ENTER NICK PLAYED BY GYTON GRANTLEY (Underbelly, House Husbands), once-promising filmmaker, now university lecturer. His controversial debut feature, Low, is being resurrected for a retrospective screening at the Adelaide Film Festival.
Low was co-created with his former best friend Hamish, who is now disgraced and presumed dead. The film remains dogged by allegations of abuse and exploitation. As Nick preps a director’s commentary and public appearance at the AFF, the past arrives uninvited via a chorus of women (played by some of our brilliant SA actors): student-lover Gen (new Flinders Grad Shardae Santos), wife Mish (Anna Steen), former muse Saskia (Kate Cheel), and Frankie, a teenage girl whose reappearance catalyses a chain of revelations and reckonings that culminate in Nick’s fall from professional and personal grace.
Structurally slick, the play mimics the fragmented form of a DVD commentary track: non-linear, reflexive, full of contradiction, omission, and performance. Helpmann Award-nominated writer Ash Flanders’ Commentary is equal parts scalpel and mic drop. This sharp and funny work interrogates the ethics of art-making in an era when cancelling people feels like a spectator sport.
Director Petra Kalive describes Commentary as “a work about who controls the conversation and who has the loudest voice. Whose voices are doing the silencing or who is getting silenced?”
For Gyton, best known for his portrayal of convicted murderer and drug trafficker Carl Williams in Underbelly, which won him a Logie, and as stay-at-home dad Kane in House Husbands, playing Nick in Commentary takes him back to the exciting premise of a live audience. Gyton’s stage credits include the Ensemble, the Old Fitzroy and La Boite Theatre, and he played Ron Weasley in the Melbourne Princess Theatre production of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.
“Commentary takes a look at the conversation that’s been had today in the media and how the media is consuming what’s going on in the world,” he said. “It’s having a look at how the conversation has evolved over time, what is relevant now compared to 20 years ago and how time can change people’s opinions.”
Gyton and Nick are two very different characters, with one “making a lot of mistakes, a lot of bad choices” and not admitting the error of his ways as his world implodes, and the other is a family man who recently spent 18 months in Sardinia with his wife and three kids. An ambitious move halfway across the world in which they come up against challenges, stumbles and memories to last a lifetime reads like a script in itself. Which is why he has a book on his family’s time in Italy, Il Dolce Fiasco, on “food, family and a little bit of fame”, coming out later this year.
So how does Gyton step into the role unlike himself, into the role of a university professor who’s facing cancel culture at its zenith? What music would help him get into character? “I think he’s a pretty sad guy so probably something by Nick Cave. (My character) Nick’s one of those maudlin guys, sitting on a heavy red at 3am nodding off to some maudlin music.”
These differences only ignite Gyton’s curiosity. Asked if he would have dinner with Nick, he replies, “Yeah I’d have dinner with Nick, absolutely. I think it would be refreshing to get an unedited point of view, someone who is not afraid to tell it like it is.”
And how would Gyton describe Commentary in three words? “Start the conversation.”
21 Aug – 5 Sep 2026
Dunstan Playhouse,
Adelaide Festival Centre
For tickets:
statetheatrecompany.com.au
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