Loaded
Christos Tsiolkas’s début novel Loaded (1995), the story of a single, debauched night in the life of nineteen-year-old Greek-Australian queer man, Ari, is no stranger to being given fresh life in new mediums. In 1998, it served as the basis for the film Head On, a breakthrough for director Ana Kokkinos and star Alex Dimitriades, even as its sexual explicitness proved controversial. A new stage version, adapted by Tsiolkas and playwright Dan Giovannoni, was slated for Malthouse’s 2020 season until the pandemic struck, only to emerge during the lockdowns in the form of an audio play. It has now been reimagined yet again, this time as a monodrama for a live audience under the direction, as with the audio version, of Stephen Nicolazzo from queer theatre collective Little Ones.
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