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WAKE Carriageworks “WAKE” arrived at the Sydney Festival with a thumping soundtrack, international credentials, and an appealing premise: a contemporary reimagining of the Irish wake as a communal ritual of remembrance, release and celebration. Created by Dublin-based collective THISISPOPBABY and staged at Carriageworks, the work promises to collapse the distance between audience and performer, grief and joy, tradition and pop spectacle. The intention is admirable and culturally grounded. Irish wakes are historically social, noisy, irreverent affairs - spaces where storytelling, music and laughter sit comfortably alongside loss. “WAKE” seeks to honour that tradition by assembling a multi-skilled cast of dancers, musicians, aerialists and spoken-word performers in what is framed as a shared gathering rather than a conventional theatrical work. What the audience receives, however, is less a ritual than a revue. “WAKE” positions itself as a high-energy event. After some Irish jigs play as we find our seats, the live music pumps, performers circulate confidently, and the tone is unmistakably upbeat. Individually, the performers are highly skilled. Tap dancers deliver speed and stamina, aerial acts demonstrate impressive physical control, and vocal performances are strong and assured. The band is tight driving the show forward with a concert-like momentum that never really lets up. But momentum is not structure, and enthusiasm is not dramaturgy. As a piece of theatre, “WAKE” lacks focus and cohesion. The 90 minutes unfolds as a loose succession of acts rather than a shaped experience, more akin to a cruise-ship cabaret or a Schools Spectacular / rock eisteddfod than a work with a clear theatrical arc. One number follows another with little sense of escalation, contrast or emotional logic. The wake, as a conceptual frame, is invoked but never meaningfully deepened. The show’s MC and spoken-word segments gesture toward reflection, connection and collective meaning, but these moments feel underpowered against the production’s default setting of maximal energy. Any possibility of stillness, ambiguity or emotional complexity is quickly smothered by the next musical cue. The result is a flattening effect: everything is presented at full volume, leaving no room for resonance. Visually, “WAKE” leans heavily into spectacle. Costuming favours glitter, exposure and boldness, but rarely with discernible purpose beyond provocation. Men in sparkly G-strings do not make a tap-dance routine more compelling; nor does aesthetic excess compensate for a lack of choreographic or thematic clarity. At times, the visual language feels interchangeable with commercial entertainment contexts, undermining the work’s claim to ritual or depth. There is no doubt that “WAKE” is well intentioned. Its inclusive spirit, its celebration of queer joy, physicality and collective experience, and its desire to reclaim mourning as something communal rather than private are all laudable. The performers’ commitment is palpable, and the audience is frequently encouraged - implicitly and explicitly - to join in the celebration. Yet good intentions do not absolve a work from the need for form. Without a stronger curatorial hand, “WAKE” becomes a showcase rather than a statement. It gestures toward meaning without ever quite landing it, substituting volume, sparkle and scale for focus and development. In a festival that regularly presents complex, rigorous international work, “WAKE” ultimately feels undercooked as theatre. Celebration, like grief, gains power through shape, contrast and restraint. Here, the party never quite knows why it’s happening - or when to stop.

