ophelia. maybe is a nuanced new theatre piece by BYTE (BackYardTheatreEnsemble). This Millennial post-modern drama is a multifaceted play exploring the complex themes of identity, relationships and what it is to be artistically driven as a young female in the modern world. This wonderful new theatre piece is a group-devised performance developed by director Joachim Matschoss and actresses Verity Wood, Breanna Milliken and Emma Snow. The play is primarily set at a bohemian trendy café called Ninety-Nine Witches, where the artistically rich but financially poor friends Lucy (Emma Snow) and Emma (Breanna Milliken) meet and are sometimes served by, but mostly interrupted by, Natalie (Verity Wood) who runs the café with aplomb and esoteric eccentricity.  

The play was conceived just after the silent solitary isolation of COVID lockdowns but gestated to full fruition during the tentative first year after lockdowns. Premiering at the delightfully kitsch and intimate Butterfly Club in Melbourne in December 2022, the play is a Millennial drama which embraces the post-modern feminist notions of multiple discourses and the subjectivity of the modern female. Like the flowers and herbs embraced by Ophelia in Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’, all three characters both meet and break the moulds and expectations of females in a modern world, refusing the constraints of feminine innocence, morality and self-sacrifice, while embracing the more complex and contradictory elements that make up the identity of most modern Millennial women. Ophelia in ‘Hamlet’ hands out rosemary for remembrance and pansies for thought but she refuses to hand out daisies for innocence since as she says, “There is no innocence here”. This production does the same, exploring how difficult it is for young females to navigate between identity and ambition through the fragility of friendships to the delicate and coloured cloak of dreams.  

Emma Snow plays Lucy with both flamboyant flippancy and a fine-grained fragility, a wonderful balance maintained by this charismatic actress. She, like the audience, believes that her brazen self-assurance will make her the front runner for being cast as Ophelia even though her ambitious character seems too abrasive and self-obsessed for an audience to truly feel she deserves the part. As Emma, Breanna Milliken brings a sensitive vulnerability that places her as both a tragic and heroic figure in this ensemble piece. Her emotional vulnerability echoes the melancholic madness and helpless disposition of Hamlet’s Ophelia victimhood and yet her resilience and tenacity reverberate the inner strength we all hoped we had in the times of the Global pandemic. Lucy and Emma’s fragile and sometimes toxic friendship is both counterbalanced and disrupted by the interruptions of the Café Ninety-nine Witches waitress Natalie played by Verity Wood. Wood plays Natalie with a quirky eccentricity that both provides comic relief and a theatre of the absurd dis-ease to the piece. The strong ensemble acting of these three actresses are woven with a subtle complexity by director Joachim Matschoss that both represents the post-modern world of Millennials and provides a thoughtful and satirical commentary on the nature of aspiring female creatives in a post-pandemic world.  

Ultimately, BYTE’s Ophelia. Maybe is a dynamic and delightful ensemble piece with nuanced characters which comments on the complex nature of Millennial females as they explore the nature of connection, ambition and the fragility of friendship. In the end, the audience fears that these three women will, like Shakespeare’s Ophelia, fall with the flowery wreaths of their dreams into the weeping brook of their broken dreams but hopes that they will pull from the watery weight of the grave of ambition towards a horizon where love and passion are the wings of hope and dreams rise above fear and the weight of the modern world. 

Dr. Mark Eckersley

Hedda, Nora, Julie and Me, BackYard Theatre Ensemble, EdFringe 2022, ★★★★☆

This play had me in it with them from the very first beat. The tension of bringing together four incredibly diverse and intense women from the theatrical canon was captivating. This show is an hour of watching a realistic take on four old friends who stayed in contact out of obligation. The brilliant awkwardness made me remember those old worn-out friendships that may be time to let go of. Relationships, old flames, hidden emotions, frustration, creative dreams, and unresolved issues. The perfect storm. A high-school reunion-style set-up brings together four of the theatrical canon’s most iconic women. Hedda- Hedda Gabler and Nora- A Doll’s House, both Ibsen classics, Strindberg’s Julie from Miss Julie and Nina from Chekov’s The Seagull. Hosted at Noras’ house, the play reveals all their unshared burdens, secrets, dreams, and old grudges. Made almost entirely out of monologues and closely translated script from the original plays, it’s impossible to review this piece and not mention the extensive work it would’ve taken Joachim Matschoss to write. I was admittedly a little sceptical when I heard about the concept, but Joachim has intelligently strung together these four women in a setting that allows them to come to life with integrity and a bucket load of exciting twists and turns. It almost felt that the excerpts from each play were meant to be brought together in such a thoughtful manner.
While a more modern-day woman would probably prefer to see these four characters engage with content other than the men in their lives, this is forgiven knowing the script’s origins. In these plays, these characters spent a lot of their voice on men’s actions, infatuations, and attitudes. The four actresses honoured and dedicated themselves wholeheartedly to each character. Verity Wood commits fully to the relentlessness of Hedda’s criticism and struggle. She brings a flair and nuance to this role that left us wanting more. Hedda’s torrent of bitter words is mainly directed toward Nina, played by Amalia Krueger. Amalia gives a well-rounded and colourful perspective to this role and holds strength and dedication in her performance style. Her stage presence is captivating. Nina sits in the inspiration of Julie, a writer played by Rhian Wilson. Rhian brings a lightness and almost optimistic tone to Julie. It’s beautiful to watch Rhian sweep through the tense and awkward dynamic between the group with a breath of fresh air. All are hosted in the home of Nora, played by Bianca Conry. With a gentle and honest performance style, Bianca is a sweet bundle of joy to watch. I couldn’t help but feel empathy for Nora as she tried to keep the peace. The overall set was minimal; this was okay. However, it would be interesting to watch this play unfold with a bigger budget and with a little more set detail to enhance further the coming together of these four characters from their original storylines. There is a lot of potential here in design and scale for this play. Each moment was delivered with honesty and precision, creating an inescapable tension. The tension builds and builds so slowly that expectations are pretty high when the pot does boil over. The moment Hedda picks up a gun is off-stage, leaving me feeling like there was an intensity missing from this moment. We missed a crucial part in the play. But maybe the restraint held right until the end reflects society’s restriction on these women. Theatre is all up for interpretation, right?!

