Set around a drinking game, this play pushes friendship to its limit

THEATRE
Never Have I Ever ★★★
Melbourne Theatre Company, Arts Centre Melbourne, Fairfax Studio, until March 22

Kas (Sunny S. Walia) and Jacq (Katie Robertson) are steeling themselves for a fraught night. Their boutique concept restaurant – charmingly rendered by Zoe Rouse through wrought-iron trellises and an ornate kitchen – has gone under, and they need to come clean to their friends-turned-benefactors: uni chum Adaego (Chika Ikogwe) and her wealthy, older husband Tobin (Simon Gleeson), who invested (not loaned) £125,000 in the business.

Never Have I Ever crackles with spiky repartee.Credit: Sarah Walker

The intimacy of their friendship has already been tarnished by the stink of an unequal money exchange, but the night goes down in flames for entirely different reasons. Tobin waves them off when Kas insists on paying him back, but finds himself quite unable to forgive a transgression of a different kind altogether – one that implicates the other three.

Never Have I Ever takes a while to find its groove, but at its best, it crackles with the fiery intensity and spiky repartee of fractious exchanges, barbed insults disguising long-held resentments and political contradictions lay bare as the four friends find themselves siding with and against each other.

As increasingly large amounts of alcohol and drugs are consumed – illuminated by Rachel Lee’s discordant flashing lights – the bacchanal comes to a head during the famously revealing drinking game, where dangerous territories are trespassed with enduring consequences for all.

The characters in Never Have I Ever try to outmanoeuvre each other from their respective stations.Credit: Sarah Walker

An oppression olympics takes hold of the night as the four try to outmanoeuvre each other from their respective stations, cleverly gestured to in the design of the unsuccessful restaurant – suggesting a futility in being an “identity politician”.

Jacq is a white, bisexual, working-class woman; Kas is a brown, straight, working-class man; Adaego is a black, upper-middle-class woman and Tobin is at the top of the pyramid – an exceedingly rich, straight white man.

The characters speak in empty platitudes and make meaningless assertions to one another, which is undoubtedly the point, but Never Have I Ever struggles to rise above the limitations of the very political discourse it’s pillorying – one that operates at the intersections of disadvantage to avoid accountability and shirk solidarity-building.

There are too many memorable one-liners to quote, but at times, Deborah Frances-White’s script feels bloated with exposition – there’s too much monologuing and rehashing of well-worn points in different, but not necessarily more interesting, ways.

The tension is diffused when the dramatic heft of a show-stopping revelation is milked for the entirety of the second half. A somewhat surprising pact is formed, but by then the stakes are sufficiently lowered. After a night of shocking disclosures, the denouement arises largely as you’d expect.

The casting, however, is faultless. Aided by the signposting of Rouse’s impeccable costuming – the purple jumpsuit ensemble that Ikogwe spiritedly struts around in is a highlight – the characters are fully realised. Gleeson is impeccable as the odious, unexpectedly funny Tobin, and Walia takes the morally vacillating Kas to new heights in a memorable address towards the end.

Firmly grounded in a post-Brexit UK, Never Have I Ever holds great resonance in a post-Trump 2.0 world where people are more polarised than ever and coalition-building on the left faces challenges. Never Have I Ever is ambitious in its scope and unquestionably of the zeitgeist, but fails to cohere in crucial moments.
Reviewed by Sonia Nair

THEATRE
And Then There Were None ★★★
Comedy Theatre, until March 23

The current “cosy crime” revival in international publishing owes much to the comforts of Agatha Christie. No writer could stitch together and unravel a mystery quite like her, though her most popular work – and the one the author herself regarded as her finest piece of craftsmanship – puts cosiness to one side and presents a puzzle of fiendishly dark intricacy, with no Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot on hand to solve it.

And Then There Were None features more well-known actors of stage and screen than space permits.Credit: Jeff Busby

On page, stage and screen, And Then There Were None has tantalised readers and audiences for generations.

