliveroo. She likes coffee and booze and all the small, seductive comforts of consumer capitalism. But Bog Witch asks what happens when those things stop filling the hole. What happens when the distraction disappears and we are forced to look at the world we are actually living in? The themes are big: mental health, motherhood, consumerism, climate anxiety, ecological collapse, grief, our disconnection from nature, and the possibility of changing how we live. But Kimmings never allows the ideas to become worthy or preachy. She is too funny, too self-deprecating and too theatrically inventive for that. Instead, she gives us songs, stand-up, storytelling, projections, sound, folk traditions, horror, audience participation and a generous dose of the ridiculous. There is something wonderfully primal lurking beneath the comedy. The bog, the woods, the animals and the landscape gradually become more than scenery. They become characters, memories and forces with which that Kimmings reckons. And this is where her genius as a theatre-maker really kicks in. The raw material is her own life, but she doesn't simply tell us about it. She makes theatre out of it. Her personal anxieties become theatrical images; her experiences become jokes, songs, rituals and stories. She has an extraordinary ability to take something painfully ordinary and suddenly make it strange. The production is gorgeous. Sound, music, projections and lighting create a world that can shift from cosy rural idyll to something ancient, unsettling and faintly hallucinatory. There is more than a touch of folk horror here - The Wicker Man occasionally seems to be lurking at the edge of the woods - but Kimmings is always willing to puncture the portentousness with a filthy joke or a gloriously ridiculous image. And then comes the ending. I won't spoil it, because discovering where Bog Witch eventually takes us is one of the show's great pleasures. It is unexpected, joyful and completely bonkers, with more than a touch of the church hall about it. After all the climate anxiety, existential dread and wrestling with the state of the planet, Kimmings finds a wonderfully communal, celebratory way out. It feels both absurd and absolutely right. That may be the secret of Bog Witch: it takes enormous subjects and makes them human. The climate crisis is terrifying, but so is being a parent. Capitalism is destroying us, but we still want a coffee. Nature is magnificent, but sometimes it is also muddy and inconvenient and full of dead things. Kimmings doesn't offer an easy solution. She offers something better: connection, imagination, community and the possibility that changing how we live might also change how we feel. A glorious return. Funny, filthy, tender, politically alert and theatrically magnificent. Review by Kate Gaul

FOR DOLORES ★★★★★ Two young women bound by more than circumstance. Outstanding performances, gorgeous specificity and a friendship from which it is impossible to look away. Eva O’Connor’s For Dolores (Traverse Theatre) follows Mo, the Scottish one, and Réaltín, the Irish one, who meet as students in Edinburgh and party, play and blaze their way through the student dream. A few years later they are in Glasgow, dealing with friendship, motherhood and the consequences of the choices they have made. What begins as friendship becomes something much more consuming, a rivalry, an obsession, a chosen family and a relationship bound by love, dependency and desire. It is a wonderful piece of writing: funny, raw, beautifully specific and full of Scottish and Irish detail. These women have histories, accents, politics, families, jokes and grievances; they feel completely of their places and completely themselves. At the centre are two outstanding performances. Catriona Faint’s Mo and Lara McDonnell’s Réaltín have a chemistry that makes the friendship utterly convincing. They are funny together, irritating together, affectionate and cruel. They know each other too well. There is something almost addictive about watching them circle one another. And there is a delicious queer edge to the relationship. O’Connor understands the complicated territory between friendship and desire, between loving someone and being in love with them, and the often-blurry line between intimacy, dependency and possession. These two young women are bound by far more than circumstance. The play moves between their student years and the consequences of what happens later, gradually revealing how this extraordinary friendship has been formed and how it might unravel. What initially feels like a joyful, messy friendship becomes increasingly charged. The stakes rise, and the emotional architecture of the relationship begins to show itself. Faint and McDonnell are superb at navigating those shifts. There is no simple victim or villain here. Both women are capable of generosity and selfishness, tenderness and damage. Their performances make the relationship feel lived rather than constructed. I particularly loved the specificity of the world O’Connor creates. The Scottish and Irish details are not decoration; they are fundamental to who these women are and to the tensions between them. The humour is similarly rooted in character rather than simply inserted for relief. Jim Culleton's direction gives the performers room to let the relationship breathe, while the production gradually tightens around the events that will change everything. There is a real sense of watching two people who once thought they would always belong to each other discover that love, in whatever form it takes, doesn't necessarily make a relationship safe. For Dolores is funny, messy, moving and deeply human. It is a beautifully observed portrait of female friendship pushed to its limits, and a reminder that some of the most important relationships in our lives are also the most complicated. Review by Kate Gaul