Opera for the Dead 祭歌 The Neilson Nutshell Opera for the Dead 祭歌 , (Sydney Festival) created by Mindy Meng Wang and Monica Lim, announces itself not as an opera in the conventional sense, but as an immersive rite - part installation, part concert, part collective act of remembrance. Inspired by Chinese mourning rituals yet deliberately porous in its meanings, the work unfolds as an abstract meditation on grief, ancestry and impermanence, inviting audiences not to follow a story but to enter a state. From the outset, the experience resists fixed vantage points. As we enter plastic mandarins bounce on upside down sound speaker’s innards – the piles of fruit are gradually added to by subtle assistants who later add bells to the mix. Audiences are free to wander through a space in continual metamorphosis: a stage dissolves into a cinema, which in turn becomes a series of shadowed ritual chambers. Ambisonic sound, 3D animation and shifting architectural forms conspire to destabilise orientation, producing a gentle but persistent sense of flux. This is a work less concerned with spectacle for its own sake than with atmosphere -an enveloping field of sound, light and motion that asks for surrender rather than scrutiny. At the heart of the piece is the music, where Wang’s guzheng and Lim’s electronic soundscapes interlace ancient musical forms with contemporary textures. The score breathes with a living tension between the archaic and the emergent, its timbres oscillating between intimacy and vastness. Ritual chants and melodic fragments surface, dissolve and reconstitute themselves within electronic landscapes, creating a sonic environment that feels devotional and is insistently modern. Chief vocalist Yu-Tien Lin delivers a performance of extraordinary presence. Lin navigates the score’s demands with commanding assurance, moving seamlessly between registers, styles and embodied traditions. Their technical virtuosity is undeniable, but it is the performative intelligence that truly astonishes: each vocal shift feels dramaturgically precise, emotionally charged and spiritually grounded. If one can embrace this environment it is this sound that opens a fissure between worlds. Design elements play a crucial supporting role in shaping the work’s affective power. Leonas Panjaitan’s costumes ingeniously repurpose Chinese operatic and mourning garments, lending the performers a ceremonial gravitas. Video design by Nick Roux and lighting by Jenny Hector is all deliciously over the top, absolutley compelling, and contributes to the sense of ritualised excess. What makes Opera for the Dead 祭歌 particularly powerful is its refusal to resolve meaning. This work neither explains nor reconciles tensions between cultures, fractured understandings and lived experience. Instead, it holds life and death in suspension, allowing grief to remain at once private and communal - spiritual, material, eternal and fleeting. This is unmistakably a “festival work”: ambitious, immersive and unapologetically experiential. Yet beneath its technological sophistication lies something profoundly human- a recognition that mourning is not linear, that remembrance is performative, and that ritual can be reinvented without losing its power. Opera for the Dead 祭歌 is not an opera to be watched from a seat, but a space to be entered, traversed and carried with you long after you leave. Review by Kate Gaul

Big Mouth Strikes Again (The Smiths Show) Wharf 1   “ Big Mouth”  is not so much a Sydney theatre show as it is a temporary relocation. For ninety breathless minutes, Salty Brine whisks the audience somewhere electric and a little dangerous - somewhere that feels unmistakably like New York, even as it pulses through a Sydney Theatre Company’s Wharf 1. It’s the kind of performance that reminds you theatre can still feel like a secret you’ve stumbled into - thrilling, intimate, and slightly unhinged in the best possible way. At the heart of the show is Salty Brine, a true original whose presence alone could power the night. From the moment they step onstage dripping in Arctic fur, there is an astonishing sense of momentum. This is not a performer who warms up; they ignite. The energy never dips, never falters, and never feels forced. It is propulsion as performance - joy, fury, camp and vulnerability all moving at once. What makes “Big Mouth”  genuinely gripping is its audacious structure. Brine interweaves personal narrative with Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein”  and the music of The Smiths 1981 album “The Queen is Dead”,  creating a hybrid that could easily collapse under its own cleverness. Instead, it coheres into something strangely inevitable. Mary Shelley’s tale of creation, monstrosity and longing becomes a prism through which Brine refracts their own story, while the songs - so often soaked in melancholic irony - are repurposed as narrative tools rather than nostalgic hits. Crucially, this is not cover-song cabaret. Brine is not interested in reverence. The lyrics are used, reshaped, occasionally tweaked, and recontextualised, with new arrangements that feel emotionally precise rather than showy. Each song advances the story, deepens the stakes, or cracks the audience open a little further. Even familiar lines land with fresh force, as if you’re hearing them not for the first time, but for the first time truthfully. Vocally, Brine is astonishing. They move from spoken word to singing with zero hesitation, as though thought itself simply tips into melody. The voice is elastic and commanding – everything from intimate and confessional to gloriously theatrical. If you had to pin it down (and part of the pleasure is that you can’t), it sits somewhere between Sam Smith’s emotional clarity and Ethel Merman’s unapologetic belt. It’s a voice that refuses to choose between pop vulnerability and old-school bravura and is all the stronger for it. The costume is delightfully mad - bold, excessive, and entirely in dialogue with the show’s themes of self-invention and visibility. Once the fur trimmed cloak is shed, we see a pink and silver lamé pussy bow frock. And later a little black sequined number.  