The locked-room murder mystery has become a cultural touchstone, almost an archetype, of the psychological suspense thriller – and like Shakespeare’s Hamlet, it defines a genre by subverting its main principle.

Just as the most famous revenge tragedy pivots on a failure to take revenge, so too does Christie’s ultimate murder plot turn on the lack of a reliable sleuth to stand in for the spectator. It’s an intimate trick because the game afoot is so deadly that perhaps only you and the author, in the end, will be left knowing the identity of the murderer.

Ten guests have been invited to an island mansion off the coast of Devon by an unknown party. The first corpse might be an accident, but when another of their number dies, it dawns upon them that they’ve been lured into a trap. Paranoia mounts and dark secrets are revealed, as the survivors seek the serial killer among them before it’s too late.

On page, stage and screen, And Then There Were None has tantalised readers and audiences for years.Credit: Jeff Busby

The cast features more well-known actors of stage and screen than there’s space to name. Together, they weave a claustrophobic web of suspense – on an ironically spacious, sparsely adorned set inspired by the International Style of architecture.

Robyn Nevin has form with Agatha Christie. She directed the 70th anniversary tour of Christie’s long-running play, The Mousetrap, to compelling effect.

This one isn’t yet as secure – the initial set-up needs a freer sense of comedy and a lighter touch with exposition. Mind you, introducing 10 characters, getting ‘how do you dos’ to sparkle, and adumbrating a dangerous situation is rather a lot to accomplish, theatrically, so a few forced moments and workmanlike shortcuts are forgivable.

If it feels like an arduous 50 minutes before interval, the longer second “half” flies by. Each scene is pared to the knuckle; Nevin’s flinty, unsentimental eye and taste for disciplined ensemble performance are perfect for the material. Attention to character flaws make for a very satisfying body count, and – once the plot mechanics have been wound up – the brisk and meticulous genius of Christie’s lethal conceit unfolds with clockwork precision.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

MUSIC and PHOTOGRAPHY | ASIA TOPA
William Yang: Milestone ★★★
Hamer Hall, February 20

For William Yang, the camera has long been a portal. One of Australia’s most revered social photographers, Yang captured the essence of his times, from Sydney’s burgeoning queer scene in the 1970s to the AIDS epidemic – as well as his own family story. Now 82, his extraordinary life is preserved in image.

Milestone is Yang’s swansong, presented in his signature slideshow format for one night only in Melbourne as the opening show of Asia TOPA. This collaboration with pianist and composer Elena Kats-Chernin and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra is tender and moving, as Yang leads the audience through decades of memories and culture.

William Yang: Milestone at Hamer Hall on February 20.Credit: Michael Pham

The artist speaks with candid warmth and humour about his family and his disconnect from his Chinese heritage, alongside his discovery of his sexuality and a new social scene. Images of his social life are a who’s who of the time: Keith Haring, Brett and Wendy Whiteley, Jenny Kee and Ita Buttrose are just a few of the faces shown. The details border on superfluous, but Yang is a charming storyteller who certainly has a lot to share about his fascinating life.

Kats-Chernin’s compositions recall a film score, changing to suit the images. When the dry plains of Yang’s Queensland hometown, Dimbulah, are shown, the music is scenic. Bacchanalian scenes of queer revelry are accompanied by spirited passages; Yang’s reclamation of his Chinese heritage through travel is made even more poignant by Kats-Chernin’s grand, sweeping score.

The music and Yang’s narration almost never overlap – it’s an accompaniment to the images rather than his words. There could have been an even greater emotional impact if the music and prose were married too, though it’s affecting to see Yang turn during the musical sections to watch the slideshow himself, remembering.

Milestone, Yang’s swansong, was presented in his signature slideshow format for one night only.Credit: Michael Pham

In Yang’s later work, he transcribed stories directly onto his photographs. The show ends with a backwards reel of images, many with memories written onto them. It’s cyclical and beautiful for the show to begin and end with a photo of Yang as a small child, now with almost a century of knowledge upon him.

