All The Things I Couldn’t Say // All Grown Up (but not really)

Come Back Festival Week 3. Deus Ex Femina // Dead Darling Theatre. 28 Aug 2026

 

All The Things I Couldn’t Say is an extraordinary mediation on the disconnect in human communication in the age of social media and reality TV.

 

Writer/Director Katherine Sortini offers a nonlinear series of scenes in one social media platform or another in which human beings misread each other. Avoid each other. Avoid themselves. Mangle big issues. Yet say things they would never normally ever feel free to say.

 

Performers Rob Wells, Juanita Navas-Nguyen, and Monica Patteson are human faces behind awkward questions. Fierce arguments and enigmatic on-screen text conversations revealing more than we realise about a new behavioural style/grammar of human interaction this century has subtly moulded us to.

 

Why do you back trace words you type? Why do you rely on acceptable communication tropes? Are you hiding something? Are you lying?

Watching this in action is unsettling. What we think is private, is in fact a universal behaviour.

 

Then there’s Rob Wells’ superbly placed awkward YouTube character, on ukulele letting the world in his on off pursuit of a paramour amidst a dark moment as a family rides home from church, as well as salacious conversation as two friends embark on viewing Love Island.

The impersonal becomes antiseptically personal. Those loose words, disembodied, hold half their power without a human face.

When there is a face, those couldn’t be said, yet said words, unleash a surprising power to enforce an awkward, unwarranted, unexpected conformity.

 

All The Things I Couldn’t Say is a work dealing directly with the 21^st Century via its own tools; mobile phones, apps and algorithms brought to life on stage. Brilliantly, shockingly, yet engagingly so.

 

All Grown Up (but not really) well and truly exceeded all expectations.

Never has an audience had so much fun exploring whimsical joys of primary school life as lived in reminiscence by Billie-Rose Russell with lots fab help from Josh Rocca with a focus on the early 2000s.

 

Is the time period an impediment? Hell no! Sheer auto suggestion instantly brings to mind your own eras primary school days, easily blended into Billie-Rose’s own delightfully drop dead hilarious, big kid, larger than life shenanigans.

 

Dead Darling Theatre’s production under the eye of Hannah Smith is a brightly coloured, wild, fast paced cabaret style jaunt played in Billie-Rose’s childhood bedroom.

Sure, she’s 24. But not tonight thanks.

 

It’s this slither of divide between primary school kid and and adult the whole work swings on.

Essentially, it’s Billie-Rose the kidult encouraging the audience to be kidults in a pop culture sweet mix of memory, games, and toys of the era.

Not to mention socialisation side of things.

 

It’s in tales of Billie-Rose’s own weird and wonky primary school experiences sussing the ‘people thing’ we get a glimpse of the confusion we’ve forgotten in our times. Over being a bit odd or out there. Disasters (that were not, but seemed like it.)

Obsessions over the big must have thing of the day.

It’s quite the achievement, this psychologically savvy work. Taking an audience to places they remember in a passing manner needing a jolt to access something a little deeper. Done in such a delightfully, warm hearted, ferociously joyous way.

 

David O’Brien

 

When: 27 to 30 Aug

Where: Goodwood Theatre and Studios

Bookings: Closed

 

Commentary

State Theatre Company South Australia. Dunstan Playhouse. 25 Aug 2026

 

Melbourne-based playwright Ash Flanders cofounded Sisters Grimm theatre company in 2006. They “created a unique style of queer experimental theatre” with productions at Malthouse, Melbourne Theatre Company, Sydney Theatre Company and Belvoir. Flanders’ career continued as a solo writer/performer, filmmaker, and now in television - check out Dog Park on the ABC. His “black comedy,” Commentary, is one of two works birthed in-residence with the Athenaeum Group.

