Throughout their 30 year history, Geelong’s Back to Back Theatre have built a body of work remarkable for its generosity, courage and intellectual acuity; they’re seemingly incapable of glibness or conceptual laziness. The company won the world’s richest theatre prize, the Ibsen award (2.5m Norwegian kroner; A$380,000), in 2022, following it up with the Gold Lion at Venice in 2024.
Ganesh Versus the Third Reich – which has toured the world since its 2011 premiere and is now in Melbourne before heading to the Festival d’Automne in Paris – is one of their finest and most daring works, reminding audiences of this company’s genius and gumption. It is returning right when we needed it.
The play is, as the title suggests, a provocation that interrogates spirituality, politics and the enduring power of symbols, refracted through the meta-theatrical device of the rehearsal room. Given that Back to Back is a company primarily composed of people who identify as having an intellectual disability or neurodivergence, the themes of power imbalance, reclamation and self-actualisation reverberate thrillingly.