“Because of the way I was brought up, I did not value my own story,” Yang says. “The document I was making was my history, but it took a while for me to find my own voice.” Milestone is a generous sharing of that voice – one that has immortalised parts of Australian history that may otherwise have been lost to time.
Reviewed by Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen

EXPERIMENTAL | ASIA TOPA
Sensing Dark Matter ★★★★
Science Gallery Melbourne, until March 1

The exotic form of matter known as dark matter, which according to current scientific consensus accounts for most of the matter in the universe, has long served as a useful device for science-fiction fantasists.

The allure of dark matter lies in its mystery. This most subtle of all substances, imperceptible to our senses and invisible to every form of radiation, can be implied only through the gravitational effects it creates on a cosmological scale.

Sensing Dark Matter is the work of Taiwanese artist Su Wenchi.Credit: Michael Pham

Attempts to explain dark matter involve theories which themselves verge on the marvellous, involving strange particles and materials with evocative names like fuzzy matter, mirror matter and dark fluid.

Even the laboratories and equipment designed to test these theories, such as the colossal Super-Kamiokande observatory, built under Mount Ikeno in Japan, seem like architectural dreams from the distant future.

Taiwanese artist Su Wenchi, a choreographer and new media artist, has collaborated over three years with researchers at the Stawell Underground Physics Laboratory to craft a virtual reality experience that captures something of the sublimity this cosmic unknown.

It begins at the entrance to the Stawell facility, depicted as a large cavern with rough stone walls. Or at least that’s the assumption. In fact what we see is mostly darkness, with only a few spare points of light spangling the walls and floor.

Sensing Dark Matter uses virtual reality to capture something of the sublimity this cosmic unknown.Credit: Michael Pham

These particles of light clump in ways that suggest distances and textures, smooth or rough surfaces. We emerge from the cavern into a sprawling complex with vast chambers and massive turbines, around which the lights converge in a swirling dance.

Sensing Dark Matter is gorgeously rendered, but it’s also a suggestive allegory for human perception. We see only a few glimmers of light, but from these minimal cues, we construct vast worlds, imagining far beyond what is immediately visible.

It’s a short journey, only 17 minutes, but a heck of trip.
Reviewed by Andrew Fuhrmann

MUSIC
Hania Rani ★★★★
Melbourne Recital Centre, February 20

Hania Rani’s current visit to Australia comes at the tail end of an intense 18-month tour. But if Rani was feeling weary as she took to the stage on Thursday night, it didn’t show. Returning to the Melbourne Recital Centre for the second time in less than two years, she performed a generous set that ran close to two hours, with only occasional pauses between tunes.

Pianist and singer Hania Rani at an earlier performance. Credit: Sian O’Connor

The Polish-born, Berlin-based pianist and singer carefully constructs her live shows so that each piece morphs seamlessly into the next, creating the feel of an immersive, almost theatrical experience. On stage, she sat (or stood) ensconced in a semi-circle of pianos – one upright, one grand – and an array of keyboards and synthesisers.

Rani’s music flits between multiple realms – acoustic and electric; ambient and trance; classical and club-friendly; shadows and light – and her show was designed to amplify these contrasts. The artist herself flitted restlessly from one instrument to another, adding and subtracting sonic layers as the music swelled and subsided. Her ethereal voice might float across a wistful piano melody one minute, then soar with reverb-drenched majesty over a fidgety, synth-driven pulse the next.

Rani’s music flits between multiple realms.Credit: Martyna Galla

Rani herself was often obscured in near-darkness, preferring to focus our attention on the atmospheric sweep of her music and the abstract images that swirled and streaked across the diaphanous screens behind her. While her passion and focus were palpable (even with her back to us, her body twitching and jerking as she extemporised with abandon on synths), I did yearn to see her more clearly and connect with the human at the heart of these cinematic soundscapes.