FERAL ★★★★ Personal stories, comic genius and one very fabulous frock - Jess Fuchs is an absolute joy. FERAL is performed by Jess Fuchs. Jess Fuchs is funny. Properly funny. The kind of funny that comes from recognising yourself, your friends, your family and probably several people you would rather not recognise yourself in. In FERAL, Fuchs brings together a collection of personal stories, observations and wonderfully sharp comic material, weaving them into an hour that feels both extremely personal and completely relatable. There is an ease to her storytelling that makes you feel as though you have been let in on the joke and then she finds another joke underneath it. Fuchs isn't simply delivering a series of gags; she has a gift for taking the stuff of ordinary life and finding the absurdity hiding inside it. Small moments become stories, stories become beautifully constructed comic set pieces, and just when you think you know where she is going, she takes a deliciously unexpected turn. There are some genuinely memorable (and painful) personal stories here. They stay with you because they aren't simply vehicles for jokes, they have character, specificity and enough truth in them to make the comedy land harder. Fuchs has that increasingly rare ability to make an audience laugh while also thinking, oh God, yes, I know exactly what she means. And she has comic genius. Not the grandstanding, look-at-me kind, but the kind that seems to come naturally from a performer who knows precisely how to tell a story, when to hold a beat and when to go for the punchline. Her timing is excellent, and there is a lovely sense of mischief running through the whole thing. Also: the frock. I loved Jess Fuchs's frock. It deserves its own mention because it is fabulous, and because there is something wonderfully reassuring about a comedian who understands that what you wear is part of the storytelling. It suits the whole enterprise: funny, big, confident, outrageous and entirely herself. There is nothing especially complicated about the proposition here. Fuchs gets onstage and tells us stories about being a person in the world. But the simplicity is deceptive. Good stand-up requires enormous skill, and FERAL demonstrates just how much craft goes into making an audience feel that someone is simply chatting to them. This is also one of those shows where the time slot works beautifully. 6.55pm is a great Fringe time late enough to have got yourself properly into the day, early enough that you can still go out afterwards and continue the evening. And FERAL is exactly the sort of show you want in that slot: funny, warm, energetic and a thoroughly enjoyable way to spend an hour. It’s really human and the Irish holiday, Titanic and the coccyx story are gold Go see it. It is a great time slot, a great show, and Jess Fuchs is a comedian worth remembering. Review by Kate Gaul

HOSTILE — Edinburgh International Festival ★★★½ Gentle, inventive and beautifully made — Hostile turns bits of wood, clever gadgets and one brilliant performer into theatrical magic. There is something particularly pleasurable about watching a performer make theatre from almost nothing. In Hostile, French company Bakélite send Olivier Rannou into a spaghetti western with some timber, string, clever gadgets, a few everyday objects and a great deal of theatrical ingenuity. Rannou is the Hostile heart of the piece. He has a lovely physicality and a strong personality, and his cowboy is part Clint Eastwood, part cartoon character and part hapless survivor. This is entirely non-verbal theatre, so his face, body and precise manipulation of objects must do the storytelling. He is a generous performer who understands how to bring an audience into the game. What I particularly liked about is its inventiveness and its materiality. Objects are not hidden or transformed through elaborate illusion; we see Rannou make the world happen. A piece of wood becomes something else, string becomes a snake, simple mechanisms produce surprisingly sophisticated theatrical effects. There are clever little gadgets and beautifully judged pieces of stage business, and a constant sense of anticipation: what on earth is he going to do with that? The smaller-scale work is charming, although this is also where I had a reservation. From the back rows of Church Hill Theatre it was difficult to see some of the miniature detail. I wondered how this was working for the younger members of the audience, particularly when some of the pleasure comes from seeing exactly how the piece of wood reveals a character or landscape. Once the scale increases, however, the production really starts to surprise. The transformations become bigger and more theatrical, and there are some lovely moments when the audience suddenly understands what all those bits of material have been building