Dark Road

Written by award-winning Youth fiction writer and playwright Laura Lundgren Smith, Dark Road, has poignant impact in Australia post the December 2025 Bondi terrorist attack, but equally important is its universal message about human frailty, challenge and allegiance.

Before their 3-show season begins, Actually Acting Youth Theatre’s Fringe shows are sold out. Such is the ‘pulling power’ of this up-and-coming company. Actually Acting Youth Theatre won the 2024 Adelaide Critics Circle Group Award for Community Theatre, receiving the accolade for their work during the 2024 Adelaide Fringe, specifically for their 2-piece production Know Your Role and Our Place. Once again, the company explores issues that challenge and test us, this time by exploring human issues through the lens of the perils of Nazi Germany.

Directors Alicia Zorkovic and Brant Eustice have carefully harnessed the passion and idealism that young actors bring to performance. This well-balanced, 13-person ensemble is led by Milly Grainger as Greta, a diminutive, beautifully costumed and coiffured actor, who delivers an unrelenting portrayal of a brain-washed survivor of poverty and disadvantage who takes becomes a guard in a prisoner of war internment camp. Determined not to look back as she traverses what we discover is a ‘dark road’, preying on the weak and disempowered, she initially protects her sister Lise, and ultimately takes an unthinkable step in her commitment to ‘empower Germany’.

Jasmyn Setchell, as Lise is well-costumed and convincing as the younger, morally principled sister who struggles with her sister’s transformation into blind cruelty and moral turpitude. As a journalist chronicling stories of survivors and perpetrators, Marcus Murdoch embodies the role of Dailmer. He is the spoken conscience keeper, the living mirror to an era of horror that must not be forgotten and is still with us in 2026 in a new guise. He is unabating in challenging and never pardoning Greta.

Costumes provide visual support for the context, and notably, female cast had taken care with the evocative hairstyles of the time. The hideous privation of Ravensbruck camp would likely have had less well-shod and coatless, filthy prisoners, but the ‘reveal’ at the start is also used effectively to create a sense of time and place.

What appears to be the story of two sisters is, in fact, a complex parable, the everyday being the normalised privations of a prisoner of war camp where Jewish prisoners are regarded as and referred to as ‘refuse’ taking up space, and a society where ‘the smell of weakness’ can result in torture and death.

Zorkovic and Eustice use subtle staging techniques like seating the whole ensemble on the edges of the performance area; a chilling reminder of how often and easy it is to be a silent bystander in horrific times.

Dark Road serves as a 50-minute conscience call, reminding us that ‘where there is light, there are shadows’. It is also a very good example of the importance of youth theatre as a teacher and a voice that shapes and informs our future.

Jude Hines

Photographer: Greg Adams from Imagestix