★★★★★
Five windowpanes divide a large blue box. Tall screens shaped like smartphones stand on either side. The stage is empty, but Nick Atkinson’s voice is already filling it, delivering the director’s commentary for his film Low.
Matilda Woodroffe’s set establishes the visual grammar of Ash Flanders’ Commentary: windows, mirrors, screens and reflections. Each promises access to reality while placing another frame around it.
Our lives are movies for which we supply our own commentary, casting ourselves as protagonist, victim or misunderstood genius. The problem is that everyone else is directing a film of their own.
Then video of the incident that destroyed Low appears. Nick’s collaborator Hamish has filmed a teenage girl through her bedroom window. The camera initially seems to end the argument. Here is objective evidence. What other interpretation could there be?
Flanders and director Petra Kalive do not dispute the violation. Nuance is not exoneration. Instead, Commentary expands its field of inquiry to the stories built around the image: who knew what, who benefited, who remained silent, who later rewrote events and who gets to decide when another person’s account becomes definitive.
Twenty years after the film was buried, filmmaker-turned-university lecturer Nick is invited to present it at a retrospective. The accompanying director’s commentary offers him what he has always wanted: a captive audience and the opportunity to tell the story on his terms. He was the responsible collaborator, he insists; the genuine talent, betrayed by someone else’s pathology.
Gyton Grantley’s masterful performance gradually dismantles that mythology. Nick is someone you recognise and loathe. Spend enough time around powerful men, and you will have met him: charismatic, entertaining and apparently vulnerable, yet capable of turning a room brittle whenever his fragile ego begins to splinter.
The people around him seem to walk on eggshells, or broken glass, anticipating the rage that will follow any challenge to his version of himself.
Grantley never reduces Nick to a swaggering monster. His conviction is real, as are his disappointments and flashes of tenderness. That makes him more unsettling. Kalive’s program note identifies a Salieri quality in Nick: he can recognise the artistic genius he does not possess.
Hamish had an instinctive, raw and self-destructive authenticity; Nick has competence, drive and the money and institutional position required to remain in circulation. He nurtured Hamish, resented him and has spent two decades rebuilding their collaboration with himself at its centre.
Every relationship becomes material for this reconstruction. Nick blames Hamish for his stalled career, but his encounters with podcasters, former colleagues, his wife and his mistress reveal a more prosaic cause: ego, entitlement and a near-total incapacity for reflection. He pursues students partly because they still see the award-winning filmmaker he needs to believe he is, rather than the failed artist he fears he has become.
The commentary track runs through the play, guiding our sympathies and inviting us into Nick’s confidence. Visual evidence repeatedly interrupts him. Memory shifts, timelines distort, and other people introduce incompatible accounts that feel, to them, equally true.
Nick responds as he always has: he reframes. If the film no longer works, there is an interview, a podcast, a rebranded screenplay or another medium through which he can regain control.
He cannot, because the thing that made Low extraordinary was never his alone. That knowledge poisons every reinvention. Nick’s tragedy is not simply mediocrity, but an inability to accept his own portion of it.
The screens also place Commentary squarely within the social-media age. Every comment section now resembles a theatre full of competing directors’ tracks, each contributor attempting to enforce a preferred interpretation.
Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger describes the uncanny split between physical and online selves, but the divide predates smartphones. Oscar Wilde built The Importance of Being Earnest around public and private identities: the work self, romantic self, marital self and illicit self. Social media did not invent performed identity. It industrialised it and gave the audience a reply button.
Flanders describes the play as “vicious”, and its sharpest turn is towards us. Artists occupy an unusual place in public life because audiences use them to define themselves. Admiration becomes identity; fandom becomes tribe.
When an artist is exposed, the audience may experience it as an accusation against its own judgment. The familiar question of whether we can love the art and hate the artist is also a question about what our consumption says about us.
The play interrogates the contemporary demand for purity without pretending that accountability is persecution. What mistakes may an artist survive? Does the nature of the offence matter? Is apology sufficient?
