I left Queensland Theatre Company’s production of Torch the Place with a very specific urge: to call my mum and sit down with a couple of old photo albums. And maybe — very gently, very diplomatically — slip a few things into the bin while she wasn’t looking. Perhaps that Microsoft Encarta 95 CD-ROM she insists someone might need one day.
That impulse feels very much in the spirit of the play. Benjamin Law’s debut stage work (directed by Ngoc Phan) begins with a simple premise: three adult children come home for their mother’s 60th birthday with cake… and a skip bin. The surprise is an intervention. Mum, Diana, is a hoarder, and the house has reached the point where something has to change.
Predictably, this plan does not go well.
What starts as a tidy-up quickly becomes an excavation. Boxes are opened. Old arguments resurface. Memories spill out along with decades of accumulated objects. The play digs into why people hold on to things so fiercely — not just physical items, but also grudges, grief and unresolved family stories. Hoarding here isn’t treated as a punchline. It’s tied to loneliness, trauma and the strange comfort that objects can offer when life itself has been unstable.
Yet for all that weight, the play is very funny.
Law has a knack for writing families that are chaotic and loving in equal measure. The siblings bicker constantly as they attempt to sort through their mother’s mountain of possessions, and their wildly different personalities collide in ways that feel painfully familiar. Family, after all, is where the fiercest loyalty and the deepest irritation often live side by side.
At the centre of it all is Hsiao-Ling Tang as Diana, and she gives an absolutely magnetic performance.
Diana is stubborn, sentimental and occasionally infuriating. Tang plays her with such vibrant energy that the audience swings between wanting to wrap her in a hug and wanting to leap out of our seats and stage the intervention ourselves. She fills the room the moment she walks on stage. One minute she’s tossing out a casually savage remark. The next she’s revealing something fragile underneath all that bravado. You understand why her children are worried. You also understand why she resists them so fiercely.
Tang inhabits Diana with such vitality that every sharp remark or stubborn refusal feels lived-in, revealing a woman shaped by decades of experience and love.
I did feel that at first the siblings read almost as caricatures — the responsible eldest, the relentlessly online middle child, the earnest youngest — but over time those edges blur into something very real. Their squabbles, shaped by growing up as migrant kids with a single mum holding everything together, settle into the kind of rivalry that feels both specific and somehow widely familiar.
Denise Chan brings a wonderful sense of tightly wound responsibility to Teresa, the eldest daughter. Teresa is the one who organised the skip bin, the one translating between everyone else’s emotions, the one trying desperately to keep the entire operation from exploding. Chan captures that particular eldest-child exhaustion beautifully.
I related to her more than I expected.
I’m not parentified in the way Teresa clearly has been, but there’s something very recognisable about the role she occupies. Eldest daughters often end up holding the clipboard in family situations, whether they asked for the job or not. Chan lets you see the love behind the exasperation.
The rest of the performers (Kristie Nguy, Locan So and Peter Thurnwald) click together in a way that genuinely feels like a family. Together they create a household that is loud, messy and full of competing emotional languages. Everyone loves each other. They just express it in WILDLY different ways.
Visually, the production is a small miracle.
The stage is packed with an avalanche of objects — boxes, bags, magazines, relics from decades past. It’s overwhelming in exactly the way Diana’s house needs to be. Every time another container is opened, a fresh wave of nostalgia spills out: relics of the 90s and early 2000s that had me flashing straight back to my own teenage years.
More than once I found myself wondering how on earth the props department managed to source some of this stuff, let alone find it in pristine condition. Somewhere backstage must be a warehouse that looks suspiciously like Diana’s house. And in Diana’s world, of course, every single item is apparently destined to be valuable one day.
The sheer volume of objects on stage also made me quietly admire the crew. Resetting that elaborate chaos night after night must be an undertaking worthy of its own standing ovation.
Tonally, the play moves with surprising agility. One moment we’re in broad comedy, with arguments escalating into ridiculous territory. Then the lights shift and the story slides into dreamlike sequences or sudden emotional honesty that hits much harder than expected. Law’s writing moves easily between absurd humour and moments that land with a quiet thud in the chest. As the clutter gradually clears, the family’s history becomes easier to see (and more painful to relive).
By the end, the play lands somewhere gentle. A recognition that families are complicated ecosystems. That people carry their histories in ways that aren’t always logical. That sometimes the things we refuse to throw away are doing emotional work we barely understand.
I walked out thinking about my own family’s boxes of stuff. The sentimental junk, the relics nobody quite knows what to do with. And yes, I’m still considering that quiet mission to dispose of Encarta 95.
Though if Diana were here, she’d probably remind me it could be worth something one day.
WHAT: Queensland Theatre Company’s Torch the Place
WHEN: Until March 29, 2026.
WHERE: Bille Brown Theatre, South Brisbane,
TICKETS: Get your tickets to Torch the Place here.
In her spare time, she likes long walks down the makeup aisle and performing in Brisbane theatre. You can follow her adventures on Instagram and TikTok @thebeautypalate.