towards. The lighting and sound are important partners in this process. They give the relatively simple materials atmosphere and scale, creating a western landscape that can move from comic to slightly sinister and back again. The effect is surprisingly cinematic, without losing the handmade quality that is the production's greatest pleasure. There is also something very appealing about the gentleness of Hostile. It doesn't over-explain itself or demand that we find a great meaning in its western adventure. Instead, it trusts the audience to enjoy the act of making. There are surprises, visual jokes and moments of genuine theatrical magic, but also a simple pleasure in watching an artist work with materials and turn them into a world. It is a reminder that theatre doesn't necessarily need elaborate technology or huge resources to create something memorable. Sometimes a piece of wood, a performer with an idea and an audience willing to imagine are enough. Hostile is gentle fun and beautiful theatre-making. Its small-scale work may be challenging to see from a distance, but as the world expands so does the theatrical pleasure. A lovely, inventive piece of object theatre that understands the joy of making something appear before our eyes. Review by Kate Gaul

Evita Too ★★★★★ Who gets remembered? Who gets erased? Evita Too turns the machinery of patriarchy into one very funny, very filthy, very smart musical. EVITA. You know her. The white dress.The balcony.The songs.The myth. ISABEL? Um. This is precisely where Sh!t Theatre’s Evita Too begins to mess with us. Rebecca Biscuit and Louise Mothersole have taken the enormous cultural phenomenon that is Evita and started pulling at its seams. Who was Eva Perón? Who was Isabel Perón? Why do we know one and barely know the other? And, most importantly, who gets to become a myth? Isabel Perón became Argentina’s first female president. Eva became Evita. Therein lies a show. And what a show. History gets dragged into the rehearsal room, musical theatre gets put on trial, and Isabel Perón is caught somewhere in the middle. There are songs, puppets, video, wigs, jokes, historical research, tangents and the kind of gleefully anarchic theatricality that Sh!t Theatre have made their own. It is chaotic. It is funny. It is very, very clever. And underneath all that apparent mayhem is some seriously rigorous theatre-making. Evita Too isn't a straightforward biography of Isabel Perón. Thank god. Instead, Sh!t Theatre use her as a way into something much bigger: the construction of political myth, celebrity, power and memory. The Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice musical becomes both the culprit and the playground. We aren't simply being told, here is the real story behind Evita. We are being asked: Why did this woman become a myth? And why did that woman become a footnote? The intersection of gender, political power and populism is explored with all the subtlety of a brick through a window and yet the thinking underneath it is anything but blunt. Biscuit and Mothersole are terrific as ever. They ooze talent and have that rare ability to make an audience feel that we are all in on the joke together. Their rapport is infectious. Their timing is impeccable. Their theatrical confidence allows the show to veer off in seemingly ridiculous directions without ever completely losing us. And then something happens. The jokes start to land somewhere else. Throughout the show there is a recurring image of ancient hands painted onto cave walls. A hand. I was here. Thousands of years ago someone pressed their hand against stone and left a trace of themselves behind. And suddenly this riotous investigation into Isabel Perón becomes something else. Who gets remembered? Who disappears? What survives us? What do we leave behind? What remains when we are gone? This is where Evita Too got me. Because beneath the politics, the celebrity, the jokes and the glorious theatrical mess is a surprisingly tender meditation on death, grief, memory and legacy. I was deeply moved. And hovering behind all of this is the patriarchy of course, the systems that decide whose stories are amplified, whose power is legitimised, and whose lives become legend. And yes, one critic has described the show's nudity as “unnecessary and irrelevant.” Well. Thank you, Sir. Another man taking up space to tell us what women should and shouldn't be doing with their bodies. You can be the judge of that. Sh!t Theatre's great achievement is that they make serious research feel like play. They make history unruly. They make political theatre funny. They make a musical about one forgotten woman while simultaneously asking why we remember anyone at all. It is riotous.It is irreverent.It is ridiculous. And then, it asks you to think about your own disappearance. EVITA. Remembered. ISABEL. Forgotten. US? Who knows. For just over an hour, Sh!t Theatre make us think about what it means to leave a mark. I WAS HERE. It's brillant - go see it! Review by Kate Gaul Image: Alie Wright

