Monstrous veneers, naïve similitudes, brave counterfeits and radical fictions – the inescapable artifice of storytelling is the dark vortex consuming minds and lives in Sam Holcroft’s brilliant and dizzyingly kafkaesque A Mirror, first staged in London in 2023.

It's a sloshing, dark purgatory of mother/daughter dysfunction that we encounter for sixty minutes in Gemma Burwell’s striking debut. In its surreal watery antechamber, with dialogue tinged by Beckett, two tormented psyches can’t get clean.

So much mutually assured destruction is in our gendered rules of existing, Shepard seems to be saying. All these baits and traps and stupid, savage dances, rubbed raw and bloody by the rote turning of the wheel.

Holidays it may soon be, but the horrors persist. This show – ft. stand-outs iOTA, Hannah Raven and Nat’s What I Reckon – understands that naughty is just as necessary as nice. Presented by Red Line Productions until 20 Dec 2025.

I don’t do stars, but giving this one five. As one of my colleagues said, it’s Iolanthe’s year.

This tightly choreographed two-hander is a bruising examination of a gay man reflecting on the traumatic origin story of how he came into his sexuality, and its long shadow through a life.

Lim has gathered us all into her consciousness, assigning us the role of both active participants and welcome witnesses, as she travels back in time to answer the seemingly irresolvable questions which have dogged her all her hyphenated ‘Asian-Australian’ life. Who is she? Where does she fit?

First staged in 2010, A Czar is Born returns with old-fashioned silliness, musical numbers, and a solid cast.

A communion of shared fairy bread. A sudden outpouring of light. A red ute. With PACT’s ambitious production, Salusinszky is in a firmament of her own, incandescent with her own strange light.

A thick spire of twisted fabrics reaches up, or plunges down; a heavy umbilical cord between sky and earth. A frozen vortex is at its base, or a dark and oily mirror.