GG review | Conjah + PSEUDO | Arts House

"GG" is gaming shorthand for "Good Game", usually said at the end of a match. In GG, the term becomes the starting point for a performance about control and choice. Using street dance, motion capture, digital avatars and gaming technology, this collaboration between collectives CONJAH and PSEUDO Studio ask who gets to decide what happens, who is being controlled and what it feels like to have no control at all. Rather than telling a conventional story, GG plays out this exploration through movement, technology and the relationship between the dancers and the digital world around them.

Unfortunately, these ideas never quite come together, instead feeling like a series of disconnected scenes. One involves watching a hand discovering numerous items, including a gaming controller, inside a puppet-theatre-like structure, creating the impression of a video game being operated from within the stage. It’s fascinating to watch, and this has to be one of the most expressive hands I’ve seen, moving, reacting and communicating with remarkable precision. There’s a real sense of curiosity as the hand interacts with the objects around it, but it doesn’t seem to lead anywhere.

Cleopatra & Antony review | Melbourne Shakespeare Company | fortyfivedownstairs

History remembers Cleopatra and Mark Antony primarily as lovers, but romance was only one part of what brought them together. Cleopatra was a ruler fighting to preserve Egypt's independence, while Antony was a Roman general caught in the bitter struggle for control of Rome. Their relationship unfolded as the Roman Republic collapsed, making their personal choices inseparable from the political forces that would prove to be their undoing.

While I knew the broad outlines of their story, I wasn’t especially familiar with Shakespeare’s play. Some reading beforehand revealed a more politically charged drama than the popular image of the doomed lovers suggests. Melbourne Shakespeare Company’s production of Cleopatra & Antony, directed by Sonya Suares, brings its intrigue, tension and ambition into fortyfivedownstairs’ basement.

Dance Palace review | Finucane & Smith | Luna Park

I remember going to my first ever Finucane & Smith show back in 2010. I had never heard of Finucane & Smith before, but the title Carnival of Mysteries was too tempting to ignore. I vividly recall watching the various acts unfold, wide-eyed as I discovered this new world. But it was Moira Finucane’s performance as the Ice Queen, inside a tent, that has stayed with me most. There was something captivating about the strength and power in her voice, and I was transfixed by it. Since then, I have eagerly attended many of the performances and events created and curated by Finucane & Smith, including their current show Dance Palace, marking 30 years of their work.

Staged inside Luna Park, Dance Palace invites us into a place of exhilaration and excess, where cabaret, circus, burlesque and live music collide. It is a fitting setting for the occasion, with the faded glamour and eccentricity of the historical theme park providing the perfect backdrop for an evening that revels in the strange, the spectacular and the unexpected.

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 | Pummel Squad | 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.

CreepyPasta review | Dancehouse

Once confined to internet message boards and YouTube narration channels, creepypasta has steadily entered the mainstream, most recently through the release of Backrooms. These eerie tales of liminal spaces, conspiracies and inexplicable horrors have become a defining form of modern folklore. Harrison Hall's CreepyPasta draws on that tradition, using dance, sound and media to examine the anxieties lurking beneath our constantly connected lives.

CreepyPasta opens with a striking sequence. A lone performer (Nikki Tarling) is tethered to a rope that disappears into the darkness above. She moves with slow, precise fluidity under a solitary spotlight. Shiv Geaney's lighting sends red laser beams slicing through the space towards the audience, while Mat Spisbah's pulsing, heartbeat-like soundscape builds a sense of foreboding. Tarling's body is the only human presence in an environment consumed by screens, attempting to resist invisible forces pulling at her. Harrison Hall soon joins her, with the pair navigating various physical and multimedia encounters that push the boundaries between dance, performance art and digital installation.

Saplings review | Australian Theatre for Young People | Arts Centre Melbourne

Young people rarely enter the youth justice system because of a single bad decision. More often, they're shaped by circumstances beyond their control, the adults who fail them, and institutions that struggle to offer the support they need. Hannah Belanszky's Saplings - which is drawn from workshops and interviews with incarcerated youths - places those realities centre stage, inviting audiences to reconsider the labels and see the people underneath.

The vignettes introduce us to different young people in different situations, yet they are all intrinsically connected. A teenager is questioned by police after breaching his bail to buy instant noodles, while another group of friends who have just broken into a house cling to doli incapax, the legal principle that children under a certain age are presumed incapable of understanding right and wrong.