The Dear Departed: Live Radio Play By Mill Theatre at Dairy Road and ArtSound

This March, The Mill Theatre tries something deliciously different: a live radio play, performed and recorded in front of an audience. Before screens took over our living rooms, radio drama was the beating heart of storytelling — and in Australia, it was once a golden age. From the 1930s to the 1950s, locally made radio plays and serials dominated the airwaves, shaping national culture and shared imagination. This production revives that tradition, inviting you to watch the mechanics of storytelling in real time: actors at microphones, sound effects created live, music underscoring the action — and a brand-new recording captured every night. It’s theatre, radio, and time travel all at once.

Our first radio play is The Dear Departed, a wickedly funny one-act comedy by British playwright Stanley Houghton, adapted for live radio performance. Set in the 1930s, the play skewers middle-class respectability as two selfish sisters, Mrs Slater and Mrs Jordan, descend into chaos over inheritance, furniture, and the very convenient assumption that their elderly parent has become a burden. Sharp, absurd, and gleefully unkind, The Dear Departed exposes how quickly moral values crumble when money is involved. Light on content and high on laughs, this is a joyous, silly, and surprisingly biting comedy — and a rare chance to be part of a live audience as a radio play is made before your eyes. Come for the nostalgia, stay for the chaos, and leave having witnessed something you truly don’t see (or hear) every day.