I admit it: reality TV is my guilty pleasure. There’s just something strangely addictive about watching people perform for a camera—the illusion of intimacy, the choreography of authenticity, the constant awareness of being seen. It’s a fascination that Keziah Warner takes to its logical extreme in her three-part play Control, where the first act hurls the spectacle of self-performance into outer space, literally.

Warner’s Control is a haunting sci-fi drama that imagines a future that feels dangerously close to our own, interrogating who holds power in an age ruled by technology. It opens aboard a spaceship bound for Mars, where four contestants—each deliberately cast to fit a familiar archetype—live under total surveillance. They’re assigned missions designed to heighten the drama, yet it quickly becomes clear the tasks are just props and the real game is the performance itself. They quarrel, flirt and deliver confessionals on cue, with their exhaustion seeping through whenever the feed cuts. Eventually, the humour in this act begins to thin as the characters’ facades crack under the pressure to stay watchable.

It’s easy to be drawn in by the spectacle, especially if you’re a lover of the format like me. What makes this first act so effective, however, isn’t its familiarity to the genre, but the way Warner weaponises that familiarity to expose our own complicity as spectators. As the contestants unravel, the play shifts its gaze outward, exposing our appetite for spectacle and our tendency to mistake exposure for authenticity. And unlike the television it echoes, there’s no screen to hide behind at the Explosives Factory; every breakdown and silence happens right in front of us, leaving me to think about what it means to be both entertained and implicated and to enjoy the show even as I recognise the cost of watching it.

From there, Control sheds its reality TV skin and mutates in something more. The second act drifts into a museum of memories, a space where people can revisit their own childhoods through recorded fragments of the past. It’s a fascinating premise that raises unsettling questions about who gets to curate memory and how easily that power could be exploited. Yet for all its conceptual sharpness, this act feels less assured in execution. The narrative takes time to find its footing, and I often caught myself lingering on minor details—attempting to decipher their ‘keyboards’ and the repeated rewinds—only realising later that none of it was essential to understanding the story. Still, there’s an elegance in what it’s reaching for; a meditation on how even our most personal histories can be shaped, stored, and rewritten by the systems that claim to protect them.

The final act reimagines control in its purest form: creation itself. Set on New Earth, an android is programmed to become more human, designed to work as a childcare teacher in a role that demands empathy and compassion. After the surveillance and memory of the first two acts, this feels like the natural endpoint; a world where humanity is no longer performed or remembered but engineered. Warner brings her questions full circle, asking what remains of authenticity when emotion itself can be coded. Notably, this act plays out without props or staging, relying entirely on the exchange between actor and audience. Its simplicity amplifies every pause and gesture, played with raw precision by both the human and the android. For the first time, Control feels entirely in control, offering a stunning depiction of what it means to be human even when humanity is manufactured.

All three acts are performed by a tight ensemble of four—Seon Williams, Faran Martin, Lachlan Herring and Alex Duncan. Williams is the standout, shifting seamlessly from the cheerful energy of her early characters to the delicate precision of the android learning to be human. She brings warmth and volatility in equal measure, grounding the play’s more abstract ideas in real emotion. Duncan, meanwhile, feels slightly underused. His presence in the first two acts hints at greater complexity that never fully surfaces, though his work in the final scenes suggests what could have been explored further.

Overall, Warner’s Control is a bold, finely calibrated exploration of performance, power and the illusions we build to feel autonomous. Across its three acts, it exposes how easily our need to be seen becomes a form of submission, and after every act, you’re left asking yourself the same question: who’s really in control?