REVIEW: Works in Chaos 2.0 - Salad Days Collective

Works in Chaos 2.0

Presented by: Salad Days Collective

Venue: PIP Theatre

Date attended: 24 July 2026

Lighting Design: Georgia Lily Chalmers

Sound Design: Tommi Civili

Projection Design: Cutter Harris

Photography: Gracie Hosie

“Please keep your limbs, expectations, and unresolved emotional baggage inside the ride at all times.”

Three new one-act plays. Three creative teams. One month to whip up something stage-worthy. A mountain of cardboard boxes. And one glowing refrigerator... Welcome to Works in Chaos.

Presented by Salad Days Collective at PIP Theatre, Works in Chaos 2.0 invites us into the messy middle of making theatre. These are fresh-off-the-press plays still being tested and adjusted, with no pressure to pretend every answer has already been found. And the sold-out audience got to join the chaos and watch each piece discover what it might become.

Each 30-minute play was followed by amusing, unsolicited facts read aloud while the stage was reset amid a growing number of cardboard boxes. Those boxes and a silver refrigerator covered in colourful magnetic letters formed the basic set for the shows. Before long, that fridge is glowing ominously and acting as a portal between the evening’s strange little worlds. Georgia Lily Chalmers’ lighting, Tommi Civili’s sound and Cutter Harris’ projections give each play its own atmosphere while repeatedly transforming the same cluttered space.

Our House

Written by: Aimee Tacon

Directed by: Maxi Mossman

Cast: Sonny Green as Ed and Emma Ferguson as Toya

“You have everything you need here. Don’t waste time trying to understand it.”

Our House begins with a simple enough instruction: Ed has one year to build a house. If he fails, Toya will kill him. No pressure...

Toya arrives armed with an alarming number of handguns (also cardboard thankfully), while Ed starts fumbling around with the “building materials” and their relationship becomes increasingly difficult to name.

The house is clearly a metaphor for building a life with someone, but Aimee Tacon’s script keeps stretching that idea in different directions. Ed and Toya shift between lovers, caregiver and dependent, captor and captive, and participants trapped in the world’s most alarming home renovation.

The script moves with dreamlike logic and the unruly rhythm of a subconscious left unsupervised. Certain symbols make complete sense in the moment but become almost impossible to explain later. Everything seems packed with meaning, even when that meaning is just out of reach. The pants-shitting scene is probably the best example of this...

Director Maxi Mossman makes excellent use of the clutter. Boxes and crepe streamers become construction materials, barriers, and toys. Sonny Green and Emma Ferguson are superb together. Both play the surreal material with such naturalism that the relationship remains believable even when the situation does not. Ferguson’s Toya can be affectionate, commanding or capable of scaring Ed shitless within seconds, while Green gives Ed a highly believable mix of confusion, obedience and mounting desperation. They slip between each new phase of the relationship without signalling the change, keeping this strange little two-hander constantly off balance.

Dance Forever!

Written by: Malika Savory

Directed by: Gina Greer

Cast: Megan Lilly as Miki, Jasmine Prasser as Rachel, Liam McMahon as Marco and Neve Francis as Lenny

Imagine Jumanji, except instead of an ancient board game, a group of online gamers downloads Dance Forever! from the dark web, gets sucked into the software and is forced to dance through increasingly hostile levels. Miki, Marco and Lenny connect through online gaming. Their conversations collide over one another in the recognisable way teenagers speak through headsets, each apparently assuming everyone else can process four thoughts at once. Once pulled into the game, they become their avatars and begin wandering through the software like they've been dropped into the Backrooms (but with choreography).

The sound effects and digital projections make the game feel like a real, glitching world with the glowing refrigerator becoming its portal. Their relationships are already messy before anyone gets sucked into a dance game. Miki is isolated at home with a stepmother she cannot stand and an absent father, so she clings tightly to the blunt, aggressive Lenny (although her real identity is another matter entirely). Marco, meanwhile, is a homeschooled teenager with POTS who seems to arrive already halfway through an existential crisis (poor wee lamb).

