Joe White’s Blackout Songs is set to take Melbourne audiences on a wild ride through addiction, love, and memory. This time, the play finds its stage at Red Stitch Actors’ Theatre in Saint Kilda.

Here, the intimate setting is stripped down to its bare essentials, featuring only two stools and scattered wine bottles, providing the perfect canvas for this gripping two-hander.

Jack Twelvetree and Sarah Sutherland in Blackout Songs. Photo © James Reiser

We first encounter the unnamed protagonists at an AA meeting where there’s nothing stronger than coffee. Their chemistry is immediate and volatile; the kind you will later point to as the fork in the road for Jack Twelvetree, who plays a lost and hopeful young painter.

Alongside him, Sarah Sutherland plays a sloshed manic pixie dream girl who sweeps Twelvetree into her chaos. She prances across the stage, all velvet, high-boots, and mocking, picking and choosing her memories; real or not. She wants to live a big, full life like Janis Joplin and Andy Warhol. It’s freeing until it’s not.

From moments of stability to hedonism, hope to despair, the character’s emotional journeys are spotlighted with heartbreaking clarity by Tom Healey’s...