Loaded

The theatre show, Loaded, based on the iconic book of the 90s by Christos Tsiolkas of the same name, which was then turned into the epic film Head On, directed by Anna Kokkinos and starring Alex Dimitriades, is currently playing at The Malthouse. Directed by acclaimed director Stephen Nicolazzo (Looking for Alibrandi), and adapted for the stage by Christos Tsiolkas and Don Giovannoni, this solo show is played by Danny Ball. The story of Loaded is based on a 24-hour period of a drug hungry, sex crazed gay Ari, the son of Greek migrants, and all the people in his life who interact with him. He travels the Melbourne suburbs trying to find himself and free himself from the Greek cultural pressures to conform. 

I have to preface this review by saying that I came to this show with a particular perspective, as a woman of the Australian Greek-Cypriot diaspora. I read Tsiolkas’s Loaded over ten years ago as an extremely sheltered housewife and mother who was trapped by culture, and it was reading this book that had me questioning everything. It opened a door for me and inspired me to abandon my career as a computer programmer and follow my dream of not only being a writer, but untangling myself from the expectations and norms of my culture. Thus because of this, I came to this theatre adaptation with a high level of emotional anticipation and expectation, especially since Stephen Nicolazzo is one of my favourite directors, Christos Tsiolkas is one of my favourite writers, and I absolutely loved what they created with Don Giovannoni when they adapted Christos’s Merciless Gods for the stage a few years back. 

The character of Ari from the 90s has been brought into the present day in this stage adaptation, and I think Danny Ball did a great job of holding the stage all on his own for 90 minutes with barely any props. The acting was really good, as was the body movement. The stage design by Nathan Burmeister consisted of two archways, the outer made of small aqua-blue tiles, which was very Greek, but inside on stage, the set was able to rotate in a circle, which it did at certain points, and the colour scheme was a drab purple. The lighting design by Katie Sfetkidis was very simple, as was the sound design by Daniel Nixon. I was expecting this show to be loud and chaotic like Ari’s spirit, with a cast and full set like Looking For Alibrandi, but instead everything was kept very simplistic, perhaps to allow Ari space to just say what he wanted to say. 

Through Ball we got to feel Ari in his 24 hour cycle in 2023. As the play progressed, I felt that this work was more an ode to Ari’s energy, and how that energy sees the world of today, as opposed to being an adaptation of the book Loaded. There was commentary on everything from political correctness, to hipster culture and gentrification, Melbourne suburbia, to identity politics, to Greek culture and feeling like you belong nowhere, and just like the Ari of the 90s – he didn’t want a bar of any of it. 

There was dreariness to this play. A sadness. A decay. This is complex work that is not easy to unpack. Ari tells us that even today, Greeks have to lie, that’s how we get by, and it’s sad that this is still true. There was a suffocation in the writing that weighed heavily as Ari went from drug to drug, body to body, a lost soul with no clear sense of direction. At times I couldn’t follow what character Ball was playing, but I wondered if that was part of depicting the chaos of Ari’s ghost. At one point I thought – is Ari in hell? The only reprieve the audience gets from this hell are the glorious moments of sex, or the honest and funny commentary on how Melbourne is, which I felt was Ari’s way of punching back at the culture that punches him and weighs him down, stopping him from living the life he wants to live. Escape still seems to be the only solution for Ari. 

Ari is in no way politically correct. The sexual scenes of random sex were delicious and liberating, his love for another man and having sex with him, beautiful and necessary to be shown on our stages, especially since migrant culture is still so backwards and homophobic. I thought of a Greek gay man yet to come out to his family watching this show, and how important and relevant works like these are to the queer migrant community today to show that although we had Loaded in the 90s, and then Head On, we Greeks are not as progressive as we think we are. There is still a problem. 

Ari tells us, we Greeks still can’t be ourselves. We have to lie to get by. As a Greek woman also watching this play, I found myself thinking that we need more Greek stories on our stages and in our books, to have a dialogue with Ari, who seems to be alone and somehow trapped. At one point I felt as if the set itself and Ari were underground in a cave, Ari spinning on his wheel like he is on display, but is anyone listening? I had images of the ancient statue of the Greek athlete throwing the discus. I don’t know, maybe in a few weeks my interpretation of this show will change once again.

Koraly Dimitriadis

Koraly Dimitriadis is a writer, poet, performer, film and theatre maker and the author of Love and F—k Poems and Just Give Me The Pills. 

Photographer: Tamarah Scott