Featured
COMMENTARY
By Markus Hamence
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.
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
