Now in its fifth year, Melbourne’s RISING has entrenched itself in Australia’s festival calendar. Emerging from the ashes of the Melbourne Festival and White Night, it has survived two Covid-19-aborted iterations to become, alongside Sydney’s Vivid and Hobart’s Dark Mofo, a key midwinter arts and culture assembly. It is possible to think, as you gaze up at Flinders Street Station, its yellow façade and green copper dome bathed in that distinctive shade of icy blue, that the festival has come of age. Yet, I’m not sure that founders and co-artistic directors Hannah Fox and Gideon Obarzanek have quelled the sense that RISING remains something of a Frankenstein’s monster, neither its identity nor its purpose fully intelligible.

As with all winter festivals, it undoubtedly serves to, in the bureaucratic jargon of the moment, ‘activate’ the city’s CBD at a time when its population might be more favourably disposed to a hot toddy and a subscription to Binge. To its credit, RISING’s music offerings and First Nations programming – shaped by a team including Wiradjuri programmer Hayley Percy and Yorta Yorta curator Kimberley Moulton – are rich, and the festival’s emphasis on innovative and immersive fare is characteristic, if not exactly unique in 2025. As with any major arts festival, RISING’s program can feel overwhelming, even unnavigable – what to choose from more than one hundred events, ranging from a feminist mini-golf installation to an eight-hour day party?

If these don’t sound like your idea of a good time then you may, like me, be drawn towards the program’s somewhat less outré theatre offerings, of which I counted seven (not including plenty of dance works and others billed more broadly as ‘performance’). I found myself at two co-productions from Melbourne Theatre Company, one loose-limbed and friskily experimental, the other well-made and earnestly didactic. Both, intriguingly, turned on the same tension between traditionalism and progressivism, the old ways and the new.

Legends (of the Golden Arches) is a brisk, fringe-style play by long-term collaborators Joe Paradise Lui and Merlynn Tong. It is part-getai – a form of boisterous live performance common during the Ghost Festival in the creators’ native Singapore – and part-katabasis, or descent into the underworld. Tong is a playwright with a growing reputation. Her 2022 play Golden Blood was nominated, as is cheekily pointed out in one of Legends’ many fourth wall-breaking asides, for a Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, and the set up here feels very much like conventional playmaking. Two friends – lightly fictionalised versions of Joe and Merlynn themselves, who also play both roles – are holding a vigil for their dead grandfathers. Merlynn is determined to hew to tradition by burning joss paper, a rite said to ward off evil spirits and ensure ancestors receive the provisions they need in the afterlife. Joe, on the other hand, is questioning and sceptical. Thus, from its opening moments, the play’s exploration of the boundaries between belief and doubt is established.

When Joe, frustrated by what he sees as Merlynn’s rigid, unreflective traditionalism, attempts to burn a bag containing a Big Mac and a Filet-O-Fish – their grandfathers’ preferred McDonalds order – the pair are thrust into diyu, a kind of Chinese hell. Rather like Dante’s circles of hell, diyu is a realm of judgment and punishment and contains worlds-within-worlds. One zone resembles a dodgy Singaporean karaoke joint; others entail encounters with God of War Guan Yu and Goddess of Mercy Guanyin. While the play’s first half is naturalistic, the second is flamboyantly theatrical, Cherish Marrington and Wendy Yu’s charmingly lo-fi projections replaced by a neon-lined temple and giant inflatable puppets. As is consistent with the narrative structure known as Hero’s Journey, Merlynn and Joe are transformed by their threshold-crossing journey into the unknown (tests, allies, and enemies abound) and we imagine, though it is not entirely clear, that their return to the ordinary world is accompanied by new insights and abilities.

Much of this is played for laughs – Marrington’s high kitsch karaoke world costumes, complete with LED sneakers, are worth the price of admission alone – but braided into the script are heart-rending (and presumably true) biographical details. Merlynn’s mother, we learn, took her own life, while Joe made the fateful decision to eschew compulsory military service in favour of pursuing a career in the arts in Australia. These disparate tonalites are smartly judged and balanced, and what emerges is a complex, vital, and often hilarious dissection of grief, ritual, and (dis)belief. If Joe never quite convinces in the same way that Merlynn does – she is a confident actor of considerable range, he often comes across as tentative and slightly wooden – the mismatch is forgivable, a sacrifice occasioning some real magic.          

Where Legends winningly indulges its creators’ sense of camp while affectionately sending up many of the peculiarities of the diasporic experience, The Wrong Gods presents its depiction of a struggle between tradition and modernity as no laughing matter. S. Shakthidharan’s previous play, Counting and Cracking, which premiered in 2019 and featured in last year’s RISING, was one of the major achievements of Australian drama this century, an utterly absorbing and affecting three-and-a-half-hour epic concerning the travails of four generations of a Tamil family across Sri Lanka and Australia between 1956 and 2004. The Wrong Gods is a more modestly conceived play – a four-hander clocking in at a comparatively fleeting 100 minutes – but no less concerned with weighty idea(l)s.

Radhika Mudaliyar in The Wrong Gods (photograph by Brett Boardman)

Its dual protagonists are Nirmala (Nadie Kammallaweera) and Isha (Radhika Mudaliyar), a mother and daughter living an agrarian life in a riverside valley near the boundary between North and South India. Isha aspires to become a scientist while Nirmala, abandoned by her ‘bastard’ of a husband, tenaciously clings to the modest existence the family farm provides. When Lakshmi (Vaishnavi Suryaprakash), the representative of a Western corporation, arrives in the village offering yield-increasing tech to Nirmala and a university education for Isha, mother and daughter divide bitterly along familiar lines. Nirmala is suspicious of Lakshmi’s intentions; Isha sees her offer as an escape route from a stultifying life – indeed, as the answer to her prayers to an unnamed Goddess.

Seven years pass, and Isha, now having graduated and secured a job with the corporation, returns to the valley with Lakshmi. In an echo of the real-life Narmada Valley ecological disaster, Isha and Lakshmi inform Nirmala that her village, and countless others like it, face an existential threat from imminent floods caused in part by the rapacious extractivism of the corporation. Tens of thousands of people will be displaced, their homes and livelihoods destroyed.

While Keerthi Subramanyam’s set, incorporating something like an amphitheatre made up of fissured and moss-flecked concentric circles, tilts at a sense of myth, The Wrong Gods feels less like a parable than a contemporary play of ideas – which is to say, one that tends towards speechifying. Structurally, too, the play feels uneven, in part I suspect because it is built on a series of not-quite-believable narrative contrivances. Where it succeeds is in Shakthidharan’s ability to compress the tragedy of unchecked resource capitalism into a human-scale drama, and in the play’s powerfully imagined female-led resistance (based on the Narmada Bachao Andolan Indian social movement), which is admirably reflected in a creative team comprising nearly all women. The performances are beyond fault, especially those of Kammallaweera and Mudaliyar, whose fraught mother-daughter relationship is skilfully and at times movingly sketched.

While Counting and Cracking’s many admirers may find that The Wrong Gods falls short of that high bar, it nevertheless makes for an engrossing drama, and one that thrusts into the spotlight the evils of neocolonialist capitalism and our capacity – nay, necessity – to resist them.       

Legends (of the Golden Arches) (Melbourne Theatre Company/Performing Lines) continues at the Southbank Theatre until 28 June 2025 (performance attended: 7 June) and The Wrong Gods (Melbourne Theatre Company/Belvoir) continues at the Arts Centre until 12 July 2025 (performance attended: 10 June).