The costumes announce Brine as a creature of their own making, stitched together from influences, obsessions and sheer audacity. Supporting them is a brilliant 4-piece band, tightly responsive and clearly having a ball. What ultimately makes “Big Mouth”  so commanding is Brine’s total ownership of the space. This is a performer who understands how to tell a story with every tool available - body, voice, text, music, silence. Humour, camp excess, and genuine risk. Brine is not hiding behind irony; they are offering something raw, intelligent and deeply felt. For Sydney audiences, “Big Mouth”  is a gift: a reminder that theatre can surprise, seduce and transport us completely. For ninety minutes, you’re not just watching a show - you’re somewhere else entirely, held in the mouth of a singular, fearless artist. by Kate Gaul Image: Harry Elletson

Rothar Sydney Opera House   Child’s play in the very best sense, “Rothar” is an imaginative bicycle adventure from Ireland that proves wonder can be built from simplicity, ingenuity, and trust in young audiences. “Rothar”, by the way, is an Irish (Gaeilge) word that means “bicycle.”   So,in the little bike shop at the end of town, a world of adventure awaits - and from the moment the lights come up, the audience of youngsters is completely engaged. There is instant laughter, the kind that bubbles up when children sense they are in safe hands. “ Rothar”, presented by Branar, is pitched perfectly for its audience: playful without being frantic, imaginative without being overwhelming, and confident enough to let moments unfold at a child’s pace. Miquel and Moisés arrive for work at a modest bicycle repair shop. There is no exposition, or explanation of who they are or where we are. Instead, the story emerges through action. As the two set about their day, the space gently transforms into a workshop of the imagination. Using objects found in the bike shop, the performers begin to create worlds far beyond its walls, inviting the audience to travel with them purely through play. Largely non-verbal, “Rothar”  relies on physical storytelling, visual invention, and an acute understanding of how children read movement and rhythm. The comedy is gentle and generous: a wobble, a misjudged balance, a moment of shared concentration that tips into delight. Giggles, gasps, delighted recognition – and even advice - ripple through the theatre as each new idea reveals itself. The imaginative journeys are conjured with remarkable economy. A sea shore (of paper) appears, its breeze and waves suggested through movement, sound, and light. Soon after, we slip underwater, where the performers’ evocative physicality evokes drama without ever spelling it out. Later, the space becomes a circus tent, wheels spinning into daring feats and familiar mechanics turning into acts of risk and bravado. Each transition feels surprising yet entirely logical within the world of the play. One particularly inspired stroke is the inventive use of a leaf blower and it really pays off. Employed with precision and restraint, it becomes a tool of transformation rather than chaos, creating moments of heightened spectacle that draw audible delight from the audience without tipping into sensory overload. It is emblematic of the production’s overall approach: playful, inventive, and always controlled. Branar’s design is deceptively simple, allowing imagination to do the heavy lifting. The music and lighting are beautifully calibrated for young audiences — evocative and atmospheric but never frightening. There are no sudden shocks or looming darknesses here; instead, the soundscape and lighting shifts guide the emotional journey with reassurance and clarity. This careful attention to tone makes “Rothar” especially welcoming as a first theatre experience, while still holding enough sophistication to engage adults in the room. The relationship between the two performers anchors the fantasy. Their dynamic - cooperative, competitive, affectionate - is instantly legible and deeply human. Without words, we understand their disagreements, their shared triumphs, and the joy they take in making things together. It is this emotional clarity that allows the show to travel so fluidly between imagined worlds without losing its audience. Produced in association with Drama at University of Galway and Baboró International Arts Festival for Children as part of the Creative Europe Mapping Project , "Rothar"  arrives in Sydney with strong international credentials. Supported by Sydney Festival and Culture Ireland, it is polished and wonderfully intimate. “Rothar”  is a celebration of imagination, collaboration, and the sheer pleasure of play. Come on a bicycle ride through the imagination - and rediscover how thrilling it can be to see the world anew. Review by Kate Gaul Image: Supplied

