Just after the premiere of MTC’s West Gate, about the eponymous Melbourne bridge’s collapse in 1970, Theatre Works presents another play about a shocking event in recent Australian history.

Tom Holloway’s Beyond the Neck explores the aftermath of the Port Arthur massacre of 1996, in which 35 people were killed and 23 were wounded. Many suffered psychological trauma as a consequence.

Holloway’s interviews with survivors are the basis for his play, which premiered in Hobart in 2007. Its name refers to the narrow isthmus that connects the Tasman Peninsula, where the former convict settlement of Port Arthur is located, with the rest of Tasmania.

Emmaline Carroll Southwell, Freddy Collyer, Cassidy Dunn, Francis Greenslade: Beyond the Neck. Photo © Steven Mitchell Wright

At the start of Beyond the Neck we are reminded of the settlement’s reputation for physical and mental brutality by a Port Arthur tour guide, one of the play’s four characters, all unnamed.

Beside this 75-year-old man is a woman aged 28, a teenage girl and a boy of seven. They slowly reveal their separate stories in short monologues, the others...