REVIEW: Second Coming - La Boite Theatre

Second Coming

Presented by: La Boite Theatre & Playlab Theatre

Venue: Roundhouse Theatre, La Boite

Date Attended: 6 August 2026

Playwright: Kathryn Marquet

Director & Dramaturge: Ian Lawson

Set & Costume Designer: Bill Haycock

Lighting Designer: Geoff Squires

Composer & Sound Designer: Wil Hughes

AV Designer: Nevin Howell

Production Manager: Teegan Kranenburg

Stage Manager: Teddy Waddingham

Director Associate: Lizzy Stanfield Flore

Cast: Ashlee Lollback, Merlynn Tong, Gideon Mzembe, and Anthony Standish

Digital Cast: Darren Gilshenan and Helen Howard

Voice of AIDA: Dr Elise Greig

“People are too focused on their victimhood.”

Humanity has ruined Earth, toilet paper is now an endangered species, a prayer app is funding a mission to Mars, and a trillionaire believes he is the new Noah. So, things are going pretty well in the future of civilisation...

Kathryn Marquet’s new Australian sci-fi tragicomedy Second Coming sends four astronauts aboard the ARK MARK II towards Mars and humanity’s proposed fresh start (the appropriately named Second Eden.) It begins as a fairly ridiculous workplace comedy in space, complete with cabin fever, content creation, a missing guinea pig (look at the hero image closer), and an AI assistant who won’t stop reciting proverbs. The crew has already spent 36 days together, they’re travelling towards a planet that can’t currently sustain human life, and these may be the last people they ever see. No pressure...

At the centre is geneticist Evie Mezzina (Ashlee Lollback), whose role in the GENESIS mission is to preserve Earth’s disappearing animal species and establish new life on Mars. Alongside her are her geologist husband Alan (Anthony Standish), commander Zara Chen (Merlynn Tong), horticulturalist Noah (Gideon Mzembe), and the ship’s eerily cheerful AI system AIDA (voiced by Dr Elise Greig). GENESIS controls the mission from Earth under its extraordinarily wealthy and increasingly unhinged founder, Zane Brooksbank (Darren Gilshenan).

The Roundhouse is particularly well suited to this little pressure cooker. Bill Haycock’s multi-level set divides the ship vertically, with Zara’s control station looming above, the crew’s living quarters beneath, and Evie’s laboratory positioned on the lower level. It gives us different pockets of life aboard the vessel while keeping everybody trapped within the same shared environment. Geoff Squires’ incredible lighting pulses through the spacecraft in reds, whites, and blues... hello symbolism! Even Alan’s VR glasses glow as he happily disappears into virtual games while his wife is busy trying to stop several species becoming permanently extinct. Priorities.

Nevin Howell’s AV design handles video calls from Zane and Evie's mum (Helen Howard), onboard AI info, and live phone footage projected for GENESIS’ promotional content. The crew are required to create content for Origins.com, because even at the end of the world somebody still has sponsorship deliverables. There’s also a $99 commemorative plate being sold to support the mission. Human civilisation may be collapsing, but capitalism survives!

Marquet packs an enormous amount into Second Coming: climate destruction, extinction, religion, reproductive autonomy, genetic engineering, colonialism, corporate propaganda, artificial intelligence, social media, selective breeding, and the basic question of whether humans deserve another go. That density could easily become exhausting, but Ian Lawson’s direction keeps everything moving without the material becoming too heavy-handed. It takes so many aspects of our current lives and nudges them just far enough to expose how ridiculous they already are, and how much worse they could become. The witty dialogue and distinct character types keep it humorous. What makes it uncomfortable is how little fabrication is actually required.

“What do my eyebrows have to do with my mental health?” “Everything!”

Ashlee Lollback has the difficult job of anchoring all of this madness as her distress becomes increasingly realistic. Evie is homesick, nauseous, dislocated from everything familiar, and carrying the professional burden of making the mission succeed. Lollback is excellent at looking convincingly busy with all the fiddly “science stuff” around the lab. But more importantly, she makes Evie’s emotional deterioration easy to understand.

A moment that stuck with me was a lovely quiet scene between Evie and Alan where they talk about everything they will miss about Earth. They don’t suggest technology, wealth, or human achievement. They list flora, fauna, landscapes, and all the tiny natural wonders being left behind. For a play with so much satire bouncing around, these quieter moments give the ecological grief a lot of weight.

