REVIEW: Micro Theatre - Things That Happen

Micro Theatre

Presented by: Things That Happen

Venue: New Tricks, Brisbane

Date Attended: 15 July 2026

Founder and Director: Flavia Carrillo Truyenque

Photography: Firemark Photo Media

The Interview

Writer: Ricardo Arévalo

Lamont: Liam Kenny

Marla: Stella Peterson

The Chair

Writer: Daniel Giorgi

Woman: Emma Kidd

Man: Nicholas Chong

Presented by Things That Happen, Micro Theatre brought together two new twenty-minute plays by Brisbane writers, performed inside the warehouse bar New Tricks. Rather than trying to disguise the venue as a conventional theatre, the production claimed one corner of the room and worked with what was already there: the open floor, a raised DJ platform, and even a small window cut into the wall above the audience. The atmosphere was casual and unpredictable. Some audience members further back had a tougher time seeing everything, but placing the action among the crowd made the evening feel much more immediate than it might have on a traditional stage.

The first play, Ricardo Arévalo’s comedy The Interview, followed Lamont as he prepared for his fiftieth job interview. Dressed in a suit jacket, wildly patterned pants, and a Godfather tie, he chatted to his dog while trying to convince himself that maybe, just maybe, number fifty would finally be the one. Liam Kenny made Lamont an extremely likable walking disaster. He invented job descriptions, attempted to explain the suspicious gaps in his resumé, and bluffed his way through each new hurdle with varying degrees of success. Kenny’s fluffy curls and wonderfully expressive reactions completed the character's chaotic appearance (this was not a man radiating corporate professionalism).

His interviewer, Marla, began severe and matter-of-fact, then gradually became far stranger than the applicant sitting opposite her. Stella Peterson used her whole body in the role, with pointed facial expressions, bizarre little sounds, and increasingly unhinged physical choices. Peterson played Marla’s escalating demands with complete conviction, from a truth-or-lie test to making Lamont bark like a dog, exercise, and confess his deepest, darkest secret. The more seriously Marla treated the whole ridiculous process, the funnier it became.

Arévalo kept the writing compact, with each new stage of the interview escalating the joke. The sound design joined in too, building grand dramatic anticipation around situations that absolutely did not warrant it. Under all the workplace nonsense sat a rather sweet little point. For all Lamont’s anxiety about being employable, his dog had a far simpler expectation. It didn’t need him to be successful. It already thought he was enough. It just needed its owner to come home.

Daniel Giorgi’s The Chair shifted the evening somewhere much more abstract. Set in an airport, complete with surrounding sound effects, it followed a man and woman as they talked, reminisced, rolled around the space, and eventually appeared to electrocute themselves (I think?). Emma Kidd and Nicholas Chong approached the material with commitment, although the play’s philosophical meaning went over my head. The written language was expressive, and there were some striking staging ideas, but I left still trying to work out exactly what had happened or what conclusion I was meant to draw (if there was one).

The contrast between these two plays was what made the format interesting. In under an hour, Micro Theatre moved from a sharp workplace comedy to a tragic, experimental drama. Things That Happen offered a low-pressure way to sample new local writing, and the short running times gave both writers space to experiment without stretching their ideas too far. It was affordable, accessible theatre with a scrappy charm, and part of the fun was never quite knowing what you were going to get.