 

Commentary is the ninety-minute unravelling of character Nick Atkinson. Nick is an arts lecturer and student teacher at Flinders (lots of local name calling in gratitude for State producing the world premiere, I posit). He made a film twenty years ago, it was forgotten, and the Adelaide Film Festival is resurrecting it. The film was brilliant in Berlin, but toxic in Australia. Why? A whole bunch of characters in Nick’s life each contribute a colourful strand of light—their version of why—that passes through the prism of the play and converges into the glaring white light of, well, what probably happened. And that white light shines on Nick’s head like the glare of a single bulb in the torturer’s chamber.

 

Flanders has axe to grind about how artists are received in today’s plethora of media. And that of course is commentary. A bot named tasteray.com wrote a whole essay on modern commentary in which it said “even casual viewers now expect more than just a plot summary - they want context, critique and cultural resonance” in a world where a blogger can break you. And here I am, quoting a robot. Some would say it’s the democratisation of opinion. Flanders’ Nick says leave the film making to the filmmaker and just watch the film.

 

You don’t need to get involved with all this debate about opinion-making to enjoy the play. Under Petra Kalive’s staccato direction with the design team comprising Matilda Woodroofe (Lighting Design), Nic Mollison (Composer), Dan Thorpe (Sound and Video Designer) and Matt Byrne (Video Content), this is a splendid specimen of how modern theatre techniques are creating a wonderfully complex multimedia experience. But let’s start with terrific acting. Kate Cheel is priceless as an Aussie made-good in LA. Her TV prima donna in the makeup room is prime time watching. Gyton Grantley’s Nick was equally appealing, loveable and flawed. Grantley invited us to see his Nick lying to himself and everybody else yet make us feel sorry for him being lied to. Anna Steen and Shardae Santos, like Cheel have multiple roles in which they excel.

 

The creative team suavely utilise on-stage video techniques that Adelaide audiences first saw in Sydney Theatre’s production of The Picture of Dorian Gray in the 2022 festival.

 

You see, Nick has a nemesis. He made his film 20 years ago with Hamish who was a drug addict and acknowledged creative genius and who disappeared after the film was made. Nick is the steady hand, the director, the guy who actually got the film made. Hamish is the bad guy, right? Why is everyone bringing him up? We will see. We’ll see what this white light over Nick’s head reveals. Nick is a victim of his own bad karma.

 

There was one sentence near the very end of the play, spoken under Nick’s breath while in a drunken stupor, that can easily go unnoticed. Suddenly, everything becomes very clear indeed.

 

I’m never the first one to rise to my feet, but I was amazed that this brilliant world premiere didn’t get a standing ovation on opened night. Playwright Ash Flanders says in his program notes, “Audiences can be vicious.”

 

Double bravo!

 

PS if you want to read the whole bot essay here it is: tasteray.com

 

David Grybowski

 

When: 21 Aug to 5 Sep

Where: Dunstan Playhouse

Bookings: statetheatrecompany.com.au

Bang On The Nerve // Have Sex With Me, Please

Come Back Festival Week 2. Goodwood Theatre and Studios. Danielle Lim and Sam Lau // Zero Theatre Collective. 21 Aug 2026

 

Two brilliant comedies. Totally different themes and takes.

 

Bang On The Nerve was written by famed, infamous, however you see her Australian columnist, TV host and author Van Badham. Badham worked with performers Danielle Lim and Sam Lau to adapt it from its original UK setting to Adelaide, Australia.

 

It’s an extraordinarily sharp, incisive and wickedly biting, revealing comedy of Asian Australian social mores surrounding being Asian, living in a white world, and navigating relationships.

 

Elle (Danielle Lim) and Louis (Sam Lau) are forever friends living between two worlds, their Asian culture bestowed by birth and the Australian one they grew up in.

They’re a support network.

 

Elle arrives at Sam’s mightily pissed off after a day of teaching shit little kids, one who threw a jar of jam at her that missed, smashed, and sprayed her with jam.

Sam? He responds with a funny off-the-cuff song on his guitar. His life is shit too. He cosplays at a restaurant and his girlfriend has dumped him. The stuff everywhere all over Sam’s one bedroom place says single Asian male sads.

