BODY OF WORK

after the end by dennis kelly.

“Louise wakes up to find herself in an underground nuclear fallout shelter belonging to her colleague Mark, who has rescued her from the devastation caused by a suitcase bomb. Luckily, Mark has stocked food, Dungeons and Dragons and a knife. Now they just have to wait.”

With this unpredictable, provocative, and emotionally gruelling play, After the End marked Salad Days Collective’s fearless debut—a theatrical deep-dive into individual sovereignty, power, and the terrifying intimacy of survival.

Set in a tiny nuclear bunker, Dennis Kelly’s razor-sharp script walks a tightrope between the domestic and the desperate. The audience is pulled into a claustrophobic world fuelled by obsession, desire, and identity—the lethal cocktail that pins Mark and Louise in a psychological standoff neither of them saw coming.

As Mark’s long-standing fixation on Louise surfaces, the bunker reveals itself not just as a place of safety but a prison—carefully constructed to stage his fantasy of control. What unfolds is a two-hander that drags its characters (and audience) to the edge of collapse and self-destruction.

This piece was the perfect provocation to launch SDC. It allowed us to showcase our commitment to complex, character-driven storytelling and our appetite for risk. After the End was more than a debut—it was a statement. We are theatre makers who confront, unsettle, and perform without apology.

The play remains deeply relevant in a world reckoning with toxic masculinity, isolation, and the thin line between protection and control. After the End forces us to confront how power can shift in private spaces—and how survival isn't always about the world outside, but the battles waged within.

[Read our reviews here!]

Season Date
19th - 21st April 2024.

Venue: Backdock ARTS, Fortitude Valley.

A And K See A Play

ATE Creative Team

Jasmine Prasser

SDC Co-Founder / Louise / Producer
Leo Buzac

SDC Co-Founder / Mark
ava rusch

Director
Michaela faux

Production Manager
Samuel Carrick

Sound Designer
Claire yorston

Lighting Designer

scenes with girls by miriam battye.

“You're only the greatest person ever invented and he's some boy who's probs never had a conversation with a side of the sun before - but like Let's Be Modest About It
Tosh and Lou. 22 scenes.Other friends have come, got boyfriends and gone. So what? Tosh and Lou have each other. They'll never be like the other girls. They won't sit in a narrative someone else thought up. This is love. This is enough.

This is enough.”

Season Date

31st July - 3rd August 2024.

Venue: PIP Theatre, Milton.

In collaboration with PIP Theatre, SDC’s Scenes With Girls by Miriam Battye was the Queensland premiere of a bold, whip-smart, and emotionally piercing play. A complex dive into modern love, feminism, identity, and female friendship, this production was nothing short of a privilege to bring to life.

We quickly discovered that at the heart of this script is a relentless interrogation of what it means to be a woman in the 21st century. With fierce honesty and wit, Battye explores how sex, empowerment, and performativity intertwine—and how our desires, defences, and definitions of intimacy have become warped by a world that packages freedom as a commodity. The dialogue is sharp, funny, and devastating, and we leaned fully into the contradictions it offered.

Drawing on both contemporary scenarios and ancient archetypes, we crafted a world that was electric, intimate, and unnervingly familiar. From the infectious banter to the raw moments of emotional collapse, the play pulsed with energy and desperation. The result was a theatrical experience that left audiences laughing, gasping, and reflecting—often all at once.

This piece was important not just for its cleverness, but for the way it captured a generation of women stuck between wanting to be loved and refusing to be defined by it. It gave voice to the unspoken: the shame, the bravado, the vulnerability, and the yearning for something that feels real. Scenes With Girls was a mirror held up to the emotional chaos of modern womanhood—and staging it was a powerful alignment of message, mission, and artistry for Salad Days Collective.

[Read our reviews here!]

Stage Whispers

Stage Buzz QLD

Stage Door Podcast

Scenes with girls creative team

Jasmine Prasser

SDC Co founder / Producer / Set Design / TOSH
Hannah Ward

Choreographer / LOU
Georgina sawyer

Co-Producer / FRAN
Ava Rusch

DIRECTOR
Claire Yorston

SOUND DESIGN
Ziggy Enoch

SOUND DESIGN

LOVE by patricia cornelius.

