“A terrific dose of festival frivolity. A wild and hysterically eye-opening ride … fun, frantic and fabulously larger than life…”
Kenton Stevens
4 Sharons
Venue: Solidarity Hall, Victorian Trades Hall, Carlton
Melbourne
Dates: to 18 Oct 2026 (as part of the Melbourne Fringe Festival)
“It’s a riddle. Speak ‘friend’ and enter. What’s the Elvish word for friend?”
This is what Frodo Baggins asks of Gandalf as they stand before the secret door in the Walls of Moria hoping to enter the mines, or Khazad‑Dûm, and thus to traverse the Misty Mountains through that subterranean hell.
Frodo, in need of a translator, turns to his favourite and trusted wizard, to be told the password is…melon. Or, perhaps ‘mellon’.
Or, is it, indeed, ‘watermelon’ as ‘Elvis’ may have preferred it?
It turns out, we all need a translator.
So it is that the script to this cornerstone of twentieth century film has been given the (Lost in Translation) treatment by Aaron Finan and his troupe of fun, frantic and fabulously larger than life performers (including Sophie Addison, Emma Evans and Lochryn Hearne) as they navigate a polyglot-filtered reimagining of the story by hilarious turns.
For those new to the Lost in Translation approach, essentially, a well-known and much-loved film script is translated several times, through various languages, shifting a little with each pass. It is then translated back into English. In so doing, it throws up myriad strange and surprising linguistic responses to much loved names, lines and moments from the film. Then, condensed into a sixty minute romp, a group of actors (one or two of whom are guests each night, having never seen the script before, and one performer anchoring as a narrator) throw themselves gamely into a lightly costumed rendition of this newly crafted story.
The result?
A terrific dose of festival frivolity. A wild and hysterically eye-opening ride on what we thought was a well-trodden quest from Bag End to Rivendell, Moria to Lothlórien (by way of Gandalf’s fateful battle with the Balrog), to a meeting Golom and the dissolution of the Fellowship. Before, finally, Freddo, or was that Frododo, or maybe Fernando—with Sam by his side—presses on toward (the) More Doors.
Characters and costumes swap and shift at pace, voices change, scripts flip, microphones are shared (and shared again), linguistic pyrotechnics take flight, and actors’ bodies dip, slip, slide and shuffle across the stage, as this riotous take on Tolkien’s story tumbles into tumultuous being. It is nothing short of great fun.
And when it’s done, well, you can do it all again on another night, but this time with Titanic, Harry Potter, James Bond, Love Actually or many more.
Though I was left wondering whether Lost in Translation has been gifted the Lost in Translation treatment? I’d be curious to see that.
4 Sharons
Photo Nathanial Schilling
Kenton Stevens, Theatre Now