Herein lies a brilliantly paced, dark, yet joyously wicked journey into their lives.

 

Lim and Lau work this production with exceptional comic and dramatic timing. The chemistry is dynamite, interlaced with comic sad boy guitar songs.

Elle and Sam are at odds with so many things in their long friendship, their good, not so good, not happening relationships with white partners.

 

They draw us into a world of Asian cultural insecurities and Australian cultural expectations like it was something we all do. That’s the magic of their perfectly executed devil may care approach. You don’t, wonderfully, differentiate. You actually get it!

 

They fight over it all and each other. It’s hysterically funny yet simultaneously eye opening. You start to properly see what the dualities in their lives are and can cost, or rightly, enhance. No ending spoilers! It’s worth it.

 

Have Sex With Me, Please should be a long touring comedy classic.

Eddie Morrison has the best reputation for sharp, inspiring, couth/uncouth aware comedy writing in Adelaide. This production is a reprise of the ’24 Fringe Season at Prompt Creative.

It’s a snappy, very intelligent two-part structured work if you’re paying attention.

Wham! We’re whipped into a loud and fabulous intro to sex and the rules of cool sexy behaviour, all that delivered with microphone loud voices and mega video back drop projections. Man, it’s so Sexpo full on!

 

That gently segues into a quieter section of the work, as Eddie and Nate get into the serious business of revealing how to get sex. Well. There’s a sex computer involved and sex science that apparently, Nate has studied!

 

So ensues an enthused and proud of Nate Eddie, giving expression to Nate’s sex expert Doctors advice (based on his YouTube research Eddie isn’t aware of.)

Herein lies the absolute comic and thematic genius of this work. Try following the absurd advice of YouTube idiots, utilising mannequins as side props to be sexy!

Eddie certainly does! It’s surprising he’s alive, let alone human after the attempt! Plus, you must be at least 31!

 

The raucous, outrageous extremes this work goes to are entirely logical after the event. It was so funny for one person the night before this writer attended, they laughed so hard they had an asthma attack.

There’s a nice moral at the end!

 

David O’Brien

 

Where: Goodwood Theatre and Studios

When: 13 to 30 Aug

Bookings: goodwoodtheatreandstudios.com.au

Into the Woods

State Opera South Australia. Her Majesty’s Theatre. 22 Aug 2026

 

There is something particularly fitting about State Opera South Australia's (SOSA) choice of Into the Woods for its Jubilee Season. Dane Lam, Artistic Director of SOSA, introduced the production by celebrating a cast of Australian performers who have grown up, trained or now live in Adelaide. It is a welcome showcase of local talent, brought together on the stage of Her Majesty's Theatre in one of musical theatre's most demanding scores.

 

Stephen Sondheim's Into the Woods is a deceptively demanding musical. Beneath its familiar fairy-tale characters and irresistible melodies lies a work about desire, consequence, loss and the uncomfortable realisation that happily ever after is rarely the end of the story. SOSA's production, directed by Constantine Costi with associate director Shannon Burns, assembles a technically accomplished cast and an excellent Adelaide Symphony Orchestra (ASO), yet for all its considerable musical strengths, this production doesn’t quite make the journey from fairy tale to human drama.

 

There is much to admire. Anthony Hunt conducts the ASO with impressive clarity and energy, and the cast handles Sondheim's famously intricate vocal writing with assurance. There are no weak links technically. Jessica Dean brings an appealing emotional intelligence to Cinderella, finding the person beneath the fairy-tale character. Rosie Hosking gives The Witch the powerhouse treatment the role demands, while Hugh Sheridan and Johanna Allen make a convincing and warmly matched Baker and Baker's Wife.