“Tanya, Annie and Lorenzo are at the bottom of the heap. They're young but already the youth has been wrung out of them. They've been abused, they're abusive and they're difficult to like, let alone love. But it is love in all its distorted and mutated forms that holds them together.”

In staging Patricia Cornelius’ LOVE, Salad Days Collective embraced the rawness of the text with a production that was as brutal as it was beautiful. Performed at VENTspace—a converted warehouse venue—we chose to strip away the traditional theatre environment and immerse audiences directly into the grime, volatility, and aching humanity of the world Cornelius created.

This wasn't theatre you watched—it was theatre you felt. Many audience members described the experience as unlike anything they’d seen before. With the cast just metres away, the sweat, spit, and silence became inescapable. It felt like being dropped into the middle of something real, where every moment teetered between tenderness and destruction.

LOVE explores the lives of three young people on the margins—fighting, fucking, and failing their way through a world that never gave them a shot. In our hands, this play became a visceral exploration of love where survival eclipses sentimentality, and where tenderness is a dangerous, radical act.

This production was important for SDC not only because of its artistic challenge, but because it aligned so fiercely with our ethos: to stage work that is unapologetic, emotionally relentless, and fiercely human. LOVE demanded everything from us—and our audiences. And that’s exactly the kind of theatre we believe in.

[Read our reviews here!]

Season Date
1st - 3rd November, 2024.

Venue: VENTSPACE, South Brisbane.

Stage Buzz

Stagedoor

LOVE creative team

Jasmine Prasser

TANYA/Co-Producer/Set Design
Georgina sawyer

ANNIE/Co-Producer
Leo Buzac

LORENZO
Ava Rusch

Director
Claire Yorston

Lighting Design
Ziggy Enoch

SOUND DESIGN
Jessica Johnson

Stage Manager/Production Coordinator
Cutter Harris

Intern Production Assistant

“Mae lives on a farm in feverish poverty with her not-brother Llyod. Mae knows she deserves a better life. Mae knows she can have one. And in an effort to excavate herself from this dreary existence, Mae is going to school and Mae is learning things!

But Llyod doesn’t like that. Llyod is simple. He’d much rather continue living in the pig pen instead. However, when he falls sick, and a keen Mae enlists the help of neighbour Henry – a darkly comic love/hate triangle quickly ensues. Frustrated and desperate, Mae realizes that in order to change her ill-fate, she must escape the two men who depend upon her. But is she already stuck?”

mud by maria irene fornes.

Our most ambitious production to date, Mud by María Irene Fornés was a haunting, poetic, and devastating portrait of entrapment—emotional, intellectual, and physical. With its sparse, lyrical text and aching silences, Mud demanded precision, vulnerability, and deep sensitivity from all involved.

Staging this play in Australia—where domestic and gender-based violence remains a national crisis—felt both essential and confronting. Mud is not a loud or didactic play. Its power lies in its restraint. In the subtle erosion of autonomy. In the quiet cruelty that builds between people when language fails and power festers. Mae, the protagonist, longs to escape a life shaped by poverty and control—to pursue education, independence, and meaning. But the world around her—embodied by the two men who want to possess her—refuses to let her grow.

While Mud is deeply tragic, our production foregrounded the absurdity woven through the text—emphasising surreal freeze frames between scenes, moments of strange stillness, and the disjointed rhythm of people trying—and failing—to communicate. In doing so, we were able to access a kind of strange, unexpected humour, bringing a raw human texture to the world of the play. Audiences were not only confronted, but disarmed—able to see themselves reflected in these flawed, grasping characters.

This was a stark, emotionally charged production that invited audiences to sit in discomfort and recognition. Every design and direction choice leaned into the tension between hope and helplessness, between love and ownership.

Mud was a defining moment for Salad Days Collective. It showcased our ability to hold complex, socially urgent material with bold theatricality, emotional care, and a commitment to exploring both the darkness and the absurd beauty of being human.

[Read our reviews here!]

Season Date
14th - 22nd March, 2025.

Venue: PIP Theatre, 2025 Mainstage season.

Stage Buzz

Stagedoor