Duck Pond Sydney Opera House   Circa ’s  “ Duck Pond” , currently playing at the Sydney Opera House, is a playful and occasionally uneven reimagining of familiar stories, brought to life by a young ensemble of fearless acrobats. Drawing together “Swan Lake” and “The Ugly Duckling”, the work proposes a new fable about transformation, identity and self-acceptance - one that wears its intelligence lightly and trusts the audience to connect the dots. Circa has long excelled at stripping circus back to its essentials, and “ Duck Pond”  continues that tradition with a minimalist black-and-white aesthetic that feels both classical and contemporary. The set is spare and graphic, functioning less as a literal environment than as a flexible frame for bodies in motion. This restraint allows the performers to take centre stage - literally and figuratively - while also leaving room for humour and surprise. Against this monochrome world, the sudden appearance of bright yellow and orange ducks, mopping the stage with exaggerated seriousness, is instantly charming. The joke deepens when those same mops are repurposed as apparatus, becoming tools for balance, flight and risk. The conceptual blend is clever rather than heavy-handed. Swan-like poses and ballet-inflected arm lines ripple through the choreography, but they are filtered through Circa’s distinctly muscular circus language. The performers skim, perch, topple and fly, echoing the grace of classical ballet while never pretending to be dancers in the traditional sense. Fairy-tale references are similarly light: recognisable enough to anchor the work, but never so literal that they pin it down. This looseness is a strength, giving the spills and thrills emotional context without forcing a rigid narrative arc. That sense of atmosphere is heightened by Jethro Woodward’s emotive soundscape, which weaves fragments of Tchaikovsky into a contemporary score. The music swells and recedes like memory, allowing familiar melodies to surface just long enough to trigger recognition before dissolving into something new. Alexander Berlage’s lighting design complements this beautifully, sculpting the space with clarity and restraint and lend the entire production a classy, considered polish. Not every experiment lands equally well. At times, the incorporation of ballet-like movement within an acrobatic framework feels slightly awkward, and some sequences don’t show the performers at their absolute best. There are moments where the flow wobbles, or where the hybrid vocabulary seems to limit rather than liberate the artists’ physical skills. But these slips are brief and never derail the overall experience. If “ Duck Pond”  occasionally falters in its middle stretches, it more than redeems itself in its final act. The concluding sequence - an anarchic dismantling of the set that exposes the bare stage and the performers’ “true” carnie selves - is both cathartic and deeply satisfying. Any illusion is joyfully torn apart, leaving sweat, breath and humanity in its wake. It’s a powerful reminder that beneath the feathers, fairy tales and formal beauty lies the raw, communal thrill that circus does better than almost any other artform. Ultimately, “ Duck Pond” may not be Circa’s most flawless work, but it is a generous and imaginative one. Its ambition, wit and visual finesse are undeniable, and its themes of becoming, belonging and self-acceptance resonate clearly. The youngsters in the audience loved it.  Even when it stumbles, the company’s skill and creativity shine through - proof that transformation, like circus itself, is rarely neat, but often thrilling to watch. By Kate Gaul Image: Daniel Boud

Post-Orientalist Express Ros Packer Theatre Watching “Post-Orientalist Express” , I kept returning to the question of why this work was chosen to open the festival. It is a bold decision. Not because the piece lacks spectacle or ambition, but because it resists the kind of narrative clarity or gentle invitation often associated with an opening-night statement. Rather than easing audiences into the festival’s terrain, it announces itself through excess, density and refusal, asking spectators to submit to its terms from the outset. Known internationally as the enfant terrible of Seoul, celebrated South Korean choreographer Eun-Me Ahn brings her kaleidoscopic, world-renowned vision to Sydney in a rare opportunity to encounter one of Asia’s most influential avant-garde artists on an Australian stage. Performed by eight dynamic dancers and featuring more than 90 dazzling costumes - all designed by Ahn herself – “Post-Orientalist Express” transforms traditions from Okinawa, Bali and Manila into a vivid, audacious and satirical exploration of Asian cultures. An riot of colour, cliché and camp, the work confronts Western audiences with their own generalisations about the East, not to moralise but to reclaim agency through pleasure, exaggeration and self-awareness. Before the performance begins, video samples of Orientalist imagery flicker inside a circle projected onto a scrim: historical dance footage, scenes from films, and a catalogue of familiar “exotic” tropes. These references frame the work’s central provocation, laying bare the inherited visual language through which Asia has so often been flattened and consumed. Rather than reproducing these forms, the work absorbs their kinetic memories, crafting a dance language where the traditional and contemporary collide. The work aligns with a global choreographic shift toward plural, non-hierarchical forms, where tradition, pop culture and contemporary technique sit in deliberate friction without deference to Western frameworks of legibility. The work knowingly activates Western assumptions of “Asian” performance as traditional, coherent and culturally explanatory, before steadily destabilising them through excess, hybridity and refusal of translation. In doing so, “ Post-Orientalist Express”  reframes tradition not as something to be preserved or decoded, but as a living, mobile and self-determined field of pleasure and agency. As an immersive feast for the eyes and ears, the piece privileges sensation and assertion over legibility, trusting excess as both strategy and critique. The production’s carnivalesque exuberance - its camp sensibility, collective release and visual saturation - evokes the atmosphere of Mardi Gras, where celebration becomes both a strength and a complicating force. From an Australian perspective - informed by geographic proximity and ongoing cultural exchange with Asia - the work invites consideration of how easily celebration can slide into fetishisation when excess and spectacle are foregrounded. “ Post-Orientalist Express”  is alert to this tension, using self-awareness and exaggeration to keep the question open rather than offering a resolved answer. Seen within the wider context of Sydney Festival, the decision to open with “Post-Orientalist Express” stands as a deliberate articulation of curatorial values rather than a bid for consensus. This is an opening night that functions less as a welcoming overture than as a declaration of intent: foregrounding global perspective, cultural multiplicity and formal ambition, and signalling a festival more interested in friction than reassurance. In this light, the choice reframes what an opening gesture can be - not an invitation to settle in comfortably, but an insistence that audiences remain alert, porous and open to work that resists easy orientation. Kate Gaul Image: Wendell Teodoro

My Cousin Frank The Studio, Sydney Opera House Rhoda Roberts AO steps onto the Sydney Opera House stage alone for My Cousin Frank , but the space never feels empty. Over 75 compelling minutes, she summons an entire world—family, Country, history, and the piercingly relevant legacy of policy and erasure—through the remarkable story of her trailblazing first cousin, Frank Roberts. It is solo storytelling at its most potent: intimate, unadorned, and devastating in its clarity. Frank Roberts, a Widjabul Wia-bal and Githabul man from Cubawee, was Australia’s first Aboriginal Olympian. In 1964 he travelled to Tokyo as a boxer, dining with Emperor Hirohito, competing on the world stage with extraordinary courage and discipline. And yet, in a stark expression of the racism embedded in Australian law, he was denied an Australian passport because he was not legally recognised as a citizen of the country he represented. Roberts’ telling of this injustice lands like a body blow—quiet but catastrophic. Directed with elegance and restraint by Kirk Page, the production leans into simplicity: a chair, a boxing bag, and projections that drift between archival resonance and poetic suggestion. AV designers Jahvis Loveday and Mic Gruchy create a visual language that never overwhelms the storyteller, instead extending her voice into a textured, living memory-scape. Under Associate Director Julien Louis’ guidance, the staging is confident in its minimalism, understanding that Roberts herself is the engine—and the heart—of the work. And what a heart. Rhoda’s presence is generous, commanding, and deeply connected to story in the old way: not performance as display, but storytelling as custodianship. She traces her family’s journey from the era of dispersal and silence to the ongoing navigation of a world shaped, constrained, and sometimes catastrophically distorted by government policy. Yet she does so with extraordinary grace. There is fury here, but it is never untethered; sorrow but never defeat; humour, but never at the expense of truth. Frank—known as “Honest Frank”—emerges as a figure of immense integrity. He fought in every sense the word implies: in the ring, in his advocacy, for his culture, for his family. Roberts honours him not as a mythic symbol but as a man whose life was shaped by contradictions—glory and discrimination, pride and systemic diminishment, triumph and trauma. In her hands, he becomes not only her cousin, but a mirror to the nation. What is extraordinary about My Cousin Frank  is the balance it achieves: searing in its critique, uplifting in its celebration, and profoundly human in every moment. Produced originally in regional Australia, the work arrives at the Opera House with a polish and grace that never compromise its grassroots strength. It feels held by community even as it speaks to the nation. The result is an evening of storytelling that lingers long after the final image fades: a vital, beautifully crafted contribution to the narrative of Australia’s First Nations athletes—and a necessary reckoning with the costs of a country still learning how to honour its champions. Rhoda Roberts stands alone onstage, but she carries a whole mob with her. And we are privileged to witness it. Review by Kate Gaul Image: Kate Holmes

