Luke review | Red Stitch

How much can you trust a story when the person telling it has something to hide? Angus Cameron’s Luke explores the uneasy relationship between truth, memory and storytelling, blurring the line between what happened and how we choose to remember it. Developed through Red Stitch’s INK program, this dark drama follows Chris, a 19 year-old whose night of drinking and philosophical debate with two older teacher friends in 2007 sets in motion consequences that will reshape their lives for decades to come.

This becomes more compelling once Chris takes on the role of narrator. As the story progresses, we begin to question whether what took place in the first act actually happened as we saw it, or how much has been embellished in Chris’s retelling. The play creates a complex grey area between fact and interpretation, as Chris' account of the past is shaped by his memories and the narrative he wants to tell.

Beneath the Veil review | National Institute of Circus Arts (NICA)

In Beneath the Veil, NICA’s second-year students present a world where productivity is paramount and happiness and self-fulfilment can only come from work. Through a variety of circus and acrobatics, this “perfect existence” gradually begins to fail, as the things keeping everything in order start to break down and revolt inevitably follows.

The show opens by introducing us to the residents of this town. They are all dressed in identical workmen’s overalls and caps designed by Reuben James. The costumes eventually transform into circus-appropriate outfits, where they become distinct from one another but still retain the factory-like uniformity of the original workwear. An industrial score by Christopher Lewis plays, evoking a factory conveyor belt and the monotonous nature of manual labour.

Creepy Boys are promising absolutely nothing with SLUGS at Melbourne Fringe

What happens when you make a show about absolutely nothing? According to Creepy Boys, you make SLUGS, an electro-punk concert, play, clown performance and basement puppet nightmare that promises a technocolour acid trip featuring puppet Joni Mitchell, a two-person horse and, apparently, every body part they have. Created by real-life lovers S.E. Grummett and Sam Kruger, SLUGS has spent the past year travelling around the world, earning a nomination for Best Comedy Show at the 2025 Edinburgh Fringe along the way.

The tagline is as straightforward as it gets: "It’s about nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. We promise." And they mean it. "It means it’s about nothing! We felt one nothing didn’t drive the point home, but eight…now we’re cooking. We wouldn't read into it beyond that. No need. No pesky themes to go hunting for, just relax. SLUGS is a space where, finally, you can not think about all the SOMETHINGS of the world.  An hour where you get to leave it at the door. What could go wrong?"

R.A.I.N review | Harrison Ritchie-Jones | Arts House

Two voices begin whispering in the darkness of an empty stage. Barely audible, they talk about taking things at their own pace before one offers a final, slightly ominous farewell: "See you in the storm." It is an understated beginning to R.A.I.N, Harrison Ritchie-Jones’ latest contemporary dance work, but the notion of taking things at their own pace becomes more evident as the performance unfolds.

Ritchie-Jones and Michaela Tancheff have spent years developing their partnering practice, and R.A.I.N pushes them towards its breaking point. The title is an acronym for a mindfulness technique that involves recognising what you are experiencing, accepting it as it is, exploring it, and responding to yourself with self-compassion, but this is less concerned with explaining those ideas than seeing what happens when the dancers permit themselves to let go.

When magic turns to horror: Tim Ellis is bringing Darkness Is Coming to Melbourne Fringe

Darkness Is Coming is a magic show with its roots in horror. Drawing on the French Grand Guignol style of graphic, theatrical horror, award-winning magician Tim Ellis explores the mind of a psychopath looking back over his life and questioning his own reality. But there is no dialogue in this show. Instead, projections, music, sound, lighting and magic establish the world of the story, bringing fragments of the character’s imagination to life, with the audience piecing together what is happening from what they see and hear. For its Melbourne Fringe Festival season, the production comes to an intimate 32-seat theatre, where the boundaries between magic, theatre and horror begin to blur.