It can be quite to disarming to find yourself in a forty-seat room with the playwright himself onstage, playing keyboards with the cheerful unselfconsciousness of performing as someone who is absolutely not a professional keyboard player. The audience claps along. Ashley Walker grins. And then, having set the tone precisely, hands the stage to his two actors, takes a seat in the audience, and watches his own play, somewhat about himself, with a character named Ash, unfold in front of him.
Walker lives with cerebral palsy. He names this plainly in his program note, alongside a quietly provocative creative decision: the character Ash does not perform as such. It is a choice that opens a door the play leaves deliberately ajar. Where does disability end and the person begin? Can you have the real Ash without it? Walker says he has thought about this and the answer, at times, is a definite yes. At other times, he acknowledges, disability has shaped every area of his life and every view he holds. That unresolved tension gives The Unburdening, directed by Luke Visentin, considerably more weight than a straightforward coming-of-age story. Ash is not just a young man trying to find an independent life. He is a young man with a limiting condition, studying for his Masters degree, writing a play while simultaneously navigating a property search with his father, who is also his carer. The stakes are not merely domestic. They are existential.
The Unburdening is Walker's semi-autobiographical two-hander, presented by indie theatre stalwarts subtlenuance as part of Sydney Fringe Festival 2026. Connor Crick plays Ash with restless, likeable energy, capturing the particular frustration of someone who loves this parent dearly, but needs to get away from them regardless. Harrison Collis Oates as Dad brings warmth and comic timing in equal measure, sketching a father whose protectiveness is genuine and whose difficulty letting-go is equally so. Visentin has the two carry the story at a comfortable pace, and their chemistry is natural enough to make the friction feel real.
The staging is straightforward and resourceful. Cardboard moving boxes, each labelled boldly with a location, serve as the production's set, a device that is both practically clever and thematically apt. These are the physical props of transition: the boxes you fill when you are trying to become a separate person. They clutter the stage as the uncertainties clutter Ash's mind.
The play's most interesting structural choice though, is its "metatheatricality". Throughout, Ash could well be writing The Unburdening, struggling to find a throughline, searching for an ending, interrupted at every turn by the very domestic drama he is likely trying to dramatise. It generates gentle comedy and something more quietly observant: the difficulty of making sense of your own life while you are still living it. When Ash finally announces he has found his ending, it lands with the warmth of a story that has arrived somewhere earned.
The production does not pretend to be more polished than it is. Luke Visentin's director's note acknowledges the pleasingly absurd reality that rehearsals took place in the real Ash's actual living room. In a forty-seat room at Erskineville Town Hall, that authenticity is an asset.
The line that cuts deepest comes when Dad suggests Ash look for a place suited to his condition, with "other people like him". Ash's response, "Is that all I am? A fucking illness?," arrives without fanfare but lands with the full weight of everything the play has been quietly building toward. It is a big moment in the production with equally big impact.
At curtain call, Walker himself joins Crick and Oates onstage. The audience, which has spent fifty minutes watching him watch his own story, gives him the welcome he has earned.
The Unburdening. Erskineville Town Hall, The Living Room, 104 Erskineville Road, Erskineville. Sydney Fringe Festival, 22–26 September 2026.
Tickets and more info: https://sydneyfringe.com/events/the-unburdening/
(Images: Veronica Kaye)
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