Monstrous begins by pretending to be a gentle office comedy, the kind where two co-workers orbit each other in a fluorescent haze. But very quietly, almost slyly, the play starts to twist. What looks like banter begins to curdle. What looks like flirtation starts to feel like a warning. By the time the supernatural pushes through, the shift is so well-managed you hardly notice the floor dropping out from under you. At the centre of the story are Chris (Zev Aviv) and John (Byron Davis), colleagues whose connection sparks in ways neither of them seems fully prepared for. Their attraction is strange, charged, and difficult to name. When they finally act on it, one of them walks away unfazed, while the other is yanked sideways into a new and frightening version of himself. The play never spells out what has happened, or why—it prefers suggestion to certainty—and that refusal to explain becomes part of its power. Meaning sits between the lines, waiting for the audience to lean in and piece it together. A notable thread running through Monstrous is its interest in the instability of the body. Identity, sensation, transformation: the production treats these not as abstractions but as lived, unpredictable realities. Without announcing itself, the work channels a distinctly trans perspective. This isn’t done through speeches or declarations; it emerges through how the story handles flesh and change, through the way bodies seem to shift shape under pressure or desire. Chris, played with watchful opacity, becomes the locus for much of this thematic charge. Their stillness, their ambiguity, their refusal to explain themselves: it all reframes the story’s relationship to embodiment. John’s performance, restless and kinetic, is in contrast —he’s the one who unravels, who cannot return to the version of himself he thought was fixed. Lu Bradshaw’s direction embraces the play’s genre-blending instincts. They allow scenes to grow awkward, then eerie, then outright uncanny, without sacrificing emotional clarity. The humour is sharp and sometimes painful, the kind that makes you laugh while wishing you hadn’t. Horror elements slide in gradually, as if summoned from the corner of your eye. The creative team does exceptional work shaping the show’s atmosphere. The lighting design, by Theodore Carroll and Anwyn Brook-Evans, behaves like an intelligence within the room—shifting tone, colour, and shadow to hint at movements beneath the skin of the story. It becomes a barometer for unease. Corey Lange’s set grounds the action in everyday familiarity, which only makes the later disturbances feel more intrusive. Ellie Wilson’s sound design moves in cryptic pulses: low, textural, bodily. You don’t just hear it; you feel it tug your breath into sync with the characters’ panic. What stays with you after Monstrous isn’t simply its blood or its boldness. It’s the way tenderness keeps leaking through the cracks. Underneath the grime and the grotesquerie sits an oddly delicate meditation on longing, vulnerability, and the painful elasticity of the self. The play may traffic in horror, but its beating heart is surprisingly gentle. Review by Kate Gaul Image: Valerie Joy

First performed at KXT in 2016, Paul Gilchrist’s Atlantis  resurfaces with its philosophical pulse intact, reminding us that theatre can be both a thinking space and a playground. Billed as a micro-nuance production, Atlantis  is performed modestly in KXT’s white-walled Vault – and for the around 50 seats it is the perfect venue for smaller, experimental works. A windchime, a bench, three actors and a captivating script make for an impressive hour. Atlantis begins as a comedy about the tales we spin to survive. Beneath the surface, it’s a quietly searching work about meaning, myth, and the stories that sculpt our inner terrain. Atlantis gently turns our attention to the softer, stranger ways humans make sense of the world. The premise is disarmingly simple. Three characters wrestle with the slipperiness of truth, the elasticity of perception, and the desire to believe in something that will hold steady when everything else won’t. What Gilchrist captures beautifully is the human impulse to narrate ourselves into coherence. Whether we call it myth, science, faith, or just a good yarn, each of us is building an Atlantis — a personal island of meaning perched on shifting sand. What keeps the play buoyant is the blend of humour and sincerity. Gilchrist is not interested in cynicism. Instead, he approaches these big ideas like a curious friend leaning across a café table, saying, “But what if the way we tell the story changes the whole map?” The script’s early sections brim with wit, before heading into more existential terrain. A touch more space for the comedy to land would sharpen the contrast between the light and the weighty, giving the play an even richer texture. The performances from Veronica Clavijo, Jimmy Hazelwood, and Sylvia Marie  ground the show with a sense of shared humanity. Each actor holds a slightly different compass, yet all three point toward the same horizon: the idea