Keith Gow, Writer

Christmas Eve. A bedroom. Two strangers, their limbs entangled; the doona cover and pillows hiding their identities just a little while longer. Riley wakes first to chimes from his mobile phone; an alarm or an early morning text message. He carefully manoeuvres himself away from last night’s hook-up and drags himself out of bed. His family are coming over for dinner and he’s got to clean up his new apartment before they arrive. But first thing is first, he’s got to get rid of “L” – the man he slept with last night, whose name escapes him right now in his early-morning, hangover fog. L doesn’t seem in a hurry to leave, though. He’s checking his messages; friends are texting photos of their Christmas Eve barbeque, trying to talk him into coming over. He’s not sure he wants to. He’s also sending messages to someone in his phone known only as FUTRE HUSBND and ignoring texts from his dad. Riley, in a haze, is trying to put the pieces together from the night before. He got wasted at

2020 was a weird year for everyone and Lou was not coping. They spent some time in hospital and they joined the Illuminati. I mean, with all the downtime they had, what else were they expected to do? Write King Lear or something? In amongst the global pandemic, people seemed to be attracted to conspiracy theories more than ever before. In a time when QAnon threatened to affect the results of the US Presidential Election, Lou seeking out the truth of the modern-day Illuminati seems almost rational. I mean, they have – allegedly – been around for hundreds of years, there must be something to it right? Joining Lou on their journey, mostly delivered in song, is a wild ride. From diving into dozens of Facebook groups and Reddit forums, to a five-month-long conversation with Deborah, who welcomed her to the light of knowledge, you can’t help but see why people are attracted to enlightenment. I mean, it would make sense if Queen Elizabeth was a lizard person, right? Lou’s stage presence

Belinda McClory as Gertrude in Because the Night When Bruce Springsteen and Patti Smith wrote the song “Because the Night” in 1977, I doubt they were thinking about Hamlet and Ophelia – the song about desire and lust does not really describe the fractured couple of Shakespeare’s play. Springsteen was writing the song for himself to sing, but struggled with it until his sound engineer, Jimmy Iovine, who was working with Smith at the time, introduced the pair. Together they created Patti Smith’s first and, arguably, greatest hit. Theatre, as with song writing, is hugely collaborative, even if we often elevate singer-songwriters and playwrights above the rest of the creative collective. Immersive theatre turns up the viscerality in all areas of the experience of watching a performance. You’re closer to the actors, the sets, the lights and the sound. You’re within a world where you can appreciate details you would never see on stage: drawings, notes, letters, photographs, the feel of dirt