Shock Therapy Arts’ Crossing the Divide is not subtle about its ambitions, and it shouldn’t be. This is theatre that wants to provoke, question and unsettle. In a dynamic, tightly performed production, on now for a limited season at QPAC, the company confronts the long shadow of Australia’s colonial past and asks whether the divide it created can ever truly be bridged.
Written, directed and performed by Sam Foster, Hayden Jones and Benjin Maza, the piece begins with a deceptively simple premise. A high school history class trekking across the Great Dividing Range to retrace the expedition of Blaxland, Wentworth and Lawson. What could be an educational excursion quickly becomes something far more charged.
As the students move through the Blue Mountains, their guide gently reveals what is often omitted from textbook accounts: the early and fraught encounters between Indigenous people and colonial explorers.
The play cleverly uses the landscape as both literal and metaphorical terrain. The mountains loom not just as physical obstacles but as symbols of the ideological and cultural rifts that continue to shape national identity.
The production finds its emotional core in Liam (Benjin Maza), a Torres Strait Islander scholarship student who grows increasingly uncomfortable as classroom debate turns personal. Forced to repeatedly explain or defend his lived experience, Liam becomes the human cost of historical abstraction.
When tensions flare around the campfire, particularly between Liam and his friend Max (Hayden Jones), who sees colonisation through a lens of inevitable progress, the fissures between past and present widen dramatically.
The performance style is energetic and fluid. The ensemble shifts seamlessly between characters, perspectives and time periods, maintaining a brisk pace without sacrificing emotional weight.
A pivotal sequence in which Liam becomes dislocated in time, suddenly confronting Gregory Blaxland (Sam Foster) at gunpoint, is staged with a jolt that blurs history and immediacy. The effect is both theatrical and deeply unsettling.
The trio’s dynamic chemistry underscores the work. As an ensemble, they create a charged yet cohesive rhythm that carries the narrative forward with urgency. There is little excess here; the storytelling is lean, purposeful and driven by ideas as much as action.
The sound design and composition, crafted by DOBBY alongside Foster and Maza, play a crucial role in shaping the atmosphere. The score pulses beneath the action, heightening tension and grounding the production in a distinctly contemporary voice.
Crossing The Divide premiered in March 2024, and it is no surprise that the work has earned multiple Matilda Award nominations, including recognition for Best Composition / Sound Design, Best Ensemble and Best Independent Production, as well as The Lord Mayor’s Award for Best New Australian Work.
Importantly, Crossing the Divide resists offering easy answers. It does not sermonise, nor does it allow its audience the comfort of historical distance. Instead, it presents competing perspectives with clarity and invites viewers to interrogate their own assumptions.
At its best, the production feels urgent and necessary: theatre that engages with the present moment while acknowledging the complexity of the past. Shock Therapy Arts has delivered a work that is both provocative and compelling, one that recognises the divides within our national story while daring to ask whether they might yet be crossed.
Crossing The Divide is presented by Shock Therapy Arts and runs to 20 February at the Cremorne Theatre, QPAC. Cultural Precinct Cnr Grey and Melbourne Street South Brisbane QLD 4101.
Tickets: https://www.qtix.com.au/whats-on/2026/lep-crossing-the-divide
Website: https://shocktherapyarts.com/crossing-the-divide
Socials: https://www.instagram.com/shocktherapyarts/
Images supplied by Shock Therapy Arts