that our interpretations shape our lives more than any fixed truth ever could. Their dynamic makes the abstract feel tactile, almost domestic. Gilchrist’s larger point — that privilege can allow for reinvention, imagination, and risk — is woven in without heavy moralising. In a place like Australia, the play suggests, we have room to tell braver stories and live more expansive lives if we dare to. Not every society affords such freedom, and Atlantis  nudges us to use ours well. It reminds us that progress, whether personal or societal, often comes from the rule-breakers, the imaginative outliers, the storytellers who redraw the borders. By the end, Atlantis doesn’t give us answers so much as a gentle provocation: maybe the truth isn’t a fixed point at all, but a lens we’re free to adjust. The play lingers with a soft afterglow, urging us to choose our stories with care and courage. In its modest, thoughtful way, Atlantis  becomes a reminder that how we read the world might just determine how we live in it.   Review by Kate Gaul Image: Syl Marie Photography

The Edit 25A Belvoir Watching The Edit  brought to mind Lauren Berlant’s notion of “cruel optimism” — the idea that something you desire can become the very thing that prevents your flourishing. It’s an apt lens for Gabrielle Scawthorn’s sharp and unsettling play about reality television and the illusions it sells. Set in the UK, The Edit  follows Nia, a contestant on the dating show Match or Snatch , and Jess, a savvy content creator determined to capitalise on the chaos. The two women begin as allies, chasing fame and validation, but when a traumatic incident shatters their bond, questions of control, consent, and complicity come crashing to the surface. Scawthorn — who previously investigated the mental toll of reality TV in her acclaimed podcast Back from Reality  — writes and directs with precision and bite. The script exposes the industry’s dark mechanics: the manufactured intimacy, the commodified trauma, the seductive cruelty that keeps audiences glued to the screen. Iolanthe (last seen in Griffin’s Sistren ) delivers a breakout performance as Nia, charting the character’s transformation from ambition to disillusionment with emotional clarity. Matilda Ridgway ( Furious Mattress ) brings a magnetic confidence to Jess, whose entrepreneurial bravado masks deep vulnerability. Producer Matthew Lee assembles a strong creative team, with standout work from Ruby Jenkins (set design) and Madeleine Picard (sound design). At times, the production elements feel overextended — particularly the interludes of elaborate lighting and visual effects that momentarily slow the show’s snap and tension. A few judicious cuts could tighten its impact. Still, The Edit  remains a fierce and absorbing 90 minutes: a mirror held up to a culture where exposure masquerades as empowerment. As part of Belvoir’s 25A program, The Edit  stands out for its polish, intelligence, and provocation. Scawthorn’s work dissects the ethics of entertainment with empathy and rigour — reminding us that while viewers can choose what to watch, the participants inside the frame often have far less control over how their stories are told. Go see it. Review by Kate Gaul Image by Robert Cato

Everything I Know About This Water Bottle Old Fitz Children born in Australia today inherit a world of extraordinary access—electricity, healthcare, and the internet. Yet they also inherit species extinction at ten times the safe level, and chemical pollution forty-eight times beyond planetary limits. In wealthy nations, we know our prosperity has come at a price: climate instability, collapsed biodiversity, and polluted oceans. Poorer countries may not damage the planet as much, but nor do they prosper. Everything I Know About This Water Bottle is a solo work written by Michael Andrew Collins and produced by essential workers . Collins may be new to some audiences, but his reputation is already solid. His play Furthest West  was nominated for the 2015 Patrick White and Silvergull awards, Body Farm  for the 2016 Griffin Award, and he won the inaugural Foundation Commission (2017) from Australian Theatre for Young People, where his commissioned play Impending Everyone  premiered at the Stables Theatre in 2018. Essential workers have a sharp eye for the fresh and intriguing, and this production is no exception. Directed by Violette Ayad , it has a deliciously light touch. Morgan Moroney’s  design has a lo-fi analogue charm—cassette players, eclectic lights, chalkboard, and VHS. Set in 2052, the work follows Aris  (Ariadne Sgouros), an acclaimed “dead cinema” creator, delivering a lecture-style story about how we—and the water bottle—arrived here. The piece travels imaginatively from the Mesozoic era to Ms Hinkley’s year five class, through first loves, heartbreaks, horse-toy factories, recycling plants, and climate disasters, before arriving at the Old Fitz, years later. Moroney’s lighting is, as ever, first-rate—proof that poetry and beauty don’t require high-tech spectacle. A thoughtful dramaturgical thread runs through the recurring use of the GPO, prompting reflection on the human legacy of life on Earth. Zoe Hollyoak  (Producer) and Madeleine Pickard  (Sound Designer) complete a strong creative team. Ariadne Sgouros  brings dry wit and an alluring matter-of-fact delivery to the role, anchoring the piece with intelligence and restraint. The writing is teasingly clever as it slowly reveals where—and when—we are. At sixty minutes, it feels just a touch too long for a work that doesn’t fully probe the harsher realities of our plastic existence, but there is much to admire in its artistry, invention, and craft. Review by Kate Gaul Review by Kate Gaul Image: Phil Erbacher

