Four white students and a gun wait in a room overlooking the street through which the prime minister will pass. Kill the PM, liberally adapted from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Demons (1872) by Fregmonto Stokes, and directed by James Dalton for Unhappen, is terse and arresting theatre.

The Old 505 Theatre is one of the handful of venues in Sydney genuinely amenable to independent theatre. The place has its flaws, but Stokes, Dalton, and the designers Dylan James Tonkin and Benjamin Brockman have shaped the work to it consummately. Perched atop the graffiti-frescoed squat Hibernian House, you enter through an unmarked door, and ascend in a dubious elevator. Wreck and debris abound; graffiti carries decaying faces, ironic slogans, and here and there a line from Paul Celan. The theatre is an unlived room. Stray furnishings lie draped in plastic among UV lamps and a stepladder, a forgotten renovation. The window overlooks Elizabeth Street. The press of the city asserts the reality of the society being criticised, and one imagines an emaciated, tattooed Raskolnikov pacing the walls and muttering about vinyls and craft-beer. It is an ideal theatre for a play in turn frenetic and claustrophobic, desolate and farcical.