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Based on the story by Daphne du Maurier. Adapted by Louise Fox. Malthouse, Melbourne. 16 May – 7 Jun, 2025.

Forget Alfred Hitchcock’s classic cinematic thriller. Forget Daphne du Maurier’s original story. Louise Fox has taken the frightening premise of an avian revolt against humanity and placed it in Australia with a sharply contemporary context to creep you out. Some intimate audio and a shape-shifting solo performance from Paula Arundell combine to create an interesting piece of theatre.

Tessa and her family (husband Nat and their two children) have made a classic Covid “sea change”, trading the city for the open spaces of farms and beaches. One night, she hears an incessant tapping at her bedroom window. Investigating, she opens the window as a bird swoops in to attack her. A scream from her daughter’s bedroom sends her bolting in and battling off dozens of birds. In the morning… she realises it wasn’t a freak occurrence.

Unsurprisingly, Paula Arundell is wonderful playing all the roles, including Tessa and her family, as well as neighbours and friends. It’s a beautifully precise array of performances showing her personal range. Vocally, she manages to convey age, gender, mood and more with impressive agility.

However, for a show aimed at providing an inventive and immersive experience, The Birds felt rather conventional on the technical side. Outgoing Artistic Director Matthew Lutton directs Malthouse’s production, which gives the audience headphones, making the sound design (and Arundell’s dialogue) feel very close. However, this is where the play fails to reach its promise. J. David Franzke’s sound design is crisp and effective but doesn’t make enough use of the intimate stereo environment to truly elevate the play. Had the sound design simply been pumped through some good surround-sound speakers in the theatre, it would have had the same effect.

Niklas Pajanti’s ambient lighting features some interesting accents, but mostly works against the audio because the featureless lighting fails to engage the imagination of the non-existent birds. I found myself shutting my eyes to enjoy the production as an audio play, which worked wonders—placing the danger in my imagination made it more thrilling.

Kat Chan’s stage design puts Arundell on an elevated platform surrounded by props. Dozens of wooden birdhouses hang from the ceiling above her, physically reminding us of the threat we experience only through audio and lighting. Again, the abundance of space lessens the threat of attack (although the birdhouses are used to excellent effect, I just wish there was more to it).

One of the best things adaptor Louise Fox has done is take du Maurier’s post-war paranoia and place it in the world of modern conspiracy theorists and climate upheaval. While The Birds never explains the uncanny happenings, humanity’s guilt hangs over Nature’s suicidal assaults. Would anyone question the Earth’s right to defend itself against the abuses humanity has inflicted on it?

Tellingly, the play’s most disturbing moment comes not from the antagonistic birds themselves but from a morally upsetting choice Tessa must make. It is more terrifying than all the effects and relies solely on Arundell’s tortured delivery. It’s the one image that has stuck with me long after the play ended.

In retrospect, I feel the use of headphones isolated the audience in their own bubbles, muting communal gasps and reactions and lessening the theatrical experience. I still think there is much that can be done with this technique with more time and imagination to play with the form.

Written by Agatha Christie. Presented by John Frost for Crossroads Live. Theatre Royal, Sydney. 3 May 3 – 1 Jun, 2025.

Agatha Christie is justifiably considered one of the greats, if not the GOAT, of the murder mystery genre. And Then There Were None (not the original title) is one of her best and most groundbreaking novels, but her stage adaptation suffers from hackneyed characterisations and a slightly altered plot (no spoilers).

Ten strangers are invited to a secluded island mansion under false pretences. Once assembled, a pre-recorded voice accuses each of them of murder. But who is the mysterious Mr UN Owen who brought them all here? And who is killing them off, one by one?

I’d been meaning to see And Then There Were None since it opened, but real life kept getting in the way. As the run progressed, I couldn’t help but notice the seating chart for the Theatre Royal had plenty of options available, even with the balcony closed off on weeknights. It started to look like And Then There Were None was referring to the paying audience. But a last-minute night off saw me grabbing a mid-priced ticket and sitting down for a bit of comfort crime.

The air of pantomime quickly wafted in from the painted seaview on stage, as a parade of ridiculously on-the-nose accents began speaking. One of them was actually meant to be fake, so Peter O’Brien gets a free pass. Some of the others, though, were a mix of rejects from Olivier! and extras from Downton Abbey. They weren’t all bad, not at all, but the range of accents was so artificially pointed, and seemingly mimicked from a binge-watch of The Crown, that it was hard to get past them. Once the play settled into its rhythms, and the cast began to be thinned out, the performers really got to sink their teeth into things.

