There is a quiet, unmistakable nostalgia that is evoked, as a second-generation migrant, in hearing your mother tongue spoken on stage. When that language is translated, braided seamlessly with two others, it becomes something rarer still. A trilingual play is at once a unique, technical feat, a trait that is becoming synonymous with Sydney Festival, and an overdue homage to the global workforce that has, for decades, been left publicly unacknowledged by the elite art industries they sustain.

It is these people who form the centrepiece of writer and director Caroline Guiela Nguyen’s three-hour drama, LACRIMA. Nguyen seems to be drawn to the world of threes: this three hour play, delivered in three languages – French, Tamil and English – follows craftsmen (and women) across three countries tasked with creating a secret, history-making dress.

Lacrima. Photo © Wendell Teodoro

Marion (Maud Le Grevellec), head seamstress of a Parisian textile workshop, who is enlisted by a British fashion designer (Vasanth Selvam) to make a wedding dress for a British princess. Through the deft use of onstage webcams, developed in collaboration with Jérémie Scheidler, Nguyen layers multiple perspectives through both the text and live video, projected above Alice Duchange’s Parisian atelier workshop set.

The video design cleverly carries the audience across continents: from the atelier in Paris, to Britain – where Selvam appears via video call, entertaining as a snooty and exacting designer filmed by an onstage webcam and projected onto the screen as if on Zoom – to a faux television documentary following three French lacemakers tasked with restoring an archival veil.

The video footage accompanies the audience to India, where Marion commissions ageing embroiderer Abdul (Charles Vinoth Irudhayaraj) to create the dress’s monumental train: four metres long and set with 150,000 real pearls.

Lacrima. Photo © Wendell Teodoro

Nguyen assembles a cast of twelve competent actors to tell several interwoven stories, each revealing a different facet of the haute couture industry – its ethics, exclusivity, heritage, greed and craft. While the production offers a rare education in this rarefied world, it also aptly highlights how capitalism and colonial legacy have, in many ways, brought artistry to its knees.

Most unexpectedly, LACRIMA becomes a meditation on isolation: isolation from others, from the truth, from safety, from authorship, and from the very beauty their labour produces.  There is, of course, a solitude inherent to the craft of lacemaking: a rhythmic meditation, a source of pride that fills the artisan with purpose, often captured on the split video screens – pairs of hands conducting embroidery or sewing with meticulous care.

Yet Nguyen’s text persistently probes the forces that estrange her characters. Scenes unfold as if overheard mid-argument, mid-revelation, leaving the audience alert, leaning forward, as if there is always some crucial information just out of reach. Le Grevellac’s Marion is particularly devastating during a heated confrontation with her abusive husband and co-worker Julien (Dan Artus), both performers inhabiting the moment with horrifyingly realistic precision, laying the groundwork for future developments but still leaving the audience unsettled. This careful game of cat and mouse transforms the three-hour runtime into something fleeting, even urgent.

Where this urgency perhaps becomes overzealous is the sound design. The Dune Part 2-esque heightened electronic pulses turn even intimate family confessions into a near horror soundscape. A small oversight in an otherwise tonally cohesive work.

Lacrima. Photo © Wendell Teodoro

Having spent the day firefighting toddler tantrums, teething pain and the sheer logistics of making it to the theatre on time, I arrived already exhausted and slightly undone. That this was the show I made it to at this year’s Sydney Festival feels like a quiet gift.

LACRIMA is as much about the beauty of creation as it is about the costs it demands. Nguyen’s work reminds us that behind every stitch lies a story: of devotion, determination, care and the quiet sacrifices that history too often forgets.

LACRIMA is performed at the Heath Ledger Theatre, State Theatre Centre of WA, 6–10 February, part of the 2026 Perth Festival.