Hedda, Nora, Julie, and Me reveals itself almost painfully slow, in the most captivating way. While the concept and title lend themselves to being a play for theatre lovers, there’s magic here for everyone. Because who hasn’t walked into a reunion and wished they’d stayed home? To celebrate four plays, four characters, and four actresses in an hour with such sophistication and creativity is a worthwhile experience for anyone. This play’s very subtle unravelling kept me engaged until the very end. Beautiful.

Georgia Stone

Shadowfall ★★★½
La Mama, season complete

No one in the theatre world needs me to tell them that La Mama can stage absolute rubbish. Even Betty Burstall had sharp views on some work staged in the theatre she established. And yet La Mama is a remarkable institution because it’s in it for the long haul. It recognises that theatre must be allowed to fail if it is to break new ground, and every so often, a work comes along that succeeds in ways no one was quite expecting.

Shadowfall is one of these. It’s a strange and ephemeral piece, difficult to pin down. The program note invokes known theatrical quantities (it views the COVID lockdowns as “one big Brechtian gesture”, as if crisis itself were an alienation technique) but the show’s dramaturgy feels much freer than that may suggest – a flight, if you like, over unexplored terrain.

The youthful ensemble throws itself into a poetic style of nonlinear drama – one that weaves snatches of thought, song and physical theatre around fragmentary scenes that arrive onstage like unbidden memories.

The latter accumulate without ever shrinking themselves into any obvious narrative, though motifs and suggestions multiply. The myth of Icarus is one triangulation point, with a recurring image of melted wax and feathers haunting the piece, but the interplay between the mythic and the personal is more abstract, its emotional valency unstable.

We are left to ponder how brief scenes portraying the social ostracism and relational aggression of schoolgirl bullies, or conversely, concern at a friend spiralling into drug addiction or mental illness, might be interpreted.

But the piece has been constructed to resist collapsing into common sense. It’s charged with an emotional logic of its own. Between the cast’s impressive commitment, Joachim Matschoss’s striking word choices, and the elegiac quality achieved as it touches down, Shadowfall wrestles a curious and new style of performance into being before our eyes.

Cameron Woodhead, The Age

It is rare that a performance truly embraces what William Defoe sees as great theatre. The Problem is the Ending challenges how we think and encourages us to contemplate and fantasize. It offers the audience rich interpretive layers which explore the nature of creative processes through the eyes of the writer, the actor, and the spectator. The Problem is the Ending is a group devised ensemble play written by Joachim Matschoss and performed by BYTE Ensemble Theatre Company. The piece is beautifully supported by the lyrical and at times whimsical musical compositions of Robert Downie. This is a wonderfully thoughtful and exuberant piece which explores theatre processes, history, and the nature of creative practices. Matschoss directs this play with sensitivity, vigour, and artful simplicity. The warmth, honesty and generosity of his collaborative ensemble processes are evident in the vitality and energy of this show.

The play starts in a Beckett style existential crossroad. A playwright and an actor are searching for an ending to a play they have been developing. The playwright, Jade (Isabel Knight) seeks to complete her play. Her companion, the actor Paige (Florensia Andarini) acts as both a collaborator and a critical antagonist to Jade’s goal. Isabel Knight gives a masterful performance with an invisible vulnerability which is rich in complexity. Her performance embraces both the exuberance of a writer seeking completion and catharsis and the silent frustration of a writer’s quest for authenticity and originality. As Paige, Florensia Andarini is the yin to Isabel Knight’s yan. They are a marriage of conflict and vulnerability in this tragicomedy’s delicate dance between the frustration of stagnation and the joy of creation. Andarini is energetic as a performer combining the vaudevillian with the philosophical. Into this mix arrives the spectator, a symbol of the real world. As Rhiannon, Talya Callahan is fresh, animated, and realistic. As an actress she is able to show an invisible vulnerability fuelled with a quiet intensity which compliments the textured tension created by Knight and Andarini. 

This is an outstanding play, which has strong but varied performances. It is simplistic in the way it addresses the complex issues of the modern creative. It is also rich in the way it weaves literary references and allusions into performance in ironic and often comic moments. This is a breath of fresh air in Melbourne theatre which will enrich the outlook of many school students when it begins its national and international school tour seasons. The play and this performance prompt us to see that Peter Brook reduced theatre down to an Empty Space so that imaginative ensemble performers such as Isabel Knight, Florensia Andarini and Talya Callahan can truly embrace what Brook described as “unpredictable dreams”.

Dr. Mark Eckersley