Flesh ★★★★★“A masterclass in what can be delivered in 60 minutes: fearless, exquisite and gloriously strange.” Flesh (at Zoo Southside) creates an epic world in just 60 minutes with elegance, extraordinary physical skill and remarkable emotional range. The concept and direction by Sophie Linsmaux and Aurelio Mergola is a masterclass in what can be delivered in the Fringe context. Belgian company Still Life is not frightened of the edge. In fact, it seems most interested in what happens when we step over it. Across four vignettes, we encounter the breadth of human life - and death - through the body. The body is the language, the landscape and, at times, the horror. Bodies desire, fail, transform, decay and surprise us. What begins in one register can suddenly tip into something absurd, poignant and profoundly disquieting. And then there is the sheer craft of it. The lighting is beautiful. The design is exquisite, the colour palette throughout is to die for. Sound, lighting, costume and physical performance combine to create a world that feels hyperreal and, when necessary, utterly ordinary. Since premiering in Brussels in 2022, Flesh has travelled across Europe and Asia, and it arrives in Edinburgh with the confidence of a work that knows exactly what it is doing. There is a particular pleasure in watching theatre that trusts the audience enough not to explain itself. Flesh gives us four stories rather than one neat narrative. Sometimes the connections are visceral rather than intellectual. Sometimes they are funny. Sometimes they are deeply uncomfortable. And then a VR Titanic experience that is recalled on loop in the memory long after the performance ends. Because why not? That is part of the joy of Flesh: just when you think you understand the rules of its universe, it subversively changes them. It captures those moments in life when something that should be profound is suddenly interrupted by the ridiculous by distraction, by circumstance, by all the annoying stuff of being alive. This is sophisticated physical theatre, and a work with a very particular theatrical intelligence. It understands that the body can tell stories that words cannot, and that comedy can sit extraordinarily close to horror. Absurd, poignant and disquieting is an accurate description. I would add beautiful, fearless and very, very strange. An extraordinary way to start a day at the Edinburgh Fringe Review by Kate Gaul Image by Hubert Amiel

Benelong in London Wharf 1 Bennelong in London (by Jane Harrison, directed by Ian Michael, Sydney Theatre Company) frames history through an intriguing theatrical device. A young First Nations actor preparing to audition for the role of Bennelong is confronted by Bennelong himself, who insists that if his story is to be told, it must be on his own terms. The play moves fluidly between present-day Sydney, the early years of the colony and London in the 1790s, tracing Bennelong's capture, his relationship with Governor Phillip and Barangaroo, and his extraordinary journey to England. In doing so, it shifts Bennelong from the margins of Australian history to its centre, asking who has the authority to tell our national stories, and how history is shaped through performance, memory and power. The production is anchored by two compelling performances. Guy Simon is, as always, a consummate performer. He brings warmth, precision and quiet intelligence to Sebastian, ensuring the contemporary framing device never feels like a simple rehearsal-room conceit. Simon discovers a genuine emotional and cultural connection to Bennelong's story, allowing the past to resonate through the present. Opposite him, Googoorewon Knox is utterly captivating as Bennelong. Playful, generous and quietly commanding, he moves effortlessly between guide, knowledge holder, storyteller and performer. His musicality, humour and ease with the audience make Bennelong feel both historically significant and deeply human. Composer and Sound Designer James Peter Brown's work is exceptional. From the cries of gulls, the wash of waves and the whisper of wind to a haunting original score, the soundscape becomes another storyteller. It underpins the emotional core of the production and carries us beyond language into feeling. Alongside the beautifully judged movement towards the play's conclusion, Brown's score reminds us that some histories are experienced as much through rhythm, memory and emotion as they are through words. Emma White's design was the one element that left me less convinced. Its amalgam of suburban domesticity and the natural environment occasionally feels too literal for a work that is otherwise so imaginative in its theatrical language. Yet perhaps that visual familiarity is intentional, offering audiences something recognisable while they absorb a deeply confronting history that remains unknown to many Australians. Judging by the audible emotion in the theatre, there were certainly tears flowing around me. What impresses is the play's sense of place. Sitting in the Sydney Theatre Company, between Barangaroo and Bennelong Point, we are surrounded by names that have become part of the city's everyday geography. Bennelong in London restores the people behind those place names. In a city where we casually speak the names Barangaroo and Bennelong every day, this production returns those names to the people who first carried them. In doing so, the production doesn't simply recount history, it makes it immediate, personal and impossible to overlook. Review by Kate Gaul Image by Daniel Boud

