Theatre
For its centenary season, Brisbane’s La Boite Theatre brings in Dead Puppet Society for an animated fable about the climate crisis. By Yen-Rong Wong.
La Boite Theatre’s We’re All Gonna Die!
Our planet is a living entity that we’ve neglected for decades and our collective complacency is coming back to bite us. In the premiere of We’re All Gonna Die!, written by Maddie Nixon and co-directed by Courtney Stewart and David Morton, La Boite Theatre and Dead Puppet Society come together to give the consequences of environmental destruction corporeal form.
The play opens with narration set over clever use of an old-fashioned overhead projector. Cast members manipulate two-dimensional shapes across the projector to create scenery and setting. This interesting take on shadow puppetry is the first of many kinds of animation used throughout the production. The comedic tone here is reflective of the action to come, most memorably by way of a depiction of humanity’s “population” of Earth through a careless toss of chico babies.
We’re introduced to Theo (Milena Nesic), short for Theodora, a high schooler notable for her wheelie backpack in Year 9, and her parents, Lana (Louise Brehmer), a CityCat driver, and Alice (Ngọc Phan), a marine biologist with the CSIRO.
Alice is leaving on yet another expedition but not before driving Theo to school. This is where we meet Jaymie (Phan) and Jake (Anthony Standish) in biology class, who are overseen by a gruff teacher (Brehmer) with a broad Australian accent. Jaymie is one of the popular girls, and Jake is a dude bro complete with a cringeworthy rat’s tail and backwards snapback. Buying Standish as a teenager requires suspending some disbelief, but together with Phan, the two portray a typical teenage scepticism towards school and authority in general.
Nicklin (Hsiao-Ling Tang), the school principal, is “a beta man with a leadership complex”. He provides Tang with another chance to show off her comedic chops, after her star turn in Single Asian Female, but this character seems strangely superfluous: most of Nicklin’s moments could have been given to other characters and the principal given a more minor role without detracting from the play’s major themes or beats.
After Alice’s ship suddenly disappears and is presumed sunk, Theo discovers there’s a monster in the ocean that’s coming to destroy Brisbane. She tries to warn the people around her, but no one believes her except for Harvey (Standish), a corrupt minister for defence who has ambitions to be prime minister. Parallels can be drawn to Don’t Look Up, a blackly comic 2021 film that follows two astronomers who are ignored when they try to warn the world of a comet’s impending impact with Earth – a satirical yet sobering examination of society’s inaction on climate issues.
We’re All Gonna Die! could have gone deeper here. It would have been interesting to see more commentary on the treatment of young environmental advocates and protesters or how conspiracy theorists have co-opted the issue of climate change, especially considering Alice’s joke that she’s on “secret government conspiracy business”.
Nixon claims the play “points out the fact that the institutions that we’re meant to trust to keep us safe have been ignoring the impending climate-change crisis”. Its staging is timely, considering the Federal Court’s recent dismissal of a case that claimed the Australian government had breached its duty of care to Torres Strait Islanders by not doing enough to combat the climate crisis. However, it focuses less on climate change explicitly and more on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a result of humanity’s reliance on plastics and collective disregard for our surroundings.
The patch, which was predicted in a paper in 1988, is a system of circular ocean surface currents that has carried marine debris into the middle of the Pacific Ocean. This is reflected onstage – props are moved and placed to depict circles, and the actors’ movement around the stage is also circular. As well as referring to the patch, this choreography also symbolises the cyclical nature of life and offers more foreshadowing of the environment coming full circle to wreak its revenge.
We’re All Gonna Die! lives up to its billing as “a love letter to Brisbane” and is an apt inclusion in La Boite Theatre’s 100th anniversary program. The set, also designed by Morton, is brilliantly conceived in classic Dead Puppet Society style. The reveal of its colourful depiction of Brisbane and its landmarks, including the Ferris Wheel, Stefan’s Needle and the Gabba, elicited an audible gasp from the audience.
It’s packed full of Brisbane-centric references such as the Ekka and the city’s “respawn point”, the Hungry Jack’s in Queen Street Mall. This is also reflected in the score, with music composed and curated by Dean Hanson: distinct references to Brisbane include The Go-Betweens’ “Streets of Your Town” and Thelma Plum’s “The Brown Snake”.
We’re All Gonna Die! is populated with a variety of cleverly engineered puppets, including a helicopter, a missile and several iterations of the monster. The creature’s appetite for rubbish and its growth is given physical form, including a memorable moment when “arms” of garbage slither out of wheelie bins and attach themselves to what had begun as an adorable little monster.
Ben Hughes’s lighting complements this highly visual production, with the stage lit in blue and orange early in the play – the blue representing the ocean and the orange foreshadowing the danger to come. The orange lighting, combined with Brady Watkins’ sound design, builds ominously towards the play’s climax, which is revealed in a clash of noise, smoke and flashing lights.
Although the production is a visual marvel, some narrative threads – such as a specific reference to Theodora’s name meaning “an ancient empress, God’s gift”, Alice telling Theo she doesn’t realise how cool her mum is, or Theo’s realisation that the monster gets angrier when provoked and attacked – are not expanded. It could have focused more on the relationship between Theo and Alice or on the impact of grief – not only the aftermath of losing a family member but also the wider despair at the state of the environment.
We’re All Gonna Die! is a play that tries to do a little too much. Instead of being an incisive interrogation of climate change denialism and climate anxiety among young people, it settles for a surface-level examination of its many ideas. However, it is still a darkly funny and entertaining production that does communicate its message about the dangers of sustained and continued environmental destruction.
We’re All Gonna Die! is playing at La Boite Theatre until August 16.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on August 16, 2025 as "Circling the drain".
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