Bright red tiles gleam across the backdrop and floor, transforming the intimate Belvoir Downstairs Theatre into something that resembles a game board just waiting for the next move to load. It is at once traditional and futuristic, which feels exactly right for a show that is itself constantly shuffling between ancient mythology and contemporary Sydney life.

A packed Tuesday night in the middle of winter says something too. Lacuna is a premiere from Essential Workers, presented through the Griffin Lookout and Belvoir’s 25A collaboration, and it is speaking to an audience that is very much here, now.

Lacuna is about many things, beginning with the problems buried inside the apparently progressive label of “diversity”. The contradiction is instantly uncomfortable: diverse applicants may be encouraged, but that does not necessarily mean they will be employed. Claudia, unemployed and increasingly desperate to escape the cold, hard reality of needing an income and building her super, takes the most gloriously loopy career detour imaginable. She’s pulled through an Alice-style doorway into a fever dream underworld of memory, mythology and identity, finding herself employed by Meng Po, the Goddess of Oblivion, with a Rabbit God thrown into the mix for good measure.

Claudia’s new job is to erase memories from the living. It is a bonkers premise, but playwright Eric Jiang knows exactly where to take it. When “forgetting” becomes a job, remembering gets complicated. What sounds like a strange enough way to pay the bills becomes considerably more dangerous when Claudia starts tampering with the memories of people she knows. Jiang folds Chinese mythology into very contemporary anxieties about work, family and belonging, using the underworld to examine what we choose to remember, what we would rather forget, and who gets to decide.

Jiang’s storytelling is as shape-shifting as the world he creates, swerving from poetic, time-bending prose reminiscent of The Time Machine into the slangy, everyday shorthand of a young queer woman navigating Sydney. The tonal gear changes are deliberate, propelling Lacuna between allegory, fairytale and adult fable. Narnia for Gen Z, perhaps, except the wardrobe leads to the underworld and someone forgot to mention the HR department.

Nicole Pingon’s direction embraces the trippiness with gusto. Mime, choreography and movement merge into a heightened, almost anime-inspired physical language, giving the action a propulsive pace and kinetic energy that keeps surprising as the three performers hurtle between worlds.

Rachel Seeto expertly captures Claudia’s innate intelligence and restless search for belonging, balancing sharp comic timing with the growing emotional disorientation of a woman desperate to be understood as her grip on what is real begins to slip. Loretta Kung is wonderfully mercurial, shifting between Claudia’s mother and goddess , while Dominic Lui brings bombastic energy to his one-liners and cameos with plenty of comic oxygen as Claudia’s gay best friend. Together, they circle Claudia through family, friendship and the divine as the boundaries begin to buckle.

The physicality of the performers is matched by Hailley Hunt’s bold set and costume design, while Morgan Moroney’s lighting and Sam Cheng’s soundscape continually reshape the visual and sonic landscape around Claudia. Sound shifts from barely perceptible textures to booming, foreboding surges that expand and contract the space, building tension and keeping everything off-balance. Smoke, strobe and shifting light beams propel Claudia between the physical, metaphysical and spiritual, making memory, imagination and reality increasingly difficult to separate.

We spend so much time observing and filtering other people’s lives while yearning to be properly seen ourselves. Lacuna finds its sharpest expression of that irony at the dinner table, where Claudia and her mother need no underworld, mythology or theatrical trickery. For all its theatrical invention, I found myself most drawn to these scenes. The widening gulf between the life Claudia wants to live and the life her mother can recognise is enough.

Jiang and Pingon wisely resist pushing the conflict into darker territory, keeping the relationship from tipping into melodrama. Instead, the emotional tension emerges through a sad irony: Claudia’s unique spark is precisely what her mother struggles to recognise, creating a quiet but telling divide between them. She wants her mother to see her “joyful, silly queer life”; her mother sees instead what she calls a “struggle”. That disconnect raises a bigger question: do we need those closest to us to understand us completely, or simply make room for who we are?

A playful, psychedelic, mythological mind-bender, Lacuna is best entered without a map. Let the story scramble the compass, loosen its grip on reality and take you wherever it decides to go. Trying to pin every twist to the wall may be less rewarding than surrendering to its strange internal logic. Sometimes the underworld is easier, and far more fun.

Lacuna plays at the Belvoir Downstairs Theatre until 15 August 2026. For tickets and further details see : https://griffintheatre.com.au/whats-on/lacuna/

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