It’s the kind of connection that came easily to Rani’s support act, Melbourne musician Xani Kolac. Like Rani, Kolac is an expert at melding creative artistry with technology (in this case, electric violin, pedals, loops and voice) to build captivating sound worlds. But where Rani’s presence remained somewhat elusive, Kolac radiated warmth and openness as she welcomed us into her own shape-shifting realm.
Reviewed by Jessica Nicholas

THEATRE
Honour ★★★★
Red Stitch Theatre, until March 23

What would you do if your husband of 32 years announced that he was leaving you for a younger woman?

This is the premise of Joanna Murray-Smith’s landmark play, Honour, which premiered at the Playbox Theatre in 1995 and went on to Broadway and the West End, featuring actors such as Meryl Streep, Laura Linney and Dame Diana Rigg. Thirty years on, it returns to Melbourne’s Red Stitch Theatre with a stellar cast.

Lucinda Smith and Peter Houghton in a scene from Honour.Credit: James Reiser

Claudia (Ella Ferris), a bright-eyed, ambitious young journalist, is commissioned to profile George (Peter Houghton), an acclaimed journalist who is nevertheless far from immune to the flattery of young women. From their first meeting – the first scene of the play – it’s clear what’s to transpire.

Nevertheless, we’re gifted a glimpse into the comfortable camaraderie, easy physical familiarity and intellectually matched conversations George shares with his wife Honor (Caroline Lee), a poet whose literary career took a back seat to his when they had their daughter Sophie (Lucinda Smith) – something which makes his severing of their seemingly unshakeable bond all the more difficult to watch.

“How inventive can we be after 30 years?” George beseeches Honor as he delivers the ill-fated news. It’s almost a question that can be asked of Honour itself, with its familiar premise of the “passing of the baton” from wife to mistress.

Where Honour crackles with wit and candour is in the electrifying exchanges between all four characters at different junctures as their loyalties and the power dynamics between them shift, their motivations are laid clear, and their insecurities and quashed ambitions take hold.

Caroline Lee plays Honor, a poet whose career took a back seat to her husband’s.Credit: James Reiser

The characters pontificate at length about the meaning of love beyond its ability to illuminate “reciprocal flattery” in two people, the capacity for it to exist without doubt, the act of courtesy as a type of kindness, the equivalence (rightly or wrongly) of passion with love. These conversations unfold at a breakneck pace, the multiplicity of ideas never encroaching on their emotional cadence.

Every element in Honour, from Jacob Battista and Sophie Woodward’s sparse staging of two chairs to Harrie Hogan’s lighting design, is judiciously employed. Characters linger on the outskirts when they’re not onstage, their expressions altering according to what’s unfolding. The characters in the limelight sometimes gesture towards these spectres as their absence looms large in their psyches.

Battista and Woodward’s costume design is meticulous in its ability to distil the essence of a person into a few items of clothing.

Lee and Houghton play a married couple whose relationship comes to a sudden end.Credit: James Reiser

With her ruffled top that hints of cleavage, and sensible ballet flats, Claudia is cloaked in the sanctimony and unearned certainty of youth. She’s only slightly older than the chucks-clad Sophie, but those scant years are magnified in their significance. What both share is an unstinting moral clarity, at least at first, that’s matched only by George’s, in his delusions of renewed grandeur and his highly human desire to stave off death.

Only Honor remains clear-eyed. It’s her show after all, and Lee’s inhabiting of a woman hollowed out then reluctantly born anew is masterful.
Reviewed by Sonia Nair

THEATRE
Truth ★★★★
Patricia Cornelius, Malthouse Theatre, until March 8

Truth is a grave and unsettling piece of political theatre from Australia’s most decorated playwright, Patricia Cornelius. It comes wrapped in the story of Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, but the dramatic investigation expands into an urgent sort of eulogy for whistleblowers; the terrible human cost of speaking out, and the higher price paid when everyone remains silent in the face of injustice.