Casey and Diana Loading Dock History has a way of feeling distant until theatre reminds us that it was lived by ordinary people. Nick Green's Casey and Diana takes us to October 1991, inside Toronto's Casey House hospice, as patients and staff prepare for the visit of Princess Diana, a visit that would become one of the defining public moments of the AIDS crisis. Rather than making Diana the focus, Green centres the people waiting for her. Their conversations are filled with wit, longing, irritation and hope. One patient wonders why his roommate has never seen Steel Magnolias; another obsesses over eggs that somehow smell like cat food. It is funny, disarming writing that constantly reminds us these are not symbols of a tragedy but people living complicated, vibrant lives. Mi Todo Productions' Australian premiere embraces the play's warmth. This is an unapologetically old-fashioned two-act drama that allows relationships to breathe and characters to unfold without rushing towards its emotional destination. The production gently transports us back to the late 1980s and early 1990s, to memories of Diana's extraordinary compassion, the devastation of the AIDS epidemic, the fear, the stigma and, perhaps most importantly, how far we have come. Nancy Denis takes the reigns as director and is efficient and clear in her task. Gabriel Alvarado delivers the standout performance of the evening. His work is beautifully understated, carrying enormous emotional weight beneath an outward calm. There is always another thought passing behind his eyes, another feeling left unspoken. It is a performance rich in nuance, never asking for our sympathy but quietly earning it. Isabel Burton is equally impressive as the hospice nurse. She brings warmth, charisma and meticulous detail to the role, embodying the emotional labour of those who cared for patients when so many others turned away. Burton never allows the character's compassion to become sentimental; instead, she grounds it in the practical, everyday work of caring. Lucy Miller provides the production's emotional centre. Her performance opens up painful questions about family, faith and the ways fear can fracture love, before revealing that human touch is ultimately worth more than ideology, possessions or judgement. It is devastating without ever becoming melodramatic. Chad Traupmann, who also produces the work, confidently carries the central role with a convincing Canadian accent, expertly coached by Linda Nicholls-Gidley, who also appears in the production. Lib Campbell plays Diana. The ensemble as a whole works with generosity, creating a believable community whose humour and affection become as important as their grief. Loading Dock proves an ideal venue for this Australian premiere. Its intimacy makes Casey House feel immediate and lived in (Designer Maitê Inaê), drawing us close enough to witness not only the suffering but the extraordinary acts of everyday care that sustained people through unimaginable circumstances. For many audience members, this will be an emotional evening. Tears were certainly shed around me. The subject matter remains confronting, and for some it may prove difficult viewing, but Green's play never wallows in grief. Instead, it honours the courage of patients, carers and advocates whose compassion challenged prejudice one conversation, one gesture and one human touch at a time. There is also something quietly significant about this Australian premiere finding its home at Loading Dock within QTOPIA Sydney. As Australia's first dedicated centre for queer history and culture, QTOPIA provides more than a venue, it provides context. This is not simply a play about Princess Diana or the AIDS crisis. It is a work that remembers a community, celebrates those who cared when others would not, and invites a new generation to reflect on a history that continues to shape our present. At a time when empathy can feel increasingly fragile, Casey and Diana reminds us that compassion is not abstract. It is built through ordinary acts: sitting beside a bed, holding someone's hand, refusing to look away. That is why this production matters here, now. Review by Kate Gaul Image: Teniola Komolafe

The Day of the Triffids New Theatre There is something wonderfully apt about bringing The Day of the Triffids to the stage in 2026. John Wyndham's 1951 novel has lost none of its potency. Its vision of environmental catastrophe, societal collapse and humanity's uneasy relationship with science feels remarkably contemporary. More than seventy years after publication, its questions about resilience and survival continue to resonate, making James Jay Moody's long-gestating adaptation feel less like a nostalgic revival than a timely reimagining. It is also clearly a labour of love. Having worked on this adaptation over many years, director and designer James Jay Moody approaches Wyndham's world with imagination and theatrical confidence. The production embraces a "two planks and a passion" aesthetic that perfectly suits a post-apocalyptic landscape. Staged in the round at The New Theatre, the audience is drawn into the action from every side, the intimacy of the space creating an immersive experience while still allowing enough scale for the story to breathe. Visually, the production is consistently compelling. Moody's production design finds inventive theatrical solutions rather than relying on spectacle, trusting the audience's imagination to fill the gaps. Holly Nesbitt's lighting design is