A young boy who just wants to play cricket, a teenage girl begrudgingly playing happy families, a mother on a holiday gifted to her by her colleagues and a tour guide who revisits the site every day….They do not know each other until they meet in the delicate aftermath of one of Australia’s darkest days. Their stories intertwine, voices shifting, overlapping and finally connecting, as memories, resentments, healing and humanity collide.

Subtitled “A Quartet on Loss and Violence” BEYOND THE NECK is a piece of theatre which is closer to a musical quartet than a traditional play. Holloway writes this important note to actors and director in the foreword of the play - "rhythm and timbre play vital roles, perhaps equally as important as characterisation and narrative structure." It is a uniquely intricate and beautiful style of theatre writing.

Based on real accounts from people affected by the Port Arthur massacre, BEYOND THE NECK is a profoundly moving portrait of a community learning to live beyond trauma. Through Holloway’s clear, unsentimental writing, fragments of grief and resilience are threaded together by a chorus, a collective witness who observes, echoes, guides and holds each character as they inch toward one another.

Humour flickers through the darkness. Kindness sits beside pain. The play creates space for stillness, breath and hope, a reminder that healing is a shared act, and that even in the shadow of violence, connection remains possible. It is an extraordinary journey.

This new Theatre Works production, directed by Suzanne Chaundy, honours the sensitivity and courage at the heart of the text. Raw yet restrained, compassionate and powerfully human, BEYOND THE NECK invites audiences to sit together, listen deeply, and remember what happened 30 years ago in 1996 when 35 people were shot and killed, and a further 20 wounded at Port Arthur. This event changed Australia forever.

The visual design for Beyond the Neck incorporates a reproduction of Port Arthur (2012) by award-winning Australian artist Rodney Pople, winner of the Glover Prize. Pople’s powerful and contemplative painting echoes the production’s exploration of memory, loss and collective healing, creating a striking visual dialogue with Tom Holloway’s text. The inclusion of this work deepens the production’s reflective tone and honours the sensitivity at the heart of the story.

"Tom Holloway’s Beyond the Neck composes the long shadow of the Port Arthur massacre into a beautifully graduated piece of chamber theatre, a feat more remarkable for the discordant enormity of its subject." - The Age, 2012

"Director Suzanne Chaundy conducts like a maestro. It’s a challenging text that could collapse into sentiment in the wrong hands, but by guiding the cast to hold their emotions close, Chaundy lets the grace notes of humour offer light and understanding without the easy comfort of hope or the overwhelming fear of hopelessness." - Aussie Theatre, 2012

Content note: This production sensitively addresses the aftermath of a real-life tragedy and themes of grief and recovery.