Crows

Click here if you liked this article 4

https://www.eventfinda.com.au/2025/crows/melbourne/carlton

Date Reviewed: 12/11/2025

A cluster of human-sized crows move restlessly, ominously in the warehouse-like basement of The Motley Bauhaus.

Robert Lewis and award-winning playwright Ryan Enniss’ Crows, directed by Callum Bodman, is a mosaic of interwoven monologues. The premise is simple: ten characters played by four actors, each ensnared in webs of anxiety, paranoia, and fractured relationships. Each steps forward to tell their stories while, around them, the other characters interact as crows.

Performed by Ben Goss, Jalen Ong, Chloe Mckeon, and Annaliese Cartwright, this striking piece uses masks, memory, and flashes of absurd humour to explore the fragile line between sanity and survival.

Each monologue is a confession clawing its way out of the dark: one performer removes their crow mask while the others circle, murmuring and shifting in the shadows. The effect is almost ritualistic, like watching a theatrical séance unfold. The use of the mask itself is the production's core design thesis: when worn, it represents the crushing collective guilt; when removed, it reveals the exposed, raw truth of the individual who must briefly express their personal trauma.

The creation process is a literary baton: Lewis writes a monologue and passes it to Enniss, who responds, reshapes, or deepens it, or vice versa. The result is a haunting tapestry of voices that collide, collude and bounce off each other, as if the same soul were refracted through ten cracked mirrors.

One story, a childhood memory of a marble rolling across a Holden bonnet, is recognisable in another memory of a father and son locked in battle over “three shades of pink” paint, as generational abuse seeps through the walls. A cashier mentions a father buying pink in her story, a subtle insertion. A neighbourly encounter, paranoia creeping across suburban neighbourhoods, and an exorcist posing as a boyfriend all carry the recurring crow motif, looming larger as the work progresses.

In mythology, crows are omens, messengers between worlds, harbingers of change, and reminders of mortality. Here, they are both witnesses and participants, embodying the psychic residue of trauma fluttering through each story.

The show’s climax, a hallucinatory vision of God as a drag queen presented by Ong, lands like a revelation. “If you want the definition of a man to change,” she thunders, “then you’re going to clean up your shit.” It’s profane, profound, and strangely redemptive as the play’s thesis us distilled into one glittering gospel moment. This epiphany moment forces the audience to confront the intersection of toxic masculinity and spiritual crisis.

Director Callum Bodman keeps the staging spare. The performers move like restless birds around four chairs. Georgia Mason’s minimal, moody design transforms The Motley Bauhaus into a liminal zone between the living and the dead, with lighting of different colours also shifting the emotional landscape. The direction expertly weaponises the space, using sharp geometric coloured lighting to slice through the darkness, trapping the confessing character in a brutal spotlight of self-examination while the crows encircle them in the shadows.

Each actor brings nuance to the chaos. Ben Goss finds raw physicality in anger barely contained. Jalen Ong balances eerie calm with simmering dread. Chloe Mckeon glides between tenderness and terror, but special kudos go to Annaliese Cartwright, who grounds the work with humour, emotional clarity and warmth.

Crows embodies the commitment made by Persona Collective to be both a performance company and laboratory, focusing on the exploration and development of energised performance training methods.

Dark, intelligent and strangely beautiful, Crows sits on the fence between prose, performance and art.

Highlights

• Haunting ensemble work blending realism, absurdism, and mythology
  
• Powerful performances by all four cast members, especially Annaliese Cartwright
  
• Visually arresting design and movement direction by Georgia Mason and Callum Bodman
  
• A rare theatrical experience where language, sound, and gesture merge into ritual
  
• Cameo appearances of one story in other stories, look for the patterns
• The Motley Bauhaus venue, a Seventies-styled multipurpose centre with artworks and a pub.
  

Who’s it for

• Lovers of experimental and physical theatre
  
• Audiences who enjoy psychological drama, dark humour and storytelling
  
• Those interested in exploring contemporary Australian writing
  
• Anyone ready to embrace the raw.
  

Crows is performed through to 15 November, 7pm, at the Motley Bauhaus (118 Elgin Street, Carlton, Melbourne). Telephone 1800 710 499 for ticket sales. 

Reviewed by Mary Sinanidis