Trust Me, It’s the End of Our World After All, Beyond the Yard Theatre · 
The Blue Room Theatre, 18 August 2022 · 

Behind the circular hatch the audience for Trust Me, It’s the End of Our World After All clambers through to enter the Blue Room’s main theatre is a cramped bunker where the survivors of a family shelter from the terrifying world outside.

It’s familiar territory for the Blue Room, which has delivered some toxic environments and dystopian societies at the hands of young angstophiles over the years (Jeffrey Jay Fowler’s 2014 Elephants is a germane example).

In Trust Me… the air outside the bunker is fatal, riddled with the deadly Virus X that has eluded the scientists of Cure Z, who have toiled in their mysterious complex out there, somewhere, for a decade.

Only the brave dare leave their man-made caves, protected by World War I-style gas masks, to pick up their rations of revolting can food from a commissariat or rummage for clothes in abandoned recycling bins. One slip and you’re gone.

That’s what happened to an early victim of the pestilence, the father of Holly (Bubble Maynard), and her younger siblings Carrie (Bianca Roose) and Marcus (Liam Longley). They don’t know what happened to their mother Rachel, a scientist who slipped away one morning to join Cure Z and has not been heard from since.

Their terrible, but at least stable enough, lives are thrown into disarray when Holly drags in an unconscious man who startled her outside the camouflaged entry to their bunker.

Unsettlingly, Rich (Joe Haworth) was wearing a gas mask with their mother’s name on its label. How he claims he came by it, what his motives are and how each of the siblings is affected by his disruptive presence drives the play’s narrative.

All well and good. Writer and director Terence Smith insists Trust Me… isn’t a play about COVID, and he’s right. It is, as he says, about siblings and the truth and lies they tell each other, and his way of working through these themes is effective and relatable.

The narrative and the performances, though, lack temperature control. Both are cranked up to maximum heat from the first scene, and from that point there’s little room for either the story or the actors to move. There’s no humour – absolutely none – and only the briefest moments of soft emotion to release the pressure.

Sure, the world of the play is grim; sure, living cheek to jowl in its claustrophobic setting (nicely realised by set designer Owen Davis and AV and sound designer Peter Lane Townsend) isn’t conducive to laughter and high spirits. But on the other side of the fourth wall is an audience who, even if only occasionally, need a break.

So do the cast. Maynard, Roose, Haworth and Longley are adept performers (all from the Curtin and WAAPA performance schools) and clearly committed to their roles and the production. 

I’d be interested to see them in roles that better expose their emotional range, skillsets and charisma, as I would Smith’s narrative imagination and control.

For all its good intentions, Trust Me, It’s the End of Our World After All isn’t that conveyance.        

Trust Me, It’s the End of Our World After All runs at The Blue Room Theatre until 3 September 2022. 

Pictured top: Holly (Bubble Maynard) hovers over Rich (Joe Haworth) in the bunker. Photo: Pete Townsend