 

Nicholas Cannon and Andrew Crispe make a wonderfully entertaining pair of Princes, their chemistry and comic timing matched by stunning duets. Eleanor Brasted and Michaela Burger bring an immediate lift whenever Lucinda and Florinda appear, while Jessica Mills's vocal trills as Rapunzel are immaculate. Joey Haenen gives Jack plenty of comic energy, while Catherine Campbell is vocally assured as Jack's Mother. Nicholas Lester carries the dual roles of Narrator and Mysterious Man with authority.

 

Eliza Brill Reed's Little Red Riding Hood, Mark Oates's Cinderella's Father, Millicent Brake's Snow White, Gianna Guttilla's Sleeping Beauty, Rod Schultz's Steward and Cherie Boogaart's Stepmother, Granny and Giant complete a solid, vocally accomplished ensemble.

 

The comic performances are excellent on their own terms. It is, however, the production's success with comedy that ultimately creates one of its greatest difficulties.

 

The characters are frequently played with broad, heightened comic characterisation; Jack’s foolishness is overemphasised, the Steward and Stepmother/Granny are deployed largely for comic relief, and the Princes revel in their absurdity. These choices are entirely defensible within the first act, where the production frequently finds the humour in Sondheim and Lapine's fairy-tale constructions. But cumulatively, they begin to erode the emotional connection the second act requires.

 

Everyone can sing. Everyone can execute Sondheim's extraordinarily difficult material. The orchestra is excellent. The cast can deliver the comedy. But Into the Woods eventually asks us to stop watching fairy-tale characters and start caring about human beings.

 

This is particularly problematic because the second act deliberately abandons the security of the fairy tale. The characters have got what they wanted, and now they must deal with the consequences. It is darker, more reflective and considerably less forgiving. Yet the emotional weight of these developments struggles to register because the production has spent so much time establishing its characters as comic constructions. The result is a curious distance: technically impressive performances without ultimately giving us emotionally compelling characters.

 

There is another challenge, and this one belongs to the work itself. Into the Woods is long. Very long. Sondheim's dense, recitative-like writing demands considerable concentration, and the production's commitment to the original material brings the evening close to three hours including interval. Dramatically, the first half feels so complete that the second has a considerable mountain to climb to maintain momentum, and three hours of Sondheim's densely verbal writing can become numbing when the production does not continually renew its visual and emotional energy.

 

Jonathon Oxlade's set is a fascinating example of this tension. Two opposing revolves are used with great ingenuity, carrying performers into and out of scenes and giving the production an impressive fluidity. Functionally, it is superb. A cluster of towering, childlike tree cut-outs establishes the woods, but the aesthetic is less convincing. The deliberately simplified forest never quite matches the sophistication of the staging mechanism, and the repetition of the device eventually contributes to a sense of sameness. Jamie Mensforth's sound design and Bernie Tan-Hayes's lighting are both effectively executed.

 

A few of the production's more playful visual choices, including performers appearing as an oversized golden egg and harp and the unconventional dolls used for Rapunzel's babies, provide moments of whimsy but feel more like opportunities for an easy laugh than additions to the storytelling.

 

The technical execution was impressive, although opening night was not without its blemishes. The ASO occasionally overwhelmed the singers, making Sondheim's complex lyrics difficult to follow, and there were a few instances where microphones were activated fractionally too late. A projection intended to create the Giant's eye on a suspended circular disc failed during the first Giant sequence, leaving the disc initially perplexing; when the projection worked for the Giant's second entrance, the visual idea became considerably clearer.

 

This is a production of considerable technical accomplishment that might benefit from a little editing and a deeper emotional excavation. The performers are unquestionably capable. The musicianship is excellent. The staging is often clever. And there are genuine moments of theatrical pleasure.

 

But Into the Woods ultimately asks more of its performers than technical mastery. It asks us to believe that these people have lived, loved, wanted, lost and changed.

The musical demands that the laughter eventually give way to consequence. This production finds the laughter with ease. It is the consequence that never quite lands with the same force.

 

Paul Rodda

 

When: 22 to 29 Aug

Where: Her Majesty’s Theatre

Bookings: premier.ticketek.com.au