REVIEW: MONSTER - Performances Elevate Macmillan's Relentless Confronting Drama

Content warning: references to violence, suicide, and themes of self-harm.

There is no gentle way in. Monster, Duncan Macmillan’s fierce four-character play, lands its first blow before you’ve had a chance to settle. Tiny Dog Productions, presenting this Australian premiere at KXT on Broadway’s 70-or so seat theatre, has made the intimacy not merely atmospheric, but structural, turning the audience into unwilling witnesses, close enough to feel the heat of every confrontation.

At the centre of the play is Tom (Tony J. Black), a British teacher with a City advertising background (a man who fled a breakdown and reinvented himself in the classroom) and Darryl (Campbell Parsons), a relentlessly provocative student whose aggression is the armour of someone deeply, irrevocably wounded. Their exchanges crackle with rapid-fire dialogue, a battle of wits in which the rules keep shifting. Macmillan gives both characters the capacity for cruelty and vulnerability in equal measure, and director Kim Hardwick ensures we never feel entirely safe siding with either.

Black is exceptional. His Tom is a man straining under accumulated pressure: a wife (Romney Hamilton) who is pregnant and drinking, a school system content to pass its most troubled students like parcels, and a student determined to find every crack in his opponent's composure and prise it open. Black plays authority as something earned rather than assumed, which makes its eventual erosion all the more devastating. When Darryl needles him saying “You’re not really black, you’re from Surrey,” the challenge to Tom’s identity cuts deeper than the insult itself. Black lets the wound register without melodrama, and it is quietly shattering.

Parsons, as Darryl, is a revelation. He mines the role’s theatricality. The provocations, the sudden confessions, the unsettling anecdotes, all without ever letting it tip into caricature. This is a young character who discovered his mother after her suicide, who has been shuffled between indifferent classrooms and institutions, and who communicates distress through disruption because no other language has ever worked for him. Parsons carries all of that history in his body, and in the play’s quieter moments, it is heartbreaking.

The domestic world beyond the classroom is rendered with equal precision. Hamilton’s Jodi is not a subplot but a parallel pressure system, a woman increasingly invisible to her husband as his obsession with Darryl consumes him. Linda Nicholls-Gidley as Rita (Darryl’s grandmother and guardian), brings weary pragmatism to a character who represents every overstretched adult the system has deputised to manage what it cannot fix. Her eventual capitulation (agreeing to send Darryl to a residential facility, medicated into compliance) arrives not as resolution but as defeat. The play does not mistake sedation for salvation.

Hardwick’s direction is disciplined and unsparing. The intensity builds in coils, occasionally releasing pressure with a laugh. The humour is real, and well-earned, before tightening again. Victor Kalka’s design and Topaz Marlay-Cole’s lighting keep the aesthetic stripped back, forcing attention onto the performances. Charlotte Leamon’s sound design works almost as a fifth character, but restless and low, suggesting a world that will not quiet down.

While not defined as an 'inspiring' story, the execution certainly is. Monster is a play about systems that fail people and people who fail each other, about the particular loneliness of young men who have learnt that vulnerability is dangerous, and about the violence (literal and otherwise) that accumulates in its absence. It asks difficult questions about race, class, institutional care and masculinity, and it does not resolve them tidily. The ending offers no catharsis, only the blunt fact of what it costs.

But the performances are, without qualification, exceptional. The ensemble cast produce the kind of theatre that makes you forget you are watching craft; you simply believe it. That, in an intimate theatre with nowhere to hide, is everything.

Monster plays at KXT on Broadway until 21 March. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes, no interval.
Tickets and more info: https://www.kingsxtheatre.com/monster

(images: Abraham de Souza)