A talented ensemble of five performers – Emily Havea, Tomàš Cantor, James O’Connell, Eva Rees, and Eva Seymour – share the burden of storytelling, adopting a choric, incantatory, Brechtian-style of epic theatre as a baseline.

Truth is performed by a talented ensemble of five actors.Credit: Pia Johnson

Questions of truth and silence first emerge through Assange’s childhood – he’s portrayed as a prodigy and a loner at school, shunned by his peers – though it shifts quickly into an ode to the idealism of the hackers in the 1980s and ’90s.

This lost world is summoned onto the stage with a mythic quality that will delight geeks everywhere.

Video spews binary code from on high as assembled hackers – including Assange’s online persona, Mendax – retreat to their retro desktop computers and regale us with exploits, committed in a revolutionary spirit. The surging, reverberant bass electro of Kelly Ryall’s sound design takes on a hostile edge as one by one these keyboard warriors are tracked down and punished.

Cornelius gifts this sequence with likeably downbeat humour. Melbourne played a vital role in the international hacking scene, we’re told, “because the weather’s so shit”. It’s the belief that individuals really can change the world, however, that lingers and leads to the creation of WikiLeaks.

Truth is unsettling political theatre from Australia’s most decorated playwright, Patricia Cornelius.Credit: Pia Johnson

The motivations and fates of whistleblowers, including Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, are explored on an intimate human scale; their legacies on an epic one. At one stage, the audience witnesses the entire Collateral Murder video and confronts the moral enormity of it: Could any of us live with keeping such atrocities secret, if we were in Manning’s position? What would that do to us?

We see what Manning’s conscience cost her, and we follow Assange, too, from legal troubles in Sweden – exposed here as a paper-thin pretext for US extradition – to grand rhetoric from the Ecuadorian embassy, and imprisonment without trial.

The powerful documentary theatre is interwoven with two scenes featuring other kinds of silence and surveillance.

One describes a family unwilling to confront child sex abuse; in the other, a woman is stalked, her every move tracked by an ex-partner. They make the quiet point that dramatic showdowns between the individual and the state seen in whistleblower cases are the tip of the iceberg; that we should not accept from governments any behaviour we would deplore in individuals.

Looking back on all this from 2025, WikiLeaks seems like a high watermark for holding the powerful to account. Knowing about the progressive enshittification of the internet, the structural defunding of quality investigative journalism, and the US government’s vindictive pursuit of Assange and other whistleblowers, Truth is a rousing, sobering reminder of the courage and the cost involved in speaking truth to power.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

MUSIC and DIGITAL ART | ASIA TOPA
Kagami ★★★★
Ryuichi Sakamoto and Tin Drum, Melbourne Exhibition and Convention Centre, until March 16

Audiences fascinated by the aesthetic possibilities of virtual reality should flock to Kagami, an eerily beautiful and moving piano concert, performed by the late Ryuichi Sakamoto from beyond the grave.

The late composer, keyboardist and actor is best known here for his film scores – including Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence and his Oscar-winning score for The Last Emperor – and his pioneering work in electronic music.

Kagami uses VR technology to immerse audiences in the work and music of Ryuichi Sakamoto.Credit: Michael Pham

Sakamoto died in 2023, within weeks of finishing the highly technical photography used to make Kagami. There were no second chances to shoot more footage, and the elegiac quality of the music is enhanced by knowing, as the artist himself knew, that he was dying when the performance was recorded.

After being fitted with lightweight VR goggles, audience members see a spinning red cube appear inside a mandala sketched on the floor. When lights dim and the show starts, a virtual Sakamoto appears, fingers poised over an exposed baby grand, like some Obi-Wan Kenobi-style apparition from beyond.

And he begins to play a transporting selection of his most famous works. Melodic strength builds an emotional immediacy and presence, accentuating the spectrality of the performer in hologram – a mirage that seems a magical reprieve from, as much as a confirmation of, the certain knowledge of life’s impermanence.