Then there is Rachel, who has been catfishing her stepdaughter online as “Glamgirl.” Jasmine Prasser steps into the role at the last minute for this performance, script in hand, and handles the challenge confidently. The script could easily separate her from the frantic physical world around her, but she stays fully involved in the action and finds plenty of humour in Rachel’s strange place within the group.

Malika Savory’s script works best when it digs into how online spaces can be both an escape and a trap. The characters enter the game looking for connection and a break from real life, but it soon starts controlling how they move, act and even see themselves. As everything gets faster and messier, the play captures the sensory overload of an addictive game surprisingly well. Even the forced dancing feels like the pressure to keep performing online.

Some details are hard to catch once the dialogue begins piling on top of itself, but that seems intentional. The game doesn't care whether the characters (or the audience) can keep up. It feels like our online world at full volume: too many voices, jokes, arguments, and identities all demanding attention at once.

Spaceman

Written by: Samuel Herbertson

Directed by: Lauren Dillon

Cast: Meg Dale as Jayne, Matthew Butler as John, Samuel Herbertson as the Cowboy, Tammy Weller as the Postman and Lachlan Orton as Danny/Fred the Cat

“I thought it would be the bombs, or the plague, or the robots.”

Spaceman begins with a missing cat and quickly misplaces reality too. John is just enjoying a snack when he suddenly finds himself surrounded by a postie preparing for the apocalypse from inside his bathtub, an ex-girlfriend, a giant spider, his cat Fred possessing his housemate’s body, and a blue cowboy who may or may not be Death. Standard fever dream, really.

John may be experiencing a psychotic episode. Maybe nitrous oxide is turning everyone’s brains to goo. Or perhaps we are hallucinating through broken pieces of his memory as grief begins interfering with reality. The play is not especially interested in choosing one answer.

Samuel Herbertson’s writing bounces between absurd comedy and heavier themes of guilt, grief, and isolation. The stranger the room becomes, the more philosophical the play gets. My reading is that this apocalypse may be more emotional than literal. John’s world has already ended in some way, and these impossible visitors arrive as pieces of unfinished business.

Matthew Butler makes John vulnerable and increasingly frazzled, so it's easy to believe his world is falling apart even when nobody can agree on why. Meg Dale brings some warmth to the stranger parts of the story, while Lachlan Orton’s transformation into Fred the Cat is hilarious and oddly sweet. “The cute British meowing deserves recognition” is not a sentence I expected to write in this review, but here we are. Tammy Weller throws herself into the postie's apocalyptic nonsense with such confidence that I almost start believing her.

Samuel Herbertson is effortlessly funny as the blue cowboy, sitting calmly in the middle of the disaster with a magnificent moustache, blue skin, a desperate need for a cigarette lighter and the attitude of someone for whom the end of reality is merely an inconvenience. The Smurf-like look and Texan accent are funny enough already, but his laid-back delivery makes the character even better.

The cigarette smoke becomes quite strong in the intimate theatre and adds more discomfort than atmosphere. But perhaps that is the point? The end of the world is not meant to be comfortable, after all. Still, Spaceman finds a surprisingly gentle centre inside all its cosmic nonsense. The play is less interested in solving the apocalypse, choosing instead to ask who you would want beside you when everything falls apart.

Across all three plays, Works in Chaos 2.0 shows why new writing should be allowed to be messy in public. Not every idea lands clearly yet, and some moments are difficult to untangle, but the performance gives artists room to test strange ideas without pretending the work is completely finished.

The result is baffling, unsettling and frequently funny. All three pieces are alive with truly original ideas. I’d much rather watch a new work take a genuine risk than see something polished until every interesting edge has been sanded away.

Besides, any evening featuring a deadly house-building ultimatum, a dance game from internet hell, a dead British cat and a glowing refrigerator was never going to send us home with everything neatly packed away (in those many cardboard boxes).