The Nightline review | Malthouse Theatre

It's 2am and you're wide awake, the world is sleeping but you are staring at the ceiling, trapped inside your own head. Do you read a book? Watch TV? Lie there? Thanks to Roslyn Oades and Bob Scott, there was another option: call The Nightline and leave a recorded message about why you're still up. How are you feeling? What’s running through your mind? After receiving hundreds of anonymous messages, the immersive show The Nightline was born, where audience members can listen to these recordings and get caught up in the lives of strangers. The show had the initial bad luck of opening during COVID-19 and ran for one night before being shut down. Five years later, it returns to Melbourne for a full season at the Malthouse Theatre.

The Jungle and the Sea review | Melbourne Theatre Company

The Jungle and the Sea is an incredibly moving story of family, love and survival set during the Sri Lankan Civil War. Co-writers and directors S. Shakthidharan and Eamon Flack follow a Tamil family at three pivotal periods, 1995, 2009 and the present, as war, separation and loss repeatedly test their ability to stay together. It is an ambitious production that takes us from Sri Lanka to Australia and through some of the most devastating moments in this household’s lives, without losing sight of the relationships being presented. What makes it so powerful is the way it draws us into their world, making the human cost of the conflict impossible to ignore.

The show opens in 1995, when Sri Lanka is in the middle of a civil war that would last another 14 years. The conflict had already been raging for 12 years and would continue for 26 years, ending on May 18, 2009, with a military victory by the government over the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), commonly known as the Tamil Tigers. A victory that cost the lives of an estimated 80,000 to 100,000 people. Shakthidharan and Flack then return to these characters in 2009 as the fighting comes to an end, before bringing us into the present. It’s a story that takes nearly three hours to tell, but we become so invested into their lives that it feels like almost no time has passed.

Cut Chilli review | Darebin Arts Speakeasy

Intercountry adoption is often framed through the language of love, family and giving a child a better life. But beneath those good intentions are complicated issues about identity, culture, belonging and the stories we lose about where we come from. Written by Chenturan Aran, Cut Chilli explores these through Jamie, who was abandoned as a baby in Sri Lanka and raised by his adoptive parents in Western Australia. Now, as an adult, he begins to question the story he has been told about his past, particularly after falling for Zahra, an activist and podcaster.

Early in the play, Jamie makes plans to return to Sri Lanka in search of the parts of his identity that have been missing, with Zahra documenting the journey for her podcast, Decolonising My Boyfriend. What starts as an attempt to uncover the truth about his adoption soon becomes something far more confronting, forcing him to reconsider his relationship with his parents Katherine and Lee, his connection to his birth culture and the foundations on which his family has been built. Cut Chilli places these uncomfortable issues alongside the familiar chaos of family life, where love, tension, humour, and secrets can all occupy the same dinner table.

Break of Day review | Malthouse Theatre

Every night, Pam clocks on at the world’s largest online retail warehouse, packing parcels in a town where employment prospects are increasingly scarce. It’s a thankless, low-paying and dead-end job, but most residents in Burra Creek have no other option. In Steve Rodgers’ Break of Day, we follow Pam, her daughter Rae and others, as they fight to avoid becoming invisible in a place where they have been forgotten.

While Pam works away at the warehouse, Rae is desperately trying to complete a high school essay on Lolita. With no internet, a computer on its last legs, a boyfriend more focused on his own dreams and a drunk grandfather to contend with, completing her assignment feels almost impossible.

Marginalia review | fortyfivedownstairs

There are few things more absurd than a man discovering that his nose has left his face, taken on a life of its own and somehow become more socially important than he is. Yet Marginalia manages to make Nikolai Gogol's The Nose seem almost restrained. Pummel Squad's wildly inventive adaptation takes the story and throws it into a blender, transforming its inherent ridiculousness into something visually extravagant, manic, and unruly.

The production wastes little time establishing its unique rhythm. Tyler, a barber, spends the entirety of Fatboy Slim's "Right Here, Right Now" running in circles around the stage, completely committed and visibly present. When the music stops, he turns to the audience and speaks about the tension between his career as a hairdresser and his passion for art, clearly setting the tone for what is about to unfold.