Monster

I remember the first time I read Monster. I finished it and just sat there for a while. It didn’t feel sensational or dramatic in an obvious way. It felt unsettling because it felt true. It captured something we don’t often say out loud: the quiet ache of trying to survive, the shame people carry in silence and the desperate hope that connection might somehow mend what feels broken.

For me, this is not a play about villains. It’s about people. People shaped by trauma. People shaped by absence. People shaped by systems that are stretched, flawed, or simply not equipped to hold them. And yet, within that, there are moments of tenderness…small, fragile gestures of care that almost change everything.

Throughout rehearsals, I found myself thinking a lot about the stories we tell about young men. The language of threat. Of danger. Of “problem”. We often rush to define, to label, to protect ourselves from discomfort. But Monster refuses that simplicity. It asks us to sit in ambiguity. To acknowledge how family, institutions, fear and love intertwine in complicated ways. And to consider what responsibility we share in the worlds we create.

In Australia right now, conversations about mental health, family violence, coercive control and intergenerational trauma are urgent and ongoing. These aren’t distant issues. They exist in our communities, our classrooms, our hospitals, our homes and too often they are reduced to numbers or headlines.

My hope is that tonight you watch with curiosity rather than certainty. That you allow yourself to feel unsettled. That you resist easy judgement. If we all leave this theatre with a deeper capacity for empathy and perhaps a greater willingness to look honestly at the systems and relationships that shape us then this story will have done something meaningful.

Thank you for being here and sharing this space with us.

Kim Hardwick