“…a theatre of ideas…a delightful and subtle exercise in shifting character… playful and sassy… both a celebration, and indictment, of the human need and weakness for meaning-making.”
Kenton Stevens
3.5 parallel realities
Venue: Red Stitch Actors’ Theatre,
Melbourne
Date: to 6 December 2026
What happens when we (people, humans) crash into the outer limits of our understanding? When we encounter an entirely new experience. And, what is the cost of making meaning in these moments? Ostensibly, this is the topography of Pier Lorenzo Pisano’s Carbon (winner of Italy’s prestigious Riccione Theatre Award).
This is a theatre of ideas. A sort of existential thought experiment, which pivots between two realms. There is an interview between two people—the interrogator, ‘A’ (Caroline Lee), and the person who most directly experienced a seismic event for humanity, ‘B’ (Pantazi Terzian)—that seeks to make meaning of the encounter, perhaps humanity’s first with an alien form. Then there is the appearance of Voice (Conor Leach), a thread, who provides us (the audience), and maybe the universe in general, with a very handy overview of the eccentricities and severe limitations of “carbon”, by which they mean our carbon-based life form, humanity.
What do we know, and how do we know it? And, is there a singular reality upon which we can all agree? Such epistemological questions have occupied us for centuries. Is knowledge rational, of the mind so to speak, as Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz may argue? Or it is to be found in experience and reflection, felt and touched, as held by the likes of John Locke and David Hume?
‘A’ is intent on winnowing and whittling away at ‘B’s account of this radical encounter to find the one truth: what really happened. Whereas ‘B’ is more equivocal about their experience and what it might mean; easily able to hold competing thoughts, diverging possibilities, at the same time. Something many humans are good at, when they put their mind to it.
Maybe we are in the cave of Plato’s Republic trying to make meaning of the shadows bouncing across the wall in firelight, backs turned to the world outside. One party threatens to step out into the sunlight, and see things as they really are? And if they do, what will this mean for all we cave dwellers and the reality (realities?) we hold tight?
Lee’s interrogator is a delightful and subtle exercise in shifting character. Initially, cool, controlled, and insistent, a highly professional investigator, she is not without smatterings of empathy. She is intent on discovering what needs to be discovered for the greater good. Perhaps, even for the survival of the human race. As the dialogue develops, ‘A’ becomes increasingly pressured. Desperate in her search for the one small thing that will make the difference, so we can understand what has happened, and save ourselves. It is a battle to bring the unknown in from the cold, and into the bounds and warmth of the human known.
Just as I’m doing now, perhaps…
Terzian is wonderfully measured in their resistance and circumspection as ‘B’. Tired of helping in this meaning-making, they didn’t choose to be at the fulcrum of such a landmark event in human history. ‘B’ is beautifully drawn as the worn, slightly tetchy, and bewildered reluctant. Not unwilling to help, but unable to see the point. That is, until the demons of memory expose the high stakes behind what ‘B’ has experienced, and the gut-wrenching reckoning that must follow.
This dance, between ‘A’ and ‘B’, is interlaced with Leach’s playful and sassy interventions as ‘Voice’, who is replete with a supercilious knowing of all things, which puts us in our place, and cuts we ‘all too smart’ humans down to size. Ah, such incessant and obsessive meaning making, such interpretation, such depth—yes, that very thing we’re all doing now as an audience in a theatre—so cute, so futile, and yet gone in a trice. It is cutting and funny. It shoots the fabric of the play with moments of levity and perspective (well, a particular perspective, anyway).
The play’s interlocking dynamic is guided thoughtfully by director, Katy Maudlin, who places the interrogation upon a small, raised space—almost as if in a 1980s TV studio, wrapped in a Euro-inspired aesthetic of soft surfaces in browns, oranges and creams (terrific design by Anna Cordingley)—and has Voice wafting easily through the audience, using all available entrances, exits and levels (except the main playing space, until the very end), as if they are a ubiquitous presence in our minds, like it or not. Voice is wonderfully costumed (Cordingley again) in ‘80s gaudy suit, with a period microphone for style and glitz.
There are moments when the trinity upon which the play balances feels less like characters in the world, and more like the inhabitants of the Freudian mindscape. Perhaps ‘B’ is an experience of the world as ‘ego’. In turn, expertly kept in check by ‘A’ as the rational, sense-making ‘id’. All the while, both are smugly observed and judged by the morally superior ‘superego’ of Voice? As if, in concert, this trio is desperately trying to navigate a moment of fundamental human trauma. Trying to make sense of something world shattering, and work out how to live with it, or not.
There we go again, making meaning. Accurate or not, who’s to tell? But, it feels satisfying. How very human.
For me, Carbon feels like both a celebration, and indictment, of the human need and weakness for meaning-making in a universe populated by random forces. We live by giving order to the things before us—tell stories, make sense, and find relatability. Meaning as salve and comfort. It fuels our arts and our desires. While simultaneously, maybe it is ‘full of sound and fury / signifying nothing’.
Yet, how else are we to live?
photos by Sarah Walker
Kenton Stevens, Theatre Now