And then the Rodeo Burnt Down What if They Ate the Baby? A Letter to Lyndon B Johnson or God: Whoever Reads This First theSpaceUK@Niddry St Consecutive Fringe First winners  Natasha Roland and Xhloe Rice return to the Edinburgh Fringe in 2025 playing all three of their award-winning works across the festival. For fans like me this is a great opportunity to see the work in sequence and enjoy a second viewing of this striking work. Natasha Roland and Xhloe Rice are a New York City based, writer/performer company of two who have collaborated for over a decade, creating clown-esque absurdist physical theatre. “And then the Rodeo Burnt Down” is the first of the three pieces This is a queer comedy clown story about a clown, Dale, who wants to become a cowboy; Dale’s “shadow,” Dilly-Dally, who just wants to be a rodeo clown, the star cowboy who puts Dale in his place. And a bull named Arnold who puts everything in perspective. Why would the rodeo burn down anyhow?  The show is tightly choreographed and scripted even when it appears a bit rough around the edges.  It has such a light touch that it feels like virtuosic improvisation and that’s the point.  It eventually becomes absurdly meta, and the audience is on the edge of seats. Like the characters, the performers now jostle for independence inside the structure they have created for themselves. Is this a piece about writing you own queer story, claiming your identity and independence, being true to yourself?  This is a big-hearted love story and permission to burn it all down! “What if They Ate the Baby? is a queer theatrical dystopia, probing a relationship of two American housewives (Dottie and Shirley), trapped in a shared liminal space of a suburban household and their own love affair. Post second world war feminism, the stay-at-home mum and the American Dream are all under examination here. It’s not particularly ground-breaking stuff – that is, until you experience the Roland and Rice spin on these themes. After the masculine world of rough and tumble clown cowboys in “And Then the Rodeo Burned Down” it is a delight to see the pair explore femininity.  But then the hyper masculine cowboy and housewife are both “performing”, right? Percolating themes of surveillance, paranoia, capitalism all orbit a queer centre. The work is political with a light touch. Drawing on their own experiences of being in military families comes an inspired work about an idealised American childhood, and the boys it left behind:  “A Letter to Lyndon B Johnson or God: Whoever Reads This First.” In what is surely a masterclass for the ideal fringe drama this goes straight into my top ten again this year. A bare stage save for a large truck tyre, a soundscape of birds and insects at night, a monumentally beautiful script and adorable characters instantly transport us to a world with the feel of Huckleberry Finn, but Lyndon B Johnson is president of the USA, and the Beatles are hot. It is an eccentric title and gives a profound resonance to the work as we watch Ace (Natasha Roland) and Grasshopper (Xhloe Rice) play a pair of muddy kneed 7-year-old boy scouts in gloriously decorated costumes.  They recount boyish escapades, they speak in codes, they dare each other to be great, they play soldiers, they swing rope.  Sneaking out of the house one night to the station of their small town, they eagerly await the passing of a train in which rides LBJ. In the shadow of the Vietnam war, people of the USA clung to LBJ as a figure of stability and sureness an do these two boys.  Both have absent father figures and higher powers become stand-ins for authority – God is in there too, but she/he gets less of a footprint in this play except when God is mixed up with LBJ!  Ace and Grasshopper are learning to be men. To make a promise, a man must both spit and shake on it, there is nothing greater a man can be than a soldier, and never (ever) hold hands with another man (unless it’s an extreme circumstance). What is the moment that a boy becomes a man? If the American idea of masculinity - one that equates violence with strength - makes casualties out of men, then in war for what are young men dying? The Beatles tunes accompanied deftly on harmonica by the performers: “Ob-La-Di. Ob-La-Da” expresses their vitality and fizz, “I want to Hold your Hand” perhaps expressing deeper (private) feelings.  The harmonica is also an eerie instrument, and the performers use it to great effect later in the piece. Performed in the round the effortless choreography, overall staging and physicality is elegant and assured. The playwrighting is rigorous and wastes not a moment or a word in conveying story, character and theme. There is a progression towards something sharper and more political in the later work. Three years in, the costumes have lost their sparkle, the whitened and rouged faces are not perhaps as radical as they were. There is no denying the talent and vision of this duo.  Now, we eagerly await a new production. Review by Kate Gaul