Out bush somewhere live farming couple Ray (Colin Friels) and Floss (Kerry Armstrong). They’re plenty used to hard times around here, but we’re meeting them in a period of maximum stress. Drought pushed them to the edge and now heavy rains have arrived, stranding and drowning dozens of heifers, which now have to be hauled from the mud and buried. Debts to the bank are mounting and the gun-happy neighbours – a local dynasty of crooks and stock thieves – are becoming more and more troublesome.

Pretty much par for the course, you might think. Australian farming life in a nutshell. But Ray and Floss are getting on and their health isn’t what it was. Their resilience and ability to push through to the next season is waning. Talking in the kitchen or on the porch, their exchanges are brief but loaded. That nobody actually says “she’ll be right”, seems like a tacit acknowledgment that, this time, she won’t be.

Kerry Armstrong and Colin Friels in Into the Shimmering World. Photo © Daniel Boud

Into the Shimmering World is the third instalment of Cerini’s ‘gothic trilogy’ of bush-set plays, the first being the macabre revenge drama The Bleeding Tree (which won the 2014 Griffin Award for New Australian Playwriting) and the second 2020’s Wonnangatta, an intense two-hander based on a real-life murder committed in the high country of Victoria in 1918. All three are distinguished by Cerini’s condensed yet vivid stage poetry and, to various degrees, stories shadowed by the spectre of male violence.

Unlike those earlier plays, however, Into the Shimmering World is a present-day story. It’s not just lives at stake but livelihoods, ways of life, entire communities and the mythologies they generated. The threat here (if you discount Ray’s gun-happy neighbours) is inhuman – environmental, inexorable.

Colin Friels and Kerry Armstrong in Into the Shimmering World. Photo © Daniel Boud

Set on an isolated sketch of a homestead kitchen (a very effective David Fleischer design), director Paige Rattray has fashioned a production as chiselled as Cerini’s text. Nick Schlieper’s impressive lighting and composer Clemence Williams’ score make strong contributions to the work’s immersive multidimensional shimmer.

Friels is in superb form as Ray. Had Cerini not granted him a single a line, you’d still be able to read his mind and feel his pain. Friels also nails Ray’s humour perfectly, notably in a delightfully funny-awkward scene with his city-dwelling son (played by James O’Connell), who is determined to wring out a hug and an “I love you” from his taciturn dad.

Armstrong (in what is, amazingly, her STC debut) is captivating as Floss, a radiant woman whose work as a nurse props up the failing enterprise that is the farm. Together, they create a moving portrait of mutual devotion that instils a kind of dread in us: must we see it end?

There’s fine work also from Bruce Spence as Ray’s old friend and neighbour, and Renee Lim, who plays an enthusiastic bush regeneration expert and, later in the piece, the home care assistant who drops in on Ray to make sure he’s getting along. O’Connell plays a pragmatic bush cop very well, too.

Cerini’s The Bleeding Tree is already something of a 21st century classic. It’s been produced several times. Into the Shimmering World will likely follow suit. Wherever you live, I’d bet it’ll show up in the next season or two. When it does, don’t miss it.

Into the Shimmering World plays in the Wharf 1 Theatre, Sydney Theatre Company, Walsh Bay, until 19 May.