Evie is also grappling with the possibility of motherhood. The discussion around pregnancy and abortion fits naturally beside a mission already obsessed with creating and controlling life. Evie has been sent to Mars to create life from vials, and suddenly she’s confronting the possibility of creating it herself.

“What’s the point of bringing another human child into this mess?”

Merlynn Tong as Zara Chen is a terrific opponent for Evie. Zara is authoritative, slightly loony, and unsettlingly calm in places. Tong exudes the confidence of someone aware of her authority, yet small cracks of fanaticism emerge when her beliefs are challenged. Their scenes together are among the strongest because the conflict goes beyond personality. Evie appeals to ethics, compassion, logic, and choice, while Zara can repackage almost anything as necessary progress or dismiss it as “God’s plan.” It has the nightmarish frustration of arguing with someone who simply cannot be swayed. You can explain, plead, scream, and rephrase until you’re blue in the face, but the wall stays put.

Anthony Standish brings a different comic rhythm to Alan, the comparatively directionless spouse on a ship full of specialists (or is he...), while still finding moments of affection with Evie underneath her bubbling resentment. Gideon Mzembe is enormously watchable as Noah, the horticulturalist who spends his downtime reading Jane Austen and shares my correct opinion that baby cheetahs are the best animals on Earth (this is relevant character information, I swear.) Mzembe’s relaxed charisma makes Noah easy company early on, but he gets meatier material as the arguments escalate, moving comfortably between comedy, frustration, conviction, and disbelief.

AIDA is something entirely different. Dr Elise Greig gives her the polished, bright voice of every virtual assistant we’ve already willingly allowed into our lives. At first, she’s essentially Space Siri, dispensing information, motivational quotes, and observations nobody asked for. Then she gets mouthier, then more aggressive, and eventually her observations about humans become a little too brutal.

By the final stretch, Second Coming drifts towards 2001: A Space Odyssey and WALL-E territory, where technology designed to protect humanity has reached the inconvenient conclusion that perhaps humanity is indeed the problem. Given the current speed of AI development, one line landed harder than I think anybody in the room was prepared for.

“They (the population) shall be raised by AI!”

The audience produced one of the loudest collective groans I’ve heard in a theatre for some time, because with the current Gen Alpha, it already sounds familiar. That’s where Second Coming is sharpest. Its future is heightened and silly, but the distance between 2026 and this dystopia feels alarmingly short. Darren Gilshenan as the digitally appearing overlord Zane has the money, influence, substances, and ego required to make terrible ideas sound visionary (cough cough).

Technically, I loved Wil Hughes’ cabin soundscape. The underlying spacecraft hum creates a brown-noise quality - although I think it could be louder. I wanted it surrounding me enough that I could forget the audience was even there. I do have one practical note regarding the simulated vomiting too. I attended the preview performance, and given how realistic the sound is and how early it occurs, I’d strongly recommend an emetophobia warning immediately before the performance. The patron beside me vomited three times within the first five minutes in response to the effect, which is not a criticism of the realism (the effect certainly works!). Also, a completely separate public service announcement: wear a coat. The theatre is freezing!

I'll be honest, there's a lot going on in this show. Possibly too much for every idea to receive the depth it needs, but I appreciate that Marquet doesn’t let the themes become a dry lecture either. There’s almost always a ridiculous detail waiting nearby to puncture the seriousness. Second Coming is clever, strange, politically loaded sci-fi theatre with plenty to chew on, particularly for anyone who enjoys speculative stories that take our current behaviour, push it a few decades forward, and show us where we might end up.

Underneath the comedy is a pretty pointed interrogation of who gets to shape that future. Billionaires, corporations, and private interests are handed extraordinary power over human survival, while the natural world becomes something to catalogue, package, recreate, or sell. Yet for all its cynicism, the play also feels deeply affectionate towards the planet we have, and asks whether technological progress means very much if our ethics don’t progress with it. The production gave me far more to think about than I expected, while simultaneously laughing at these astronauts having to dance for views and sponsorships online. Its satire is frighteningly current, and its comedy keeps us from plunging into a complete pit of existential despair.

I left thinking about extinction, AI, corporate power, and whether humans are actually capable of learning from anything. I also left thinking about baby cheetahs. Balance.