REVIEW: Goodbye, Eli Anderson - THAT Production Company

Goodbye, Eli Anderson

Presented by: THAT Production Company

Venue: Ipswich Civic Centre

Date attended: 19 August 2026

Playwright: Grace Wilson

Director: Timothy Wynn

Assistant Director: Ruby Sanders

Set & Costume Design: Madeleine Barlow

Lighting Design: Daniel Anderson

Video Design: Nevil Howell

Sound Design & Composition: Morgan Francis

Photography: Kenn Wylchi

Content warnings: Mature themes, coarse language, mild violence, terminal illness, references to suicide, and grief.

“I can't let life catch up to me."

At 17 years old, Eli Anderson should be focused on senior year and whatever comes next. Instead, he’s facing terminal cancer, and a future that has been unexpectedly and unfairly cut short. Written by Grace Wilson, Goodbye, Eli Anderson won Queensland Theatre’s Young Playwrights’ Award before receiving its world premiere with THAT Production Company.

Eli Anderson (Lincoln Kay) has a dark cloud hanging over him, with the same illness that took his mother now threatening his own life. His father (Hugh Parker) has gone into protective overdrive, while older brother Gabe (Angus Freer) is trying to figure out how to act around Eli when everyone knows their time together is running out.

Eli doesn’t want to spend whatever time he has left being treated like he’s dying. So he takes Betty (the family’s colourful old campervan), and sets off for Uluru to make some memories of his own. Things get a lot more interesting when a teenage troublemaker, going by the oh-so-clever name “Hugh Jass”, hijacks his ride and insists on a lift to Darwin. Hello, Benji Hatchet (Jesse Frommelt).

These reluctant road-trip companions quickly become something resembling brothers. Benji talks incessantly, steals things, gets bored every eight seconds, makes ridiculous decisions, and barrels through the world with the energy of an overexcited puppy who’s discovered the front gate has been left open. He becomes exactly what Eli needs. Both boys are on the run, but for very different reasons. As the story unfolds, we learn that Benji isn’t sure he even wants a future. He barely has a past to cling to either, having been essentially left alone in the universe. This younger teen is contemplating the idea of ending his own story, while Eli has had that decision made for him.

Grace Wilson is clear that this isn’t really a play about cancer, but about men who love each other and struggle to say it aloud. Her writing places Eli in a cruel limbo between childhood and adulthood. Benji represents the adolescence he can still touch (full of play, impulsiveness, petty crime, and mischief), while to me, Gabe feels like everything waiting on the other side of seventeen: responsibility, family, memory, and adulthood. Eli sits between them, knowing he may never quite reach Gabe’s side. Thankfully, Wilson doesn’t let that sadness swallow the play. This is still an Aussie road trip, with plenty of joy along the way.

The show takes us back to a time when cassettes were king, disposable cameras were the Instagram of the day, and a Refidex was your trusty GPS. For just a dollar, the pub jukebox could become your own disco inferno. At one point, there’s even talk of becoming pen pals, because keeping track of your random road-trip buddy was a much bigger logistical challenge before social media. The boys play cricket at a far less touristy Uluru, evade the cops like pros, and soak up the exhilarating thrill of being young and up to no good.

Lincoln Kay plays Eli with a finely balanced mix of anger, fear, humour, stubbornness, and vulnerability. He never becomes simply “the sick kid” in the play. Kay’s quieter work packs just as much of a punch, with Eli’s vivid dreams and moments of make-believe reminding us how young he still is. His monologue addressed to his mum beneath the stars was met with audible sniffles in the audience. Only someone who has faced Eli’s circumstances could truly know how he feels or understand his reasoning from inside his head. Still, I found myself empathizing fiercely with him, even when his choices seemed irrational to those who cared about him. As Gabe puts it, “He doesn’t want to be coddled, he wants to be capable.”

Jesse Frommelt is enormously endearing as Benji, whose relentless, chaotic energy could easily become exhausting in less capable hands. Instead, every bit of his performance feels truthful, especially when an intense confrontation with Eli completely changes the atmosphere. I went from tensing up to tearing up within the same scene as Frommelt’s emotional work landed with startling force. The impact of having young actors who actually match the characters’ ages is huge. Their awkwardness, bravado, silliness, affection, and sudden bursts of emotional intensity feel completely real - never like adults trying to imitate teenagers.

Angus Freer brings a different kind of pain to Gabe. He’s facing the reality that his little brother will die before him, and there’s nothing he can do to fix it. Freer captures Gabe’s position between protecting Eli and respecting him. He understands something their father struggles to accept: keeping Eli alive isn’t the same as letting him truly live. His exchanges with Hugh Parker as their father are particularly intense. Dad’s overbearing nature can be frustrating, but having already lost his wife to cancer, his fear is painfully understandable. Together, Freer and Parker capture the emotional limbo of anticipatory grief, cherishing Eli while he’s still with them and already wondering what they might regret afterwards.

Timothy Wynn’s direction allows all that emotional weight to sit comfortably alongside the pace, humour, and momentum of the road trip. Madeleine Barlow’s set drops us straight into regional Australia, with corrugated tin, road imagery, and Betty herself dominating the space. A genuine campervan is an ambitious centrepiece, but Betty more than earns her place. She rotates and shifts throughout the trip to give us different perspectives, with the backstage team deserving their own shoutout for repeatedly manoeuvring the thing around!

Morgan Francis's sound design gives Betty plenty of sputters, groans, and engine noises, helping sell the idea that she’s actually getting them somewhere. The music of their era becomes another bonding language for the boys. I also loved the striped motif across Barlow’s design. Stripes appear on the walls, across Betty’s paintwork, and throughout the boys’ costumes, tying the whole visual world together. Nevil Howell’s video work is very clever too, with projections of scenery and road signage, plus live footage allowing us to watch Eli and Benji from inside the van. The projections expand beyond the stage during Eli’s imaginative sequences, while Daniel Anderson’s lighting finds beauty in the landscape, particularly beneath the stars and at dawn over Uluru.

Out there, Eli can disappear from his father’s protection and feel completely alive, while the enormity of the world reminds us how much of it he’ll never get to see. Out on the road, these boys finally get something they haven’t really had before... Space to muck around. Space to fight. Space to be frightened. And, eventually, enough space to speak.

Grace Wilson wrote the first version of Goodbye, Eli Anderson as a teenager, and perhaps that’s why its young characters are allowed to be so contradictory. They can be brave and terrified, selfish and generous, hilarious and devastating within moments of each other. Nobody suddenly becomes eloquent just because this awful thing has happened. These are boys trying to find words for experiences they were never taught how to discuss. Sometimes they manage it. Sometimes all they can do is sit beside each other in a battered van, put on a cassette, and keep driving.

Funny, poignant, and scrappy, Goodbye, Eli Anderson introduces a distinctive young Australian voice in Grace Wilson, brought to life by the gifted young performers entrusted with her work. It brought plenty of joy and tears, and left a fairly substantial lump in my throat. Grace Wilson may have written a story about a boy running out of time, but I suspect this play itself has a long life ahead of it.