Four Minutes Twelve Seconds (Flight Path) ★★★½

Written by James Fritz. Crying Chair Theatre in association with Secret House. Flight Path Theatre. 22 Oct – 1 Nov, 2025.

The characters in James Fritz’s sexting drama have all the foibles of real people in an unexpected and seemingly impossible situation. It makes for some juicy, compelling drama in Four Minutes Twelve Seconds.

When a sex tape of a teenage couple is leaked online, all hell breaks loose as Di (Emma Dalton) and David (James Smithers) must protect their son Jack from allegations of abuse and revenge porn, while also trying to get to the bottom of what really happened. Who leaked the footage? Was it Jack’s mate Nick (Nicholas McGrory)? Why did Jack’s girlfriend Cara (Kira McLennan) suddenly dump him? How much do parents really know about their teenage children?

The play Four Minutes Twelve Seconds is ten years old, and while parts of the tech mentioned feel dated, the human drama is very much contemporary in its impact. Fritz’s dialogue is sharp and layered, giving the performers room to bounce off one another like real conversations. When it works, this play crackles with that addictive theatrical energy.

Fritz makes the interesting choice to remove Jack’s voice from the narrative, he is never seen or heard, merely existing as an pressence in the next room. It places the story firmly in the parents perspective which gives it clarity and relatability. This puts the moral quandary on the shoulders of Jack’s mum, Di, as she wrestles with the thought that maybe her son isn’t the boy she thought he was — and what responsibility she bears to try to make things right. It’s a juicy role with some wonderful twists and turns. While some of the later plot developments don’t quite pass the real-life “sniff test”, they all make clear emotional sense, which earns the play a lot of leeway.

The creative team has placed the emphasis heavily on the performances. A clean, stylish stage (lovely, concise design work by James Smithers, on top of his acting role) makes smart use of the Flight Path space. Lighting by Clare Sheridan accents the great AV design of Kieran Camejo. Director Jane Angharad keeps the patter of the dialogue moving at a fast, naturalistic pace, which elevates the sometimes static staging.

Smithers is excellent in his onstage role as the protective father of Jack. His grasp of the rapid-fire text and character work saves the role from feeling repetitive, despite many of the scenes treading similar territory time and again. Also refreshingly good is Kira McLennan as Cara, Jack’s attractive ex-girlfriend from the wrong side of the tracks. Her aggression-hiding-her-fear dynamic pulls the story out of its middle-class POV and places it in a wider world.

As Jack’s devastated mother, Emma Dalton has the bulk of the dialogue and emotional journey. Dalton wisely avoids easy melodrama with a performance that fights between interiority and expression. However, with so much stage time and such a wordy, looping script, it could benefit from a bit more light and shade.

It’s interesting to see Four Minutes Twelve Seconds soon after watching Suzie Miller’s Inter Alia, which covers similar ground — parents floundering in the face of sexual abuse allegations against their sons. It’s fascinating to see how the two plays, written over a decade apart, handle the topic. Inter Alia left me asking “what do you do after the bombshell has dropped?”, which Four Minutes Twelve Seconds tries to tackle. James Fritz’s answers are bold and thought-provoking and will have the parents in the room rattled.