Why do we turn to the stage when we need to see ourselves clearly? How do stories interrogate our reality not only as a reckoning with the past but as a visceral warning of the futures we are already drifting toward? A Mirror, a new work by Sam Holcroft, confronts these questions with unnerving urgency.

Repressive regimes have always feared and revered the stage. Theatre can soothe or confront, distract or illuminate, but the moment it is censored, the state does more than silence art – it begins to reshape how a society thinks. As power, paranoia and uneasy laughter collide on stage – A Mirror forces us to see what we accept without noticing.

Holcroft’s work is rebellion in its purest form. From the first deliberate act of deception, the audience is drawn into a covert event and a playwright’s struggle to mount a forbidden production under a utilitarian state.Through a masterful play-within-a-play…within-a-play structure, the lines between rehearsal, performance, and surveillance bleed together until it becomes impossible to tell who is acting, who is obeying, and who is resisting. 

We are trapped inside a meticulously ordered society, while sensing the threat looming around every corner. On the surface, this could read as dreadfully bleak, but director Margaret Thanos allows the irony, the folly and absurdity to dominate, ensuring that humour and menace coexist in a surreal and uneasy balance.

The result lands with the full force of an Orwellian, darkly comedic indictment, intimate in its character work yet expansive in its critique of the dangerous seduction of obedience and the machinery of state authorship. How stories are policed, how narratives are weaponised and how easily a society can be coaxed into accepting the version of reality it is given.

The set design by Angelina Daniel operates on both symbolic and practical levels, featuring the facade of white veils draping the rusty red walls, only to be systematically torn down as the narrative unravels and illusion is stripped bare. Lighting Designer Phoebe Pilcher and Sound Designer and Composer Daniel Herten shape those layers with tonal shifts that feel precise, intentional and grippingly immersive.

The cast navigates the plot’s sudden swings from dark humour to genuine dread with a control that keeps the audience braced for the next turn, their sharp, disciplined energy sustaining a state of constant uncertainty. It is all the more chilling because, while the plot is distinctly dystopian, these are people we recognise, echoing the choices and compromises ordinary people make every day.

Yalin Ozucelik is unctuous and oily as Čelik, a senior bureaucrat and the Director of the Ministry of Culture and very reminiscent of a Stasi official whose avuncular ease only barely cloaks his hungry instinct for control. Faisal Hamza captures the naive idealism of the playwright and truth teller Adem with authentic ease. 

Rose Riley provides a stunning emotional core as Mei, the junior official who undergoes an astonishing cultural awakening, and Eden Falk is very effective as Bax, the state-sanctioned artist who has hollowed out his soul for privilege. Damian Ryan’s late, magnetic entrance upturns the entire narrative axis; any further description would spoil the play’s central ruse.

Crucially, A Mirror shatters the fourth wall, dragging the audience out of the safety of the stalls and into the volatile heart of its politics. Pay attention to the passageway up the stairs into the auditorium before the show begins; it offers a telling prelude. No longer mere voyeurs, we are made complicit in the narrative, navigating the same paranoia as the characters, making its dystopian logic hit uncomfortably close to home. In one unforgettable moment, the characters are compelled to sing a totalitarian oath to the tune of the Australian national anthem – we laugh at the absurdity, yet the humour only sharpens the jab; complicity is the true antagonist.

A Mirror refuses escapism. It delivers clarity. It does not simply reflect who we are – or how we “perform” – it exposes who we are becoming. Most powerful when it punctures complacency, it is both timely and provocative. Belvoir is the perfect home for such a work, a company built on social commentary and the conviction that the stage is not merely for entertainment but a “rehearsal for the future” we are choosing. Shrewd and piercingly alive, this is theatre sounding the alarm – demanding that we keep fighting to see and speak the truth.

A Mirror runs until 22 March at Belvoir St Theatre . For further details see: https://belvoir.com.au/productions/a-mirror/

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