We’re All Gonna Die: quick links
Queensland journalist and playwright Maddie Nixon was, like most Australians, shocked and stunned by the catastrophic events of 2019-2020’s ‘Black Summer’, which claimed 450 lives – 33 of them directly. Another 417 people died in the same period, according to a report in the Medical Journal of Australia, because of the toxic pall of bushfire smoke that blanketed swatches of the country during that long and terrible summer.
‘I was like, “I need to write about this and do a show about this”. But how do we do it without either preaching to the choir or making everyone feel incredibly guilty but unable to act on anything?’ Nixon says.
Her solution was to write about climate catastrophe and environmental collapse indirectly, using metaphor. In Nixon’s We’re All Gonna Die! (which opens this Saturday 2 August at La Boite’s Roundhouse Theatre), the destructive forces unleashed by humanity’s actions are embodied as a kaiju – a giant, city-smashing monster in the same vein as Godzilla, Gorgo and Mothra.
‘It’s an allegory of a monster,’ Nixon tells ArtsHub. ‘It’s kind of prepping the audience – for want of a better word – through comedy and action and epic-ness and storytelling, but then also, hopefully, landing some emotional punches along the way.
‘As much as it’s a funny play – well, I hope it’s funny – there’s an element of grief, as well. There’s a grief plot line that I think speaks to those complex feelings that a lot of us are feeling about the environment. We’re grieving, but we’re also angry, and we’re also frustrated – all of those things that you go through with grief.’
Pitched to Brisbane’s Dead Puppet Society in 2019 after the company put out an open call for proposals of new work by Queensland playwrights, Nixon’s original, ‘pretty brief’ pitch for We’re All Gonna Die! concerned ‘a teenage girl in Brisbane who’s aware that this giant garbage monster in the ocean is coming to get us all.
‘So I pitched this kind of “monster movie [meets] climate play” to them, and they said they loved the idea of that monster going up the Brisbane River and smashing up all the buildings in Brisbane. They were like, “Yeah, we want to stage that. Let’s go!”‘
David Morton, co-founder and Creative Director of Dead Puppets Society, is co-directing We’re All Gonna Die! together with La Boite’s Artistic Director, Courtney Stewart (his former housemate and collaborator during their student days theatre, meaning that the pair have a long-standing professional understanding, established some 15 years ago, of one another’s working styles).
Picking up the story, Morton says, ‘We put this brief out to the local industry here in Queensland, for a playwright who had a concept that required inventive visual staging in its scope, and – as with all of Dead Puppet Society’s work – was highly entertaining but also had a message at its heart that was concerned with issues around either social or ecological justice.’
We’re All Gonna Die: ‘a visual feast’
Nixon’s proposal, concerning the Great Pacific Garbage Patch coming to life and attacking Brisbane, immediately stood out from the 30 or so pitches the company received in 2019 – partially because of its metaphorical approach to exploring serious issues, but also because of the gleefully destructive options it inspired for destroying key Brisbane landmarks live on stage.
‘What’s so amazing about what Maddie has done, is, she’s taken the anxiety that everyone, but specifically young people have over these sort of slow moving ecological phenomenon that we’re facing in climate change, or plastics in the ocean, or ocean acidification … and re-envisaged it as an urgent, immediate threat … And then the way that Courtney and I have brought it to life and staged it, like, it’s a total spectacle and a visual feast,’ Morton tells ArtsHub.
We’re All Gonna Die: promoting Australian work
La Boite’s Courtney Stewart said staging the world premiere season of We’re All Gonna Die! in La Boite’s 100th year paid tribute to the company’s long and cherished history of nurturing and promoting new Australian work.
‘It is fitting, that in a brand-new work about giving voice to the next generation of change-makers, we celebrate the talented artists and creative collaborators who have honed their craft at La Boite,’ she explained in a media statement.
Dead Puppet Society developed one of its earliest works, The Harbinger, at La Boite in 2011 and 2012, returning in 2017 with Laser Beak Man – a musical odyssey featuring Ball Park Music’s Dean Hanson in the on-stage band. Hanson returns for We’re All Gonna Die! and has curated the play’s distinctly Brisbane soundtrack, which includes The Go-Betweens’ seminal ‘Streets of Your Town’ as well as hits from local bands such as Powderfinger, Regurgitator, Custard, The Saints, Violent Soho and The Veronicas.
Hanson says: ‘I want it [the score] to feel like someone is flipping through vinyl records from the “Brisbane” section of a record store. Nostalgia is important but there’s also an original theme and variation I wrote in a slightly sci-fi style to convey a sense that although we’re set in Brisbane, there’s something different, something out of this world occurring.’
Stewart added: “We’re All Gonna Die! is both a testament to the wealth of Queensland’s creative talent and the strongest assurance that La Boite stands ready and brimming with optimism for what the next 100 years hold.”
We’re All Gonna Die!: Brisbane landmarks
For audiences, part of the delight of the production will doubtless lie in seeing familiar Brisbane landmarks – made out of recyclable materials, like much of the set – demolished by the rampaging garbage monster. Morton says it was important for all the creatives that We’re All Gonna Die! took place somewhere that was recognisably Brisbane.
‘In these kaiju films, internationally, we’re lucky if Australia gets a mention. And in the representation of Australian stories on stages, it’s also quite rare that you see a Brisbane representation rather than a representation of a story that might be coming out of one of the more southern capitals,’ he explains.
‘And so for us, in producing the show and with working with Maddie through the scripting process, this felt to us like an incredible chance… There is so much that is incredible about this city. It has a deeply idiosyncratic way of being, and it has a similarly idiosyncratic arts industry that produces what I think is some of the most interesting work in the country. So yeah, it has just felt super important [through] the entire process that, like, this is a show that we’re making so that this audience here can see themselves, you know? And in a form that that they don’t get to see themselves in very often,’ Morton says.
We’re All Gonna Die: a climate change kaiju
When asked just how big the monster will be on stage, realised as it is through Dead Puppet’s own, idiosyncratic puppetry and stagecraft, Morton replies, ‘It’s huge, so it only just fits underneath the lighting rig in La Boite’s theatre space. I think it’s almost eight and a half metres tall.’
Nixon notes that writing a script around a gigantic monster was ‘liberating, not daunting at all’.
She continues, ‘Working with Dead Puppets means the parameters we often have when writing for the theatre aren’t there, so it was so exciting for me to write with them, because like, I often have had notes in my previous plays asking, “Maddie, how are we going to do that?!”, and so working with a company that just runs head first into those challenges has been really, really awesome. La Boite as well. I think they’ve also been really excited and liberated by the process.’
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Equally important, Nixon adds, was the creative challenge for her as a playwright in creating a story arc and character for the monster, so that the play is about more than ‘big puppet smash things,’ as she puts it.
‘There’s definitely a character arc that happens there. And I can’t say too much without spoiling it, but that was really important to me, because for theatre, “big puppet smash things” maybe isn’t as interesting as, “what if this thing actually has a character arc and has a journey and we see it evolve and grow over the play”? That was definitely a challenge, staging-wise, but yeah, the Dead Puppet guys – and Courtney at La Boite as well – have both just run at that challenge and gone, “Yeah, let’s go”. So I think we’ve all really enjoyed the problem solving, actually,’ she concludes.
The world premiere season of We’re All Gonna Die! is now previewing at La Boite’s Roundhouse Theatre. It opens on Saturday 2 August 2025 and runs until 16 August.
