Benjamin Law’s first work for the stage makes its Queensland premiere at the Bille Brown Theatre. A dramatic comedy inspired by the playwright’s own family, Torch the Place unpacks complicated family dynamics, uses magic realism to explore trauma, and presents insights into the underlying factors of hoarding.

Mum is thrilled to have her children home to celebrate her 60th birthday. Teresa, the eldest daughter, has always been the responsible one: she manages their mother’s money and tries to prevent the house from falling down around her.

Toby is a university student full of strong socio-economic convictions, and Natalie is a jet-setting social media star who arrives with a suitcase full of magazine features and free samples. These three siblings, along with Teresa’s happy-go-lucky husband Paul, converge on their childhood home for their mother’s birthday.

What Mum is not expecting is the skip bin they bring with them: their mother considers herself a collector, but her children say she is a hoarder. With her reluctant agreement, they begin to clear out decades of accumulated belongings.

This “birthday gift” brings memories surging to the surface – some happy, some silly, and some unspeakably painful. Tensions and tempers flare, and eventually the children must consider whether their well-meaning intervention is doing more harm than good.

Queensland Theatre Company’s Torch the Place. Photo © Stephen Henry

Directed by Ngoc Phan in her solo mainstage directing debut, Torch the Place tells a layered story of dysfunction and family dynamics, wrapped in outlandish comedy and reflections on the intersection of capitalism, consumerism, and complex trauma.

This offbeat multilingual story is told with Law’s characteristic dry wit and scatological humour, drawing on elements of magic realism to write around tight narrative corners. Drug-taking and dehydration induce visions that progress the plot and deliver exposition about the causes and consequences of hoarding. Unexpected dance sequences are delivered with committed enthusiasm, and game-show-style scenes involve individual audience members in the storytelling.

Torch the Place depicts the warmth of nostalgia and the memories objects can hold, as the siblings discover old belongings and reconnect with one another through their shared past. However, it also contemplates the ways in which reality can become secondary to memory, and how hoarding impulses can become dangerous to those those beyond the individual experiencing them.

Well-meaning efforts to support Mum are contrasted with Teresa and Paul’s struggles to conceive, and the play touches on issues of homophobia, racism, immigrant experiences, grief, and abandonment.

Queensland Theatre Company’s Torch the Place. Photo © Stephen Henry

Set and costume design by Jeremy Allen transforms the Bille Brown Theatre’s corner stage into a cluttered suburban living room. Hundreds of individual props are arranged beyond the front-door façade or drawn from seemingly bottomless cardboard boxes. Towering piles of “treasures” are progressively unveiled and showcased towards the end of the play, allowing the audience to appreciate the high level of detail.

There is an element of camp in the clashing patterns and textures of the design, and in the absurd oversized objects that appear in shared visions. Lengthy scene transitions allow for the shifting and resetting of props, while dramatic classical music plays and the lights flicker ominously.

Briana Clark’s lighting design and Wil Hughes’ composition and sound design deliver these moments of melodrama and revelation, as well as spotlit neighbours and the bright colours of energetic dance breaks.

Under Phan’s thoughtful direction, the cast deliver excellent comedic performances without diminishing the play’s tragedies. Denise Chan plays uptight eldest daughter Teresa, who has orchestrated the intervention and is determined to “fix” her mother’s hoarding. Chan’s terse tones and outbursts of emotion are balanced by Peter Thurnwald as Teresa’s endearingly laid-back and well-meaning husband Paul. Kristie Nguy is bursting with positivity as youngest daughter Natalie, and Logan So plays neurotic, sarcastic younger brother Toby.

Hsiao-Ling Tang gives a powerful performance as Mum, conveying both her paralysing fear and her ferocious spirit. Tang’s multifaceted portrayal allows for many moments of humour as well as devastating scenes of loss, anger and loneliness.

Torch the Place is a sprawling, stirring play about what we truly value, and what else we hold onto when that is out of reach.

Torch the Place plays at the Bille Brown Theatre, Brisbane until 29 March.