I enjoyed the work of Anthony Phelan as the retired judge Sir Lawrence Wargrave and Jack Bannister as the irresponsible Anthony Marston (but that may be because his opening costume seemed like a bit of Doctor Who cosplay). Peter O’Brien seemed to be having the most fun on stage. Tom Stokes made for a suitably unlikable Phillip Lombard.

Structurally, the play is a sound mystery (although a 45-minute Act I feels particularly short; the story had barely started). As the psychological torture of the second act begins, the thrills kick in. With each subsequent killing driving the survivors’ paranoia higher, things veer ever closer to melodrama.

Part of this is undoubtedly due to the play itself which, like Nevin’s recent revival of Christie’s The Mousetrap, cannot escape its well-worn material that has been adapted time and time again. Having become the template for a whole sub-genre of genteel British murder, it is very easy for anyone in a Christie to stumble into cliché, which they inevitably do on occasion. But where The Mousetrap leaned into its “drawing room murder mystery” trappings, And Then There Were None tries to freshen things up, which simply reveals the creaking moving pieces underneath.

There is an unrelenting flatness to this production that starts to wear thin through the first act. Dale Ferguson’s open, modernist set felt fresh and clean, though possibly too sparse in places. The bright lighting didn’t differentiate moments or tones (I genuinely wondered if they’d missed a lighting cue or two – especially in the early scenes). Paul Charlier’s sound design earned the first, though not the last, laugh of the evening with its bold shock opening.

Christie’s stories are like a box of chocolates, all similar with different flavours. But instead of being a rich, dark treat with a surprise inside, this version of And Then There Were None is more like a lone white chocolate that’s all froth and no bite. I think I’ll rewatch the thrilling 2015 BBC adaptation instead.

Written by Lauren Gunderson. Belvoir 25a. 6-18 May, 2025.

It’s the most YA of YA plots—so much so you could probably rename Lauren Gunderson’s 2014 teen romance I and You something like The Fault in Our Star Turtles (you’ll get it when you see the show). Despite occasionally feeling more like someone’s film pitch than a piece of theatre, I and You achieves its goals admirably. It’s adorable and sad. Sadorable, if you will.

Caroline (Alyssa Peters) is home sick—and has been for most of her life. She’s waiting for a kidney transplant, spending her time in her bedroom immersed in the back catalogue of Elvis and dancing around with her favourite toy, a blue turtle. She’s surprised when athletic schoolmate Anthony (Josh Hammond) turns up trying to rope her into a school project analysing a poem by Walt Whitman. And so “grumpy, sick girl” meets “handsome jock,” and the duo are forced to spend hours alone together to hit their assignment deadline.

Surprise: she’s not that mean after all, and he has the soul of a poet and a taste for jazz. They meet-cute hard, talking about life, death, their dreams and secret passions. But there’s a twist… which I’m obviously not going to spoil.

This is schmaltz with a side of saccharine, and it’s not trying to pretend otherwise. Two attractive young people in a room for a play—you won’t be surprised at where it goes, only that it takes as long as it does to get there. I and You doesn’t have a message or a grand moral to deliver. Instead, it wraps you up in a pulpy romance plot that won’t make your brain do much more than go “awww.”

The dialogue is quippy teen banter—never too dense—and delivered by two actors with oodles of charm. Like the overly loquacious teens we’ve come to expect from every teen-focused TV show post-Dawson’s Creek, the conversation isn’t remotely realistic, but it has a cadence all its own that works in this artificial environment.

Of course, the kicker is that the one bit I most want to talk about is tied up in the play’s “twist”—which we can’t really discuss—but it will make you look back at the previous hour searching for hints. My complaint is that there aren’t many, which makes the late tonal shift feel more like a cheap trick than a meaningful reveal. I saw another play a few years ago that used the exact same twist (oddly, that one was a horror—I’m not telling you what it was), and it was layered into the story with much more art and subtlety.

I and You continues the 25a trend of looking and sounding like it cost far more than the $2,500 budget would suggest. The set and lighting by Saint Clair & Mason Browne have a whimsical charm (I did wonder if the splatter effect on the ground was actually left over from Snakeface, to be honest). Claudia Barrie’s direction is focused and keeps things moving, though the play does occasionally feel like it’s spinning its wheels, waiting for the next conversational turn. The closing moments, including an expressionistic dance sequence, didn’t quite achieve the strong emotional climax they were aiming for.

Despite its lack of grander themes, I and You delivers a simple, brisk (only 75 minutes long) teen story. More importantly, it serves as a showcase for two very good performers—whose agents should be dragging every casting director to come and see them. Fans of YA media will enjoy it. Is this essential viewing? No. Is it a sweet reprieve from the world outside? Definitely.