I don’t believe I’ve ever started a theatre review by talking about my day job, but here we are: I’m a high‑school teacher.

Hardly a dramatic confession. And yet it feels impossible to separate that part of my life from Monster, a play that drops an adult into a room with a teenage boy and lets the power dynamic tilt across the fragile, shifting terrain between authority and adolescence in unsettling, unpredictable ways. Theatre is where I usually go to escape that tension, but this production by Tiny Dog Productions brought it right back to the surface with a confidence and sharpness that refused to let me look away.

Playwright Duncan Macmillan sets Monster inside a “sink” inner‑city comprehensive in the UK – the kind of school where resources are thin, tempers are short, and troubled boys are far from anomalies. The story whips through charged encounters between trainee teacher Tom, and volatile fourteen‑year‑old Darryl, while the women in their lives grapple with the fallout of his escalating behaviour.

What begins as a routine intervention quickly widens into a study of responsibility, fear and the systems that fail both young people and the adults tasked with containing them. Darryl isn’t just acting out; his disturbing behaviour slips into that harder‑to‑name territory where structures buckle, adults scramble to hold the line and the gap widens, leaving him unprepared for the world he’s being funnelled into.

Under Kim Hardwick’s steady, incisive direction, Monster sits right in that tension‑filled pressure point, as Darryl hovers in the narrow corridor between boyhood and adulthood. Hardwick knows exactly how dangerous that threshold is – and how no one in the room is ever as in control as they think. The result is a live psychological autopsy, the kind where the fourth wall feels dangerously thin and the audience stops being observers and starts feeling like silent, complicit witnesses.

Victor Kalka’s stark, interrogation‑like set gives the actors nowhere to hide, a blank space that feels both clinical and accusatory. Topaz Marley-Cole’s lighting carves that space into emotional fault lines, while Charlotte Leamon’s pulsing sound design is superb. This is flawless creative work, keeping the momentum of the charged atmosphere alive, especially in the breaths between scenes.

The performances sharpen the themes to a fine point. Tony J. Black (fearlessly stepping in after preview and performing on‑book) delivers a Tom so mulishly contained you can almost hear the crack. He finds some razor‑fine shifts of insecurity and a subtle, tightening menace, letting the subtext surface until you see the exact moment his empathy curdles.

That fragility mirrors the boy across from him. Campbell Parsons answers with a Darryl stitched from bravado, vulnerability, and an unnerving likability — those flashes of clever cheek that briefly disarm you before the threat snaps back into view. He’s a kid on the brink, the drop beneath him steep, and Parsons charts that precipice with edgy precision. He expertly taps into the early shadows of the Dark Tetrad — a chilling blend of narcissism, manipulation, impulsiveness and casual cruelty that he hides until pressure hits, and then releases in sudden, frightening bursts.

The women orbiting them are inextricably caught in this systemic collapse, bound by a shared, quiet endurance as their domestic worlds are swallowed by the same destructive cycle. Jodi (Romney Hamilton) embodies the hopeful, middle‑class future Tom is actively sabotaging, and Hamilton plays her with a luminous sincerity that makes her denial feel heartbreakingly human.

Darryl’s grandmother, Rita (Linda Nicholls‑Gidley), by contrast, carries the hardened, exhausted realism of someone who has already lived through the damage. Nicholls‑Gidley gives her a flinty, clear‑eyed strength that reads as both armour and warning. Together they land the gut punch: the men chase power, but women the shoulder the damage

In the vacuum around Darryl, education is somehow expected to “fix” everything, to stabilise crises shaped by forces far bigger than any classroom. It’s a world teachers and parents recognise instantly. I’ve taught, or tried to teach, many versions of “Darryl”, and I worry about that space daily: the rise in mental illness, the lack of support, the way schools – and indeed parents – are asked to carry burdens they were never designed to hold.

Macmillan traces the way hurt travels through people and institutions like a current, repeating itself until someone finally turns to face it. Monster unsettles not through shock but through accuracy, revealing how people absorb harm and pass it on. Bruising, intimate and unflinching, it’s theatre that lands with cutting force.What lingers is not judgement but a provocation: in this tangle of fear, care and consequence – just who ends up teaching whom? 

Monster plays at KXT on Broadway, Sydney until 21 March. For details see: https://www.kingsxtheatre.com/monster

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