PEOPLE INSIDE ME is an outrageously black comic look at grief and love and the ways we push the darkness away. Charlotte Salusinszky plays Lauren and we asked her a few questions while in the final weeks of the rehearsals
Flight Path Theatre
People Inside Me
6-15 August 2026
Kate Pollock’s Rodney Seaborn Award-winning play premieres at FLIGHT PATH on the 5th August.
Lauren works at a crematorium. She hates death, but at least the dead can’t let you down. With a history of failed relationships and pregnancies, her biological clock is ticking hard, and she finds herself at the bar night after night looking for someone to fuck.
At work Lauren discovers boxes of ashes left on the shelf – children and babies who have not been claimed by their families. The memories and unlived lives of those departed souls start to invade her consciousness until something must be done. She decides to return the ashes to their families, forcing her to confront her greatest fears.
Winner of the Rodney Seaborn Award, long-listed for the Patrick White Award and Theatre 503’s International Playwriting Award, and shortlisted for the Silver Gull, PEOPLE INSIDE ME is an outrageously black comic look at grief and love and the ways we push the darkness away.
Charlotte Salusinszky plays Lauren and we asked her a few questions while in the final weeks of the rehearsals.
Now that rehearsals are underway, how are you enjoying playing Lauren?
I’m having a wonderful time in rehearsals! It’s exciting to be staging a new text and I’m learning a lot from the cast and creative team as we excavate the layers of it. Lauren is such a multifaceted character; Katie Pollock, the playwright, has given me so much material to play with.
How alike are you and Lauren (if at all)?
Like Lauren, I struggle to wrap my head around the finality of death and dying. Lauren deals with this uncomfortability by throwing herself into working at a crematorium. Likewise, when travelling I like to visit cemeteries and peer at Catholic relics – just to face that strange vertigo around mortality and say, ‘Woah’.
A crematorium is an unlikely setting, what other settings have you acted in that were a bit unusual?
One of my favourite works I have been part of was a site-specific performance set within a new high-rise harbour development in Melbourne. The developer’s attempt to gentrify the area had failed to attract pedestrian and community life, so the vast, empty streets were actually an eerily stunning setting for the performance. I played a fish who had been conned into buying a dodgy apartment due to rising sea levels.
What is the worst job you’ve ever had?
I had a failed ‘gap year’ after high school where I planned to travel to Paris and live a bohemian artist life but instead I ended up working at a pie shop in Mt Kuring-gai. At one point, a customer told me that the bacon and egg rolls I made were the worst she’d ever eaten. That was a little bleak.
Q – What is next for you?
I have a couple of crochet projects to finish and hope to carve out some time and space to focus on writing/creating my next solo work.
People Inside Me “Ambitious, complex, movingly original.” Preview 5 August Season 6-15 August 2026 Flight Path Theatre Marrickville Sydney https://www.flightpaththeatre.org/whats-on/people-inside-me |