exceptional, transforming the space with sophisticated precision and atmosphere, while Aubtin Namdar's sound design creates an unsettling sonic landscape. The noir-inspired score and the visceral, organic sounds of the Triffids themselves become almost characters in the production, generating genuine moments of tension and unease. As a piece of theatre, it is an impressive achievement. As an adaptation, however, it proves less certain. At two uninterrupted hours, the production begins to lose momentum. The adaptation is imaginative in the way it translates Wyndham's expansive novel to the stage, but it doesn't always find the dramatic engine needed to sustain its running time. The audience already knows the broad trajectory of civilisation's collapse; the script therefore needs to work harder to surprise us, deepen character, or sharpen the moral dilemmas along the way. Instead, some scenes linger beyond their dramatic usefulness, and the narrative occasionally slips into a sense of inevitability. The result is a production that is visually engrossing but dramatically less urgent than its source material deserves. The cast, largely newcomers to The New Theatre, throw themselves into Moody's ambitious vision with admirable commitment. Performing in English accents with varying degrees of success, however, presents an ongoing challenge. In a production fuelled by urgency and chaos, there is a great deal of shouting - as the circumstances arguably demand - but in the round this often comes at the expense of clarity. Too frequently, dialogue is swallowed by the space, making it difficult to follow the text at precisely the moments when the script most needs to carry the audience forward. Among the ensemble, Max Ryan makes a memorable impression. His crisp, public-school English diction cuts cleanly through the auditorium, and his inventive, energetic performance ensures that even a comparatively small role leaves a lasting impression. Umai Shantharajah, as Josella, is a genuine discovery. She brings intelligence, warmth and emotional presence to the role, creating a character of real substance amid the chaos. It is easy to imagine this being the first of many significant stage appearances. As the young Susan, Claudia Elbourne delivers a beautifully measured performance. Avoiding sentimentality, she brings quiet nuance and emotional truth to the production, grounding the story whenever she is on stage. Leading the production, James Collins possesses an assured, understated authority as Bill Masen. With an effortless leading-man quality - there is more than a hint of classic BBC drama about him - he anchors the sprawling narrative with calm conviction and humanity. Special mention must go to Tony Llewellyn-Jones, whose considerable experience elevates every scene he inhabits. His blind farmer is deeply affecting, full of dignity and pathos, while his various appearances throughout the production are marked by precision, generosity and remarkable character detail. He has that rare ability to create fully realised lives in only a handful of moments, enriching the world of the play every time he steps on stage. Watching The Day of the Triffids also serves as a reminder of what a remarkable asset The New Theatre is. Its scale, generous seating capacity and inner-city location make it one of Sydney's most valuable theatre venues. It is large enough to accommodate ambitious design and staging, yet intimate enough to retain the connection between performers and audience. There are very few theatres of this kind left operating in the city. This production is, proudly, a community theatre production and an excellent one at that. It also prompts reflection on something missing from Sydney's theatre ecology. The New Theatre's decision to discontinue its Indie program several years ago quietly removed one of the few platforms where independent artists could develop work with a degree of autonomy while aspiring to professional standards. That distinction matters. Community theatre occupies a vital place in our cultural landscape, providing opportunities for people to create theatre for the love of it, and our city would be poorer without it. But independent theatre occupies a different space. It is where artists, producers and designers test ideas, take creative risks and, on occasion, receive at least a modest fee for their labour. In truth, very few independent artists in Sydney are remunerated in any way that reflects the value of their work. Yet the aspiration towards a professional practice, however precarious, is an important part of the ecosystem. The Day of the Triffids demonstrates just how much imagination, craft and ambition can be found within Sydney's community theatre sector. It also reminds us what a versatile home The New Theatre can be. One hopes there might again be room under its roof for both outstanding community productions and a revitalised independent program. Sydney's theatre ecology would be richer for it. James Jay Moody's production may not entirely solve the challenge of adapting Wyndham's sprawling novel, but it succeeds in something equally worthwhile. It reminds us that the best theatre is driven by conviction. In an era when the questions at the heart of The Day of the Triffids feel more urgent than ever, that conviction makes this production well worth seeking out. Review by Kate Gaul