The best of Melbourne theatre and musicals this month

Hey Melbourne, the Mormons are back! After wowing audiences in Sydney with plenty of "did they really just say that?” humour, The Book of Mormon is heading to the Princess Theatre. For the uninitiated, The Book of Mormon follows two inept Mormon missionaries from Salt Lake City on their journey to save mortal souls in a corner of Uganda ruled by a one-eyed warlord. It’s the brainchild of South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone – hence, you can expect a lot of explicit language – along with Avenue Q and Frozen co-creator Robert Lopez. 

Memory is a tricksy companion at the best of times. Even more so when tragedy strikes and lives are shattered or erased. Grief swirls in unexpected directions, consuming us all of a sudden. In pushing us further forward or pulling us back to where we started, the details get lost, washed away like sand on a beach, then reformed all too painfully clear. So it is with Australian playwright Tom Holloway’s confronting puzzle of a memory play, Beyond the Neck. Subtitled ‘A Quartet on Loss and Violence,’ it was written as a collective trauma response to the Port Arthur massacre and the indiscriminate slaughter of 35 lives, horrendously injuring 23 more. Drawing on survivor stories using some of the techniques of verbatim-style, the work is a reckoning with how well-meaning media gags on reporting the aftermath and the court case stunted the recovery process for many survivors and opened the door for rampant conspiracy theories.

When we first glimpse bone-wielding apes careening around a towering, dark monolith in the opening moments of Stanley Kubrick’s epic film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, we are awestruck and alarmed by its ominous presence. So, too, the vast pier of the West Gate Bridge that dominates the Southbank Theatre’s Sumner Stage during labourer-turned-playwright Dennis McIntosh’s new work, West Gate. Simply but astonishingly realised by set and costume designer Christina Smith, the foreboding presence of this towering structure makes Cassandras of us all. Even as the showering sparks of its creation pierce the dark, with lighting designer Niklas Pajanti working hand in glove with Smith to deploy the lighting rig as construction gantries, we are bitterly aware that it will fall, much like Troy.