The Almighty Sometimes
Subiaco Arts Centre
Tuesday, June 23 2026
Brought to its Western Australian debut by Black Swan State Theatre Company, The Almighty Sometimes officially opened its season at Subiaco Arts Centre on Tuesday night. A gripping, gut-wrenching portrait of teenage rebellion as viewed through a haze of depression and medication, the performance also explored the emotional wreckage wrought on those loved ones left in the primary character’s wake.
The evening, with its very heavy themes of trauma, self-destruction, and aggressive co-dependence, was more than ably anchored by the deceptively small cast of four. The lead protagonist was Anna, an eighteen-year-old who craved her childhood creative spark again, long dulled by an unceasing regimen of pills, the multiple uppers evened out by far too many downers. Anna was performed by ‘Ana Ika, who absolutely wowed the audience with a stunning display of a very fractured character.
Former classmate and current love interest Oliver was played by Harry Gilchrist, for whom the role entailed both sweet courtship and bitterly sour departure, lashed to breaking point by Anna’s torrid temper. Amy Mathews acted as Vivienne, a published and celebrated child psychiatrist attempting to navigate long-time patient Anna into the adult system.
Completing the cast was Alison van Reeken as Renee, Anna’s mother and local primary school teacher. At the surface level seemingly an optimist, who only wished to see the best in her daughter, Renee had been slowly ground down by a decade lived next to a volcano under near-continuous eruption.
From the introduction of these characters to the very end of the performance, alliances first coalesced and were subsequently smashed, petty conspiracies abounded, and all struggled to erect healthy boundaries with each other. Anna’s cycle of massive highs, devastating lows, constant hospitalisation, and a gnawing numbness when medicated repeated over and again, exquisitely and toxically combined with overweening selfishness, a martyr complex, and the blazing self-belief that she was always the smartest person in the room. This roiling maelstrom of pure id was played to perfection by Ika.
The set design provided by Fiona Bruce and team was extremely versatile, rotating between scenes to become a living area, a hospital room, or the front porch of Oliver’s home. Painted all in light blue, Anna’s most despised colour yet also the banner of her imagined alter ego Meredith, Celtic mistress of the seas, it was an effect disarmingly calming, to perhaps level out the ever-growing tension in the foreground.
The material was taken from playwright Kendall Feaver’s many, many powerful words and tenderly nurtured to fruition by director Emily McLean, often cutting through to the hardest truths, accentuated by lighting and sound that were delicate for the most part yet turned disorienting or even overwhelming in the heightened moments. The result herein was an audience utterly immersed in this world, with both script and character actions coloured by a haunting realism.
Before each scene there was in effect a reading, either from Anna’s manic creativity or Vivienne’s cool academia, and these words then bled into the following action. It was a very compelling way to connect the characters’ inner thoughts to the outside world. Also of note was Anna’s reduction of all others around to mere cyphers, with every part of their agency assigned by her and her alone, the absolute zenith of main character energy.
Further subtle nods to the brittle nature of the household were provided by very obvious harm reduction strategies, including the removal of razors, belts, and even shoelaces, and Anna’s firm belief that both her mother and therapist had run roughshod over her childhood. Questions of who to trust, how to love, and the very limits to which these bonds could be tested reverberated around the theatre throughout the piece.
For the most part, the tension tonight lay under the surface, like skin pricked to fire, a needling that remained no matter how much one scratched, but one scene brought a clear break to proceedings, an explosion of chaos, anger, and pain, highlighting the lengths, even to violence, that Renee would go to save her child.
The acting in this moment was exceptional: mother and daughter locked in a battle of wills that threatened to immolate them both, whilst Oliver, new to this dynamic, collapsed in on himself in near abject horror. Gilchrist, Ika, and van Reeken demonstrated their utter commitment to this very difficult material, performed immediately before the break for intermission.
The Almighty Sometimes was not a comfortable watch for long stretches of its runtime but remained an important piece of theatre, very likely to resonate with a much wider audience than the overall ticket capacity available this season. Its depiction of teenage mental health, depression, and self-destructiveness rang exceedingly true and intersected in a quite bittersweet way with Anna’s self-discovery in becoming a young adult.
All performers tonight were outstanding. All other crew involved combined to make the evening completely immersive. Black Swan continue to treat Perth and the wider state to an amazing level of consistency in the works they bring forth, and The Almighty Sometimes, with each content warning taken into consideration for individual circumstances, was a powerhouse showcase of the very highest quality.