Flanders’ tentative thesis appears to be that failure need not be final when it produces reflection, learning and change. Nick’s problem is not merely that he has made mistakes. It is that every admission is another performance designed to evade what those mistakes reveal.
That distinction is vital to the production’s examination of power in the arts. Success is a lottery administered by gatekeepers who may confuse aesthetic authority with personal entitlement. The relationships between lecturers and ambitious film students are structurally unequal, regardless of how willingly a student enters them.
Yet Commentary resists a simpler narrative in which every younger woman is presented only as powerless. Clea and Gen understand the currencies of the industry and sometimes deploy sexuality, access and attention in pursuit of careers. Their agency does not erase the older man’s institutional power.
Conversely, Saskia’s recollections of being a young actor in her first role reveal how quickly an exciting opportunity can become an unsafe environment. By presenting these experiences together, Flanders refuses both victim-blaming and the flattening of women into passive symbols.
That refusal will provoke arguments. It should. The play is resisting the polarisation through which one perspective must invalidate every other. Contradictory experiences can coexist without every judgment becoming equally sound.
Kate Cheel is a riot as Saskia, who attends anxiously to her shiny skin during Zoom calls with Nick while complaining that she is ageing and trapped in a television detective series. Jennifer Innes’ accent work allows Cheel’s voice to drift between Los Angeles polish and an Australian undertow.
Saskia remains privately warm towards Nick, even as public appearances, professional minders and reputational risk require her to maintain distance. It is a familiar arts-industry arrangement: affection behind closed doors, disavowal where the cameras can see.
Cheel also plays Clea, while Anna Steen and Shardae Santos undertake their own transformations as Mish and Anna, and Gen and Frankie. The doubling reinforces the play’s concern with performed selves. Costume, voice and posture change, but traces of one persona appear to haunt the next.
Santos gives Gen and Frankie complexity: they are young without being powerless, ambitious without becoming moral lessons. Steen is especially incisive as podcast host Anna, delivering pipe bombs about contemporary media and its audiences beneath the rhythm of professional curiosity.
Jessica Ruby Patricks, appearing only on film, completes an ensemble in which women too often become images upon which Nick projects innocence, betrayal, temptation or blame, while continually asserting lives beyond his frame.
Dan Thorpe’s composition and sound design are initially so subtle that they seem to sit beneath consciousness. When Nick’s narratives begin to fail, thriller textures gather and tension escalates.
Thorpe’s video design, with content by Matt Byrne, turns screens from explanatory devices into adversaries: each new image is a rupture that Nick’s voice cannot quite contain.
Nic Mollison’s lighting shifts the blue box between bedroom, confessional, interrogation room and hall of mirrors.
References to Flinders University and the Adelaide Film Festival update the text and heighten the uncomfortable sensation that we are flies on the wall of Adelaide’s arts scene, watching familiar hierarchies operate at close range.
The play offers no clean resolution to its questions of complicity, memory, power and punishment. Its politics are incisive, but its perspective remains the biting perspective of Flanders, refracted through Kalive and her collaborators. It will generate fierce foyer debates because nobody involved pretends to possess all the answers.
That is not an evasion. It is the point. A work opposed to the tyranny of a single commentary track cannot finish by imposing one of its own.
Like all good theatre, Commentary turns our inner monologues back upon us. Where have we edited our memories, inflated our virtues or cast another person as the cause of our failures? What have we learned from the harm we have caused?
If we meet someone who finds those questions too confronting to look inward, someone who can only spin, reframe and blame, we should probably run.
Tickets: https://my.statetheatrecompany.com.au/overview/commentary
Website: https://statetheatrecompany.com.au/shows/commentary/
Socials: Socials: https://www.instagram.com/statetheatresa/
Commentary is presented by State Theatre Company South Australia and runs to 5 September at the Dunstan Playhouse. Adelaide Festival Centre, King William Street Adelaide SA 5000.
Photo credits: Matt Byrne
