BLADDERWRACK

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https://www.theatreworks.org.au/2025/bladderwrack

Date Reviewed: 04/09/2025

You walk into the dark Explosives Factory in St Kilda, greeted by the sound of jazz music and a blackboard covered in chalk drawings of fish. Two men in sharp suits appear, speaking in clipped, old-fashioned tones reminiscent of a 1930s talkie. They apologise that unfortunately, the show is going ahead. From there, Bladderwrack dives straight into a bizarre pirate comedy brimming with odd humour and curious scenes that are as compelling as they are confounding.

Created and performed by David Tredinnick and Adam Browne, with theatrical bursts of opera from Samuel Thomas-Holland, the show feels like a slapstick dream turned surreal nightmare at the bottom of the ocean.

The story follows two ageing pirates, Saucy Jack and Bagfoot, who have been trapped for years in an air bubble inside a sunken ship. They debate how long they’ve been there: 18, 30, or perhaps 187 years. But the plot's intentional collapse is the show's structural thesis. The endless bickering and cryptic fragments transform the sunken ship into an existential purgatory where narrative coherence is swallowed by the futility of their confinement. That is when the play transforms into a Beckettian endurance test. 

The dialogue, part Goon Show patter, part nautical nightmare, veers between moments of brilliance and complete bewilderment. Some scenes shine with dark humour; others collapse under their own absurdity. A giant mermaid puppet makes a surprise entrance before a slushy baby centipede is pulled from her belly, leaving the audience both baffled and amused.

In one scene, the audience is asked to close their eyes to imagine "monsters and monstresses," before being told that such visions are "far more effective than anything this show could afford to stage." This self-aware humour leads to the show's most potent meta-theatrical device: the repeated plea to "buy the Book of the Play." By constantly pointing to the text, the performance deliberately fractures the fourth wall, making its own low-budget artifice visible. This meta-theatrical contract forces the audience out of passive enjoyment and into complicity with the show’s bewildering lack of certainty.

Technically, the production delights in its inventive simplicity. Two performers sit at a table at the back, creating live sound effects, splashes, sloshes, and ocean groans. They use jars of water, metal sheets, and their own voices. A giant glowing fish with an enormous head later devours one of the pirates, plunging the show into full-blown surreal horror. And yes, the rumour is true: the play proudly features "the longest far ever heard on the Antipodean stage", perfectly summing up Bladderwrack's mix of the highbrow and the ridiculous.

The performances are bold and fearless. Tredinnick and Thomas-Holland commit wholeheartedly into the chaos, their voices, faces, and bodies working to keep this strange vessel afloat. Their volatile characterisations, the frayed patience and constant one-upmanship, provide the only steady anchor in this swirling vortex of nonsense.

Ultimately, Bladderwrack is less a play than an experience, a strange shipwreck of imagination and absurdity. The pirates’ debates on survival, guilt, and eternal damnation unfold in cryptic fragments that invite the audience to fill in the blanks. You may leave the theatre wondering what it all meant, and whether you even liked it, but perhaps that uncertainty is the point. You may even buy the book.

Highlights

• Fearless performances by David Tredinnick and Samuel Thomas-Holland
  
• Inventive live sound effects made with jars, voices, and metal sheets
  
• A giant mermaid puppet birthing an anthropomorphic centipede 
• A glowing fish devouring a pirate in a surreal climax
  
• “The longest fart ever heard on the Antipodean stage” (if you like that kind of humour)

Who it’s for

• Fans of absurdist theatre, The Goon Show, or Monty Python
  
• Lovers of grotesque comedy, puppetry, and the darkly surreal
  
• Audiences who enjoy experimental theatre and don’t mind confusion and a scene with some bad ventriloquism
  
• People who appreciate fearless acting and inventive low-budget staging
  

Playing at the Explosives Factor from Tuesday to Saturday, 7.30pm, until 15th November.

Reviewed by Mary Sinanidis