Never Ending Night - Melbourne Fringe Festival review

For years now, the Earth has been a site of devastation with humans now forced to live underground in various bunkers throughout the world. Cyprus Pod has been home to a community of people for 15 years, and all is as normal as can be until a Messenger arrives with a request for the pod to take on eight more people. With her, she brings three of the eight who are given the task to familiarise themselves with Cyprus Pod and endear themselves to the residents. With limited rations and space, the survivors must decide if they will allow these eight people to stay or turn them away. So begins Never Ending Night, an immersive theatre show presented by Libby Brockman and Russell Sims.

In this show, audience members are permitted to explore the pod and observe and listen to the various conversations happening between the residents, the Messenger and the Messenger’s guests. The nature of an immersive show such as this is that everyone will have a different experience depending on who they follow but the conclusion should provide enough information to put all the pieces of the puzzle together even if they have missed certain scenes. In this instance, I chose to shadow one of the messenger’s guests who tries to charm and manipulate his way into the pod. While initially an interesting character, his scenes and dialogue began to get slightly repetitive with his constant advances towards his female counterpart and in his belief that a place should be made for him because he is young, strong and fertile.

Never Ending Night - Melbourne Fringe Festival preview

Fringe festivals are a time for artists to present new work and ideas and be daring in the theatre that they make. But it also gives a chance for audiences to experience innovative theatre and to step outside of their comfort zone as a passive audience member. Presented by Libby Brockman and Russell Sims as part of this year's Melbourne Fringe Festival, Never Ending Night is an immersive experience in which each audience member determines the journey that they will take.

Performed inside the Collingwood Underground Carpark, audiences enter Cyprus Pod, which has been home to a small community of survivors for 15 years. However, when 8 more newcomers arrive, the survivors must decide if they will accept them or turn them away. For this project, Brockman enlisted three writers, Bridgette Burton, Amelia Newman and Keith Gow, to come on board and help create and guide the story.

"The collaborative process was really exciting, since all our writing styles are quite different," Gow tells me. "I'm working with Bridgette, whose work I have admired for years, and Amelia, who Bridgette has been mentoring, and we established a general concept for the play and then went off and wrote three different stories about life in this one pod. The big question of the play is whether or not this pod of survivors will allow others to come and live with them; they are so comfortable in their lives, they are initially reticent to accept newcomers."

Triumph review

In defiance of its title, Louris Van De Geer’s Triumph is a trilogy of thematically linked and emotionally disturbing stories that explore people’s desire to connect with others. With Triumph, Van De Geer confirms why she was named as one of Melbourne Writers Festival’s ’30 under 30’ best young writers. Bringing her words to life are a talented and dedicated cast of five – Aljin Abella, Syd Brisbane, Anouk Gleeson-Mead, Emma Hall and Leone White – who irrespective of being the main character of one story or the supporting role with thirty seconds of stage time in another, ensure that their characters consistently retain depth, authenticity and real humanity to them.

The first story takes inspiration from Tania Head, a woman who had survived the Twin Towers from the 78th floor of the World Trade Centre. Head went on to become president of the World Trade Centre Survivors’ Network support group and spent countless years helping survivors heal. However, in 2007, it was revealed that Head wasn’t in America at the time of the attacks and had fabricated her entire story.

Crestfall and Purgatorio double bill review | L1 Studios

It's not as an easy thing to go and explore the darker side of your humanity. For most, it’s the potential repercussions of those actions that prevent us from going any further than a fleeting thought. Citizen Theatre, in association with 5pound theatre and Attic Erratic Theatre, present Inferno: A Double Bill, two distinctly different yet thematically similar plays that question what it is that makes us human and how far would we go to get what we want.

The first play by Irish playwright Mark O'Rowe, Crestfall, follows three women living in a tough and brutal town who are dealing with the abuse and hardness that characterises their location. While the performances themselves by Freya Pagt, Marissa O'Reilly and Marissa Bennett are highly committed and convincing, it was very difficult to engage with and remain engaged with the show the whole time.

Although the material is harrowing, and therefore becomes difficult at times to listen to the womens’ stories, the main issue for me was that the actors do such a good job with the accents, that at times, you miss out on what is being said while trying to understand the thick brogue. It doesn't happen often but it happens enough that I found it prevents you from being completely absorbed by what is happening.

['fraktʃəd] fractured review - Melbourne Fringe

We are now living in a dystopian world of the named and the unnamed. Where safety and comfort are a thing of the past and children are now brought up in a society where the only games they remember are guessing how many bombs are going to go off in the night. Adam J.A. Cass' Fractured, explores this frightening world through five "broken" souls. 

Danelle Wynne is the standout of the cast as Astrid, the almost feral child who is too afraid and suspicious of anyone to let her guard down. Her animal like qualities and habits show how deeply she has been affected by her experiences and are a strong contrast to the rest of the people around her, such as Suzi Loo played by Nicole Morgan. Morgan is also strong in her character and her concluding scenes were completely and utterly engrossing. Rounding out the great cast were Natalie-Lynne Pillar, Josh Vasilev and Amy Firth.