The intimate VR concert is an entirely novel experience for audiences, who are free to walk around the room, watch Sakamoto perform up close, or otherwise immerse themselves in the virtual environment.

Audiences fascinated by the aesthetic possibilities of virtual reality should flock to Kagami.Credit: Michael Pham

Music is initially unadorned by image, save the artist and piano, but soon transforms as he plays. Delicate motes of light flutter through the air. Japanese cityscapes revolve in panorama around the space. Cosmic immensities open above; life-sustaining roots and vessels below. When Sakamoto plays Energy Flow – which, to his bewilderment, charted in Japan – there’s haunting footage of a decomposing piano buried in snow.

It ends with BB, a short piece composed within five minutes of learning of the death of film director Bernardo Bertolucci – a quiet elegy within an elegy that ends in a touching lacuna, petering into silence mid-phrase.

VR technology has improved markedly since my last artistic encounter with it, at a Taiwanese showcase programmed for the 2021 Melbourne Fringe Festival. The ambition in that sampler was unconstrained – it offered everything from a 3D National Geographic-style doco to pornographic immersion in Taiwan’s all-male saunas – but the tech was clunky, uncomfortable to sustain for more than 10 minutes, and you were blind to all but the virtual.

In Kagami, the tech is extremely sophisticated. You remain aware of others – so you don’t bump into anyone – while being able to witness the performance unimpeded from any angle or distance … even through other people’s bodies.

This posthumous gift, from an artist of rare distinction, really does feel like a taste of the future.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

MUSIC
The Prodigy ★★★★★
Rod Laver Arena, February 18

In the 1990s, there was no band more dangerous than The Prodigy. To many, Keith Flint was The Prodigy: a terrifying rave-punk imp with devil horns, piercings and a spitting delivery, Johnny Rotten with a mouthful of ecstasy. Flint passed away in 2019, leaving people to ask: how could the band possibly continue? Would the band be reduced to a tribute act, neutered, like so many dangerous bands before them?

Age, however, has not wearied them. At Rod Laver Arena, they proved their mettle. If anything, their music is fuller, louder, more chaotic.

The Prodigy perform at Rod Laver Arena on February 18.Credit: Richard Clifford

Flint is present from the off: remaining members Liam Howlett and Maxim, supported by a guitarist and a drummer, enter the stage and dive straight into Breathe. Maxim, part-vocalist part-hypeman, belts Flint’s lines from under the hood of his boxing robe.

Voodoo People filled out with live drums and guitar is an invitation to chaos. The crowd lose it, and don’t regain it for the next 90 minutes. Through Poison, No Good, and an instrumental version of Firestarter, in tribute to Flint, the strobe lighting reduces the stage to bodies and glinting metal. The sound of The Prodigy is a kind of alchemy, an unholy blend of samples, live instruments and vocals, played loud and fast and relentless. It’s filthy and pure and lost none of its immediacy.

From my nosebleed seats, I’ve got an anthropological view of the stadium. A circle pit opens up somewhere on the floor. The man in front of me, driven by the band’s muscular version of Their Law, dives across five rows of chairs, somehow not hurting anyone except himself, and is frogmarched out by his girlfriend.

More than once I wish The Age had set me up with general admission tickets so I could be one of the “f---ers on the floor”, as Maxim put it more than once, instead of one of the “f---ers up top” – but then I would have missed the guy hurling his body across the plastic stadium seats, so I have no regrets.

In a gig at Rod Laver Arena, The Prodigy show they are going strong.Credit: Richard Clifford

The encore brings us to the end of the night with the inevitable Smack My Bitch Up, Take Me To the Hospital, We Live Forever and Out of Space. Outside the stadium, someone shouts an invitation to an after-party. It’s Wednesday tomorrow, but I can see people considering it. “We’re here / It’s now / We live forever” is right. The Prodigy will live forever.
Reviewed by Will Cox

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