Before heading to Paris as featured artists at the Festival d’Automne, Back to Back Theatre is briefly reviving its most celebrated work on home soil. Premiering in Melbourne in 2011, Ganesh Versus the Third Reich has since been performed around Australia and the world, collecting numerous awards along the way.

The company itself has received everything from a Venice Biennale Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, and the International Ibsen Award, aka the ‘Nobel Prize for Theatre’. Not bad for a Geelong-based ensemble of actors who have intellectual disabilities or are neurodivergent.

Brian Tilley, Simon Laherty and David Woods in Ganesh Versus the Third Reich. Photo © Jeff Busby

Directed, designed and co-devised by Back to Back’s Artistic Director Bruce Gladwin, Ganesh Versus the Third Reich is on one level just that. The elephant-headed Hindu god of obstacles travels to Germany in 1943 to take back a sacred symbol appropriated by the Nazis: the swastika.

It’s also a play within a play that echoes and amplifies the mythological-historical story’s themes by dramatising tensions that arose during this work’s creation. The actors are uncomfortable about cultural...