A crocodile, a rhinoceros, and a rooster. It’s the perfect set-up for a joke and also the names of the three “beasts” that make up Spinning Plate Co.’s Beast Trilogy: a triptych of larger-than-life plays staged over four years that have injected a much-needed dose of macabre absurdity into Melbourne’s independent theatre scene.

It’s easy to forget that when the company’s runaway hit The Crocodile premiered in 2023, most of our theatres were stuck in a post-pandemic malaise, peddling dour monodramas and escapist fantasies dressed up in faux-social realism. With an eye for maximalist design and grimly witty tragedies, the company’s creators, James Cerché and Jessica Stanley, found a sweet spot between our need for weird and joyous escapism and theatre that is critical of our equally weird and hellish lives under late-stage capitalism.

For The Crocodile, they turned fortyfivedownstairs into a dilapidated zoo, where we watched a man become a B-grade celebrity after being eaten by a freshwater croc. For their adaptation of Rhinoceros last year, they took us to a dead-end town to watch well-meaning journalists turn into...