★★★★★
In Eels’ Climbing To The Moon, Mark Oliver Everett sings of the self becoming blurred: where one person ends, and what others are making of them begins. It could almost be an unofficial epigraph for The Almighty Sometimes, presented by Independent Theatre.
Kendall Feaver’s play lives inside that same terrifying uncertainty. Psychiatric medication can be life-saving. It can also be identity-altering. If chemicals change the self, where does the “real” person live?
That question could become abstract very quickly. Feaver does not let it. Her award-winning debut play was first performed at Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre in 2018 after receiving a 2015 Bruntwood Prize Judges’ Award. It later won Best New Play at the 2018 UK Theatre Awards and both the NSW and Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards in 2019.
Anna has been medicated since childhood. Now legally an adult, she wants to know who she is without the regime that has kept her stable, safe, diminished, protected, contained, alive.
The play shows us four versions of reality. There is Anna’s lived reality: frightening, brilliant, wounded and alive with existential fury. There is Renee’s reality as mother and carer, built from vigilance, guilt and love. There is Vivienne’s reality as psychiatrist, shaped by training, risk management and the best available knowledge. Then there is Oliver’s reality, arriving as romance before discovering that love can become witness, labour and helplessness.
Feaver’s great achievement is that she does not turn any of them into an argument with legs. Everyone is right. Everyone is wrong. Everyone is afraid.
That is why the play feels so postmodern without ever becoming chilly. What is truth? Is Anna mentally ill? Is she experiencing withdrawal? Is she having an understandable response to grief, mortality and the human condition? Is society ill? Is medicine overreaching? Is family love sometimes indistinguishable from control?
The play makes you hold all these questions without giving you a place to rest.
Rob Croser directs with unusual authority. His program notes reveal his background in child protection. This production understands intervention as a moral wound. Sometimes it is necessary. Sometimes it saves a life. Sometimes it becomes another form of harm. The line between care and coercion is thin enough to cut everyone.
The set, designed by Croser and David Roach, is simple but eloquent. Green walls enclose a domestic and clinical world. On the right sits the home kitchen. On the left, the psychiatric office: two chairs, no hiding place.
The middle space becomes hospital ward, hallway or Oliver’s porch. Green is Anna’s favourite colour. The house seems arranged around her need, her identity, her fragility. It is loving. It is suffocating. It is also Renee’s sacrifice made visible.
Luke Bartholomew’s lighting catches Anna’s shifts without turning them into spectacle. Sometimes she is washed in blue. Sometimes the stage is cut by stark white light. Between scenes, music builds pressure. The frenetic piano of Radiohead’s Bloom feels especially apt: nervous system as weather pattern, thought as swarm.
Mia Livingston-Pearce is extraordinary as Anna. She makes her brilliant, fascinating and terrifying, sometimes within the same breath. Anna’s words wound and entrance. Livingston-Pearce understands that intelligence can be both gift and weapon. She lets us see the mind racing ahead of the body, then doubling back to attack whatever love is closest.
Lyn Wilson brings tremendous depth to Renee. Wilson has been part of Independent Theatre for much of its history, and that experience shows. Her Renee is not a martyr. She is funnier, sharper and more exhausted than that. She has loved her daughter through years of dread. That love has cost her, but she cannot imagine not paying.
Naomi Voortman gives Vivienne the cool clinical voice of reason. For some viewers, she may be infuriating. That is useful. Vivienne represents a mental health system trying to act responsibly with incomplete tools.
Neuroscience has made astonishing gains, including the 2024 mapping of the adult fruit fly brain, with around 139,000 neurons and more than 50 million connections. The human brain remains vastly harder to understand. That gap haunts every confident diagnosis.
Johnathon Montgomery is deeply affecting as Oliver. His face flushes pink with feeling. He seems almost unable to keep emotion outside his skin. Oliver begins as possibility: romance, sex, youth, ordinary joy. Then he discovers the gravitational field around Anna. Montgomery lets us watch enchantment turn into fear without losing tenderness.
The play also brushes against the social model of disability without naming it. To what extent is Anna ill? To what extent has the world failed to make space for grief, difference, brilliance and distress?
Once, communities had rituals for death. Faith offered an afterlife. Rites of passage gave young people symbolic thresholds to cross. Now, a child loses a parent and is expected to become functional again. If she cannot, there is a form, a diagnosis, a prescription.
That is not an anti-medication argument. The play is too humane for that. It is a plea for humility.
Jon Jureidini’s program essay, “Let Children Cry”, argues that young people need support to survive strong feelings, not always immediate attempts to erase them. There is dignity of risk in growing up. Children must cry, fail, rage, grieve and sometimes fall apart.
Yet the terrifying question remains: when does non-intervention become abandonment? When does intervention become chemical restraint?
The production also understands the old fear around genius and madness. Anna’s writing may be brilliant because of her sensitivity, her illness, her imagination, or all three. The line between visionary thought and psychosis is not always neat. Imagining worlds that do not yet exist is how humans crawled from the jungle to the metropolis. It is also how a mind can become unbearable to itself.
The mental health crisis may be one of the severe challenges of our time. Or perhaps existential and philosophical despair has always been humanity’s central wound. The Almighty Sometimes does not presume to solve either. Its message is smaller and harder.
Keep loving each other inside the despair. That may not be enough. It may be all we have.
The Almighty Sometimes is presented by Independent Theatre and runs to 6 June at Star Theatres. 145 Sir Donald Bradman Drive Hilton SA 5033.
Tickets: https://www.trybooking.com/events/landing/1567428
Website: https://www.independenttheatre.org.au/2026-season/2026/4/7/the-almighty-sometimes
Socials: https://www.instagram.com/independenttheatreinc/
Photo credits: Nik Long
