Join the acclaimed motley crew A DAYLIGHT CONNECTION on the last plane hurtling out of Earth.

Who will survive this wild ride (and its unruly passengers)? Can flight attendant Angel defeat God’s greatest gift in a battle for the ultimate prize?

Find out in… A Nightime Travesty… an epic First Nations vaudevillian musical nightmare that is equal parts sardonic, cheeky, and heart breaking. It’s a non-stop riot of music, parody, and political punch- a fever dream that feels like Babes in The Wood on acid.

A Nightime Travesty takes strands of kitsch colonial Australiana (19^th Century Vaudeville of the Tivoli era, Hey Hey Its Saturday’s Aussie cringe, and musical Variety Shows like In Melbourne Tonight) and guts them like a fish, creating a bombastic bloodbath on stage that it both horrific and emotionally resonant.

With explosions, zany costumes, gruesome decapitations, existential horror, Blak humour, romance, genocide and a live band, there’s something for everyone at this perpetual party floating in our neglected psyches!

Leading independent artists Kamarra Bell-Wykes and Carly Sheppard (CHASE) bring to Malthouse a revamped version of the smash-hit production that brought audiences to their feet at every one of its sold-out performances at Yirramboi Festival, now directed by Stephen Nicolazzo (Loaded).

Strap in for a ferocious adventure that pushes form, genre and the realms of reality with a renowned crew hell-bent on re-imagining what First Nations performance can be.

A Nightime Travesty had a sold-out season at Malthouse Theatre as part of Asia TOPIA  in February 2025. Watch this space for more touring announcements.

Read the Q + A with Carly and Kamarra.

Presented by Malthouse Theatre and Asia TOPIA, Arts Centre Melbourne.
Produced by Bureau of Works and supported by Brink Productions.

— Originally commissioned and presented by YIRRAMBOI Festival 2023. —

CREATIVES

Co-Creator + Performer Kamarra Bell-Wykes
Co-Creator + Performer Carly Sheppard
Director Stephen Nicolazzo
Musician, Set + Co-Sound Designer Smallsound
Musician + Co-Sound Designer Richie Brownlee
Lighting Designer Gina Gascoigne
Executive Producer Erin Milne
Brink Secondments Alexis West + Kate Cheel
First Nations Fellows Sonya Rankine + Jannali Jones

CAST
Kamarra Bell-Wykes, Carly Sheppard, Zach Blampied, Peter Wykes

★★★★ “Sheppard and Bell-Wykes deliver the ferocious script with a compelling command of comic grotesquerie. There’s a Brechtian force to the way their performance speaks truth to power.” Cameron Woodhead, The Age

★★★★ “A Nightime Travesty is meta, real, unreal and deadly – and the audience are in on the joke every step of the way. Reprogramming A Daylight Connection’s Yirramboi work and gifting it with a skilled director, greater development time and simultaneously tightening and expanding the production, has resulted in one of the undisputed highlights of the reborn Asia TOPA 2025. Bravo!” Richard Watts, Arts Hub

★★★★“This is not First Nations theatre in its most palatable form. It does not perform trauma in tidy platitudes, nor does it seek to conform to outdated industry expectations. A Nightime Travesty is an explosive, genre-defying experience that rejects easy categorisation, demanding instead that the industry, and its audiences, get on board. All I know is that I laughed. I recoiled. And, most importantly, I had a bloody good time.“ Time Out

“This show radically overturns conventional notions of performance and entertainment. As the demeanour of the stewardesses suggests, you need to strap yourself in for the ride and surrender yourself to some very well-orchestrated chaos.” Stage Whispers

“Director Stephen Nicolazzo has figuratively thrown the kitchen sink at this one. He appears to have adopted the approach that nothing exceeds like excess. The result is energy on steroids. Crazy doesn’t cover the half of it.” The Blurb

“Directed by Stephen Nicolazzo, A Nighttime Travesty is thought-provoking and complex theatre that addresses Aboriginal history and oppression using media representations of Aussie male humour.”
The Conversation