REVIEW BY GRACE DWYER
EDITED BY EMMA PARFITT
Content warning: This play and review contain discussions of rape, murder and gender-based violence.
On an appropriately dark and stormy night, we take the tram to Prahran and walk down a quiet alley to the MC Showroom. It’s a nifty little theatre at the top of several sets of stairs, buzzing with what looks like a full house. The stage is decked out with wooden crates, corrugated iron, and a fishing net. The outside rain hammers on the Showroom roof – unintentionally foreshadowing the intensity to come, perhaps? But I’m getting ahead of myself. A young man in thongs and a singlet carries his surfboard onto the stage and sits down. This is Jared (Fletcher Von Arx), a seventeen-year-old schoolboy and inhabitant of the fictional New South Wales suburb of Blackrock. This silent prologue not only centres him as the protagonist, but as an observer.
Nick Enright’s critically acclaimed play, originally published in 1996, is a ninety-minute extension of his shorter work A Property of the Clan – based on the rape and murder of a fourteen-year-old girl in Stockton, Newcastle. While the additions and changes to Blackrock’s narrative and characters certainly distance it from this real-life event, nothing feels remotely fictional.
The play starts as Jared welcomes his old friend/mentor Ricko (Baily Griffiths) back to Blackrock. Along with schoolmates Davo (Javier Lumsden) and Scott (Samuel John), the boys attend a birthday party for wealthy newcomer Toby (James Parker). We’re introduced to Ricko’s long-suffering ex Tiffany (Isabel Dickson), Jared’s girlfriend and Toby’s sister Rachel (Sabrina Rault), locals Shana (Charlotte Palmer) and Cherie (Olivia Mitchell), Jared’s cousin. There’s a sinister underlying tension in these early establishing scenes. It creeps into the boys’ offhand comments and casual disdain for their girlfriends, sisters, and mothers – the first of many uncomfortable dynamics brought to life by directorial team Grace Mclaughlin and Maddie Richards. Any kind of equitable façade is shattered when fifteen-year-old Tracy Warner is raped, killed, and found by a horrified Rachel. The sickening blame game results in an inundation of revelations: not just the identity of Tracy’s abuser and murderer, but the violence and cruelty towards her memory; the lengths to which the boys will go to protect their mates over the safety of their community; the girls’ inevitable indoctrination into societal misogyny and their need to be unalienably cool, sexually available and not too politically correct; and the way patriarchy spares no class, gender, or suburb.
Blackrock is powered by the development and destruction of its characters’ relationships – a constant balance of hope and despair executed flawlessly by Lunatix’s cast. Rault and Mitchell both excel at conveying the desperate escalation of their characters’ attempts to honour Tracy and hold her abusers accountable – desperation curbed by their jaded mothers, Glenys and Marian, both played by Hayley Michaels. Lumsden, John and Griffiths embody their characters’ entitled callousness and mateship, paralysed with regret, but not deterred enough to develop any self-awareness. Matt Young brings a distinct tone to his three roles as Jared’s father (Len), Toby and Rachel’s father (Stewart), and Glenys’s boyfriend (Roy). I found the most compelling relationship and two standout performances to be between Jared and his mother, Diane (Cassandra Hart). Hart turns in an incredibly tender portrayal of a mother’s torment: haunted by the events in Blackrock, her son’s increasing emotional distance and her own debilitating medical struggle. We see their beginning as a functional and loving family slowly stripped away as Jared embraces his mates’ ideologies. Von Arx absolutely kills this transition and commands the stage – I predictably fell headfirst for his ‘nice guy’ act.
Enright’s dialogue is memorable, and often moving, but Richards and Mclaughlin understand the depth of devastating silence – Cherie sitting by Tracy’s grave, Jared breaking down on the floor, Tiffany standing, exhausted after one too many public acts of humiliation. I expect and hope to see every member of the cast in many future productions.
While the production leans towards a more stripped back, minimalist Australiana, the production elements are put to efficient dramaturgical use. Sarah Ryan’s set strikes the perfect balance between setting the scene and leaving enough room for spatial transformation. Carla Gric’s lighting design makes good use of coloured and naturalistic lighting, transforming the stage into a beach, strip club or awards ceremony. A choice that stays with me is a completely dark stage lit by a single torch, revealing a horrified Rachel after finding Tracy’s body. Despite the hammering rain, Patrick Spencer’s sound design certainly holds its own – often emphasising a moment’s dramatic weight by cutting background noise. Costumes, designed and coordinated between Amelia Joy Fraumano, Richards, and the cast, are simultaneously contemporary and timeless, signalling that Blackrock’s world and narrative are just as relevant today as they were in the mid-nineties. Finally, it’s a niche nit-pick of mine that stage fighting often opts for sleeker choreography and fails to replicate real life teenage scraps – so I’m especially gratified to see fight choreographer Scott Jackson strike the perfect balance between dynamic movement and the more realistic, pathetic violence erupting in Blackrock.
Unbelievably, this is only Lunatix Theatre’s second production. The independent company debuted with Nick Payne’s Constellations in early February of this year, an ambitious, yet much smaller and more abstract work. Richards and Mclaughlin deserve props, then, for such a strong choice for a second show. I don’t think it’s coincidentally timed, either: their website describes the play as a ‘human drama which examines the social forces behind the impulse to violence’. We’re experiencing an increasing number of young men turning to extreme conservative ideology, exacerbating a much-publicised male loneliness epidemic while domestic femicide rates continue to be considered a national crisis. Performing Blackrock in 2025 is a heart-breaking but necessary reminder that suffocating, violent misogyny crushes us all.
Lunatix Theatre’s Blackrock plays July 25th-28th at the MC Showroom.
GRACE DWYER is a third year Arts student majoring in English and Theatre Studies. She fell in love with student theatre during her first year at college, playing a frog prince – and loves watching and talking about productions almost as much as she loved hopping around the stage.
EMMA PARFITT (she/her) is the Dialog’s head editor and has written Dialog reviews alongside studying towards her science degree for the past two years. She is a production manager, stage manager and producer on the Melbourne indie theatre scene and a veteran of student theatre at Union House Theatre.
The Dialog is supported by Union House Theatre.
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