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Theatre · 2021 · Premiered

Watchlist

Green is the new red.

A dark comedy of love, activism and surveillance — where falling for the wrong person can land your whole life on a government list.

Buy the script
Poster for Watchlist

Watchlist is a dark comedy and political satire about the moment private life collides with state power. Basil Pepper falls hard for Delia Dengel, an animal rights activist who draws him into the world of climate protest — and, without his knowing it, onto a government surveillance list. As his best friend Roger and his mother Marie scramble to pull him back, every character is forced toward the same impossible choice: silence, dissent or self-interest.

Premiered by the South Australian Playwrights Theatre at Adelaide’s Bakehouse Theatre in June 2021 under director Lisa Harper Campbell, the play turns a love story into a study of who gets watched, who looks away, and what it costs to care out loud. Its poster says it plainly: green is the new red.

The script is published by Currency Press (ISBN 9781760623111) and is available to buy in print, ePub and Mobi — order it directly from Currency Press.

Press

“Amusing, ambitious, provocative.”

— The Clothesline

“Brave, bold, agit-prop — an outstanding and challenging piece of theatre.”

— Glam Adelaide

“Dark and delightful.”

— InDaily

Surveillance Feed

  • A trench-coated, fedora-wearing interrogator looms over an activist in a lizard costume beneath a single hanging lamp.
  • Basil and Delia face to face in tight light, a blade held between them.
  • An actor in a patterned dressing gown mimes a gun to his own head, mid-laugh, on a dark stage.
  • A wide stage image from the South Australian Playwrights Theatre production of Watchlist.
  • The reverse of the Watchlist poster.