# COMMENTARY

**Featured** — On Your Markus  
**Event:** Commentary by State Theatre Company South Australia  
**Tickets:** https://statetheatrecompany.com.au/shows/commentary/  
**Published:** 29 July 2026  
**Author:** Markus Hamence  
**Source:** https://onyourmarkus.au/commentary/

Helpmann Award-nominated writer Ash Flanders' Commentary examines the ethics of art-making and accountability through a filmmaker confronting his past when his controversial debut feature is resurrected for retrospective screening. The State Theatre Company South Australia production, directed by Petra Kalive, runs 21 August to 5 September 2026 at the Dunstan Playhouse, Adelaide Festival Centre.

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**STATE THEATRE COMPANY SOUTH AUSTRALIA PRESENTS**

**COMMENTARY **

**By Ash Flanders**

Helpmann Award-nominated writer Ash Flanders' *Commentary *is equal parts scalpel and mic drop. 

Premiering in August with State Theatre Company South Australia, this sharp and funny work interrogates the ethics of art-making in an era when cancelling people feels like a spectator sport. 

Enter Nick, played by Gyton Grantley (*Underbelly, House Husbands*), a once-promising filmmaker now university lecturer. His controversial debut feature, *Low, *is being resurrected for a retrospective screening at the Adelaide Film Festival. *Low *was co-created with his former best friend Hamish, who is now disgraced and presumed dead. The film remains dogged by allegations of abuse and exploitation. 

As Nick preps a director's commentary and public appearance at the AFF, the past arrives uninvited via a chorus of women (played by a cast of South Australian actors): student-lover Gen (recent Flinders University graduate Shardae Santos), wife Mish (Anna Steen), former muse Saskia (Kate Cheel), and Frankie (also played by Santos), a teenage girl whose reappearance catalyses a chain of revelations and reckonings that culminate in Nick’s fall from professional and personal grace. 

Structurally slick, the play mimics the fragmented form of a DVD commentary track: non-linear, reflexive, full of contradiction, omission, and performance. 

Director Petra Kalive describes *Commentary *as "a work about who controls the conversation and who has the loudest voice. Whose voices are doing the silencing or who is getting silenced?" 

**21 Aug - 5 Sep 2026 **  
**Dunstan Playhouse, Adelaide Festival Centre **

**CONTENT **Course language, adult themes, sexual references and partial nudity   
**RUN TIME **90 minutes, no interval 

![Commentary](https://media.onyourmarkus.au/admin/2026/07/7922f5ef-f937-4ee3-b5e7-1f72ee797f80.jpg)