Cold War 2.0 Review by Solomiya Sywak

Imagine you’re a background character in Ocean’s 8 – except there’s no George Clooney, the only heist is your phone being confiscated for an hour, and the action unfolds through a chaotic dialogue that ricochets between actor, audience and the society we live in. Flooded in red light and drowned out by heavy-metal karaoke, this show is a wild ride that takes you from your seat to the mosh pit.

The theatrical duo Tobias Manderson-Galvin and Aquilla Sorensen, from international performance collective Doppelgängster, are adept at capturing the particular rage of post-anarchist punk. Their performance erupts into discussions about everything from war and disillusionment to personal experience, anecdotes and the uncomfortable facts buried beneath the daily media cycle. It feels deliberately unscripted, like stumbling into a podcast hosted by UFO theorists, where The X-Files has spiralled into pure chaos and paranoia.

Their ‘anti-theatre’ approach draws loose threads of political satire around the premise of “two losers in a motel room”. They make snow cones in the corner, which I believe are grape-flavoured, while smashing phones, jumping, yelling and screaming with manic excitement. Across five sections, the performance spirals further into chaos before breaking into metal karaoke, with the microphone passed to audience members and invitations to leap into the mosh pit, thumping across what I can only assume are heritage-listed floors.

The room itself feels like a punk bunker: black-and-white banners are DIY’d with painted skulls and teeth, while a low, almost seismic hum sits underneath the performers’ chatter. You drift in and out of understanding what they are actually talking about. Their rapid-fire pacing, headset issues and increasingly raised voices only heighten the mania.

What Doppelgängster does particularly well is sense the moments when an audience member begins to check out, and immediately target them. A lull becomes an opportunity to drag someone back into their reality: sitting on laps, forcing interactions and handing out snow cones that suddenly seem suspicious enough to make you question whether they are even safe to eat.

Are these characters criminals or agents, or even characters at all? As their masks begin to come off, the headsets, formal suits and dark glasses reveal themselves as another kind of front, a performance of privacy and authority. Slowly, the pair begin to share more personal stories, writing on the floor before stripping completely and redressing in sweat shorts and old T-shirts.

And then, once again, they break into karaoke.

Cold War 2.0 is an anarchic collision of theatre, political satire, punk performance and audience participation. Showing at The Rocks until 20 September, the work turns the theatre into a space of surveillance, paranoia and collective release, asking what happens when the boundaries between fiction and reality, and political anxiety and absurdity begin to collapse.

This is anarchy at its finest: an uneasy, exhilarating punk throwdown that takes aim at authority and the absurdity of contemporary life. The actors take over the entire room, turning the audience from passive spectators into unwilling participants in their chaotic little world.

It is difficult to know where the performance ends and the paranoia begins, and that seems to be precisely the point.

The snow cones could have used more flavouring.

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Solomiya Sywak attended Cold War 2.0 at 6-8 Atherden Street on Saturday 12 September. Cold War 2.0 plays until Sunday 20 September.