DIRECTOR
Presented by Ad Astra
Pluto, Ad Astra, August 2025
“Life’s a beach and then you die.”
Winner of the Patrick White Playwrights Award, Hot Tub is a tragicomic fever dream set on the Gold Coast during Schoolies Week. Dido, a sad girl from North Queensland, arrives at ‘The Great White’—her estranged family’s crumbling beachside tower—seeking cash for weight-loss surgery in Brazil. When her father refuses, Dido teams up with her scheming twink stepbrother to raise the money online.
Meanwhile, the family's ageing matriarch Eunice discovers she’s a suspect in a criminal investigation, but refuses to sell the building to keep everyone out of jail.
A satirical takedown of Australia’s tasteless upper crust, Hot Tub is packed with explosive secrets, cosmic justice, karaoke, and characters who will stop at nothing to protect their spot on the beach.
Dido Hunter: Grace Lofting
Murray Hunter: Sandro Colarelli
Eunice White: Sarah Speller
Jade Hunter-White: Natasha McDonald
Reece White: Lachlan Brayshaw
Officer Sheryl: Ruby Gudenswager
Macka/Stinger: Daniel Johnson
Set Designer: Ashleigh Winter
Costume Designer: Lottie Babic
Lighting Designer: Teegan Kranenburg
Sound Designer & Assistant Director: Eloise Collins
Stage Manager and Production Manager: Zalee Jensen
Marketing and Assistant Stage Manager: Brooklyn-Jade Senhenn
Assistant Director and Fight Choreographer: Ebony Webb
Vocal Coach: Marcus Oborn
Intimacy Coordinator: Michaela Faux
Ad Astra Marketing: Hannah Sisson
"Hot Tub is coarse, camp, deliberately tacky, and gloriously chaotic... I walked out trying to work out exactly what I had just witnessed. I also walked out wanting to tell everybody about it."
"This show’s cast are seriously superb. I haven’t heard an audience laugh so much in ages... “Ad Astra has a serious hit on their hands…"
Beth, Keehn, Stage Whispers
"The greatest achievement of this production of Hot Tub is that, despite its satirical nature, it is full of a sunny warmth."
Photography: Saën Sunderland
Directors Notes
In his seminal work on Australian aesthetics The Australian Ugliness, architect and social commentator Robin Boyd describes Surfers Paradise as “a musical comedy of Australia come to life. It is a fibre-cement paradise under a rainbow of plastic paint.” It’s remarkable how potently his phrasing evokes the place itself, how familiar it is to anyone who has spent even an afternoon at Surfers. Remarkably, this is Boyd writing in 1960, and yet it still applies. There’s a rambunctious quality to Surfers, a place seemingly unstuck in time and space, both modern and nostalgic, local yet foreign, slick as hell yet caked in grime, a “rainbow of plastic paint”.
Boyd writes about Surfers with a slight disdain, a snobbishness for its excess and performativity. Over fifty years later, Lewis Treston writes about Surfers and the wider Gold Coast, the place that birthed him, with far more affection. What Boyd sees as excessive artifice, Lewis sees as a stage for an eclectic cast of characters to perform their pursuit of wealth, beauty and pleasure, at often great cost to themselves and others. He sees the “musical comedy” of it all and embraces it. Maybe it’s because Lewis is an insider, not viewing the place with an outsider’s critical eye. His own eye is certainly critical, but while commentators like Boyd might be stuck on what Surfers Paradise is, Lewis is far more interested in why, and even more so, what it says about who we are as a species, here and now.
The first thing that strikes you about any of Lewis’ work is how effortlessly funny it is, much like Lewis himself. Within pages of first reading Hot Tub, I was completely dazzled by the magic of his wit, each line as clever and outrageous as the last. That’s the trick he pulls though—he distracts you with the razzle-dazzle of his language before striking you, right between the eyes, with something more profound and astute. At its best, theatre can be a mirror to its audience to see themselves in. Lewis constructs fun mirrors, but that doesn’t make them any less reflective. As dedicated as he is to wordplay, rhythm, camp and the absurd, he’s just as dedicated to truth, honesty, sincerity and humanity.
The best description I’ve heard of Hot Tub was one Lewis shared with me, when Dan Evans called the play “Chekhov with a spray tan”. That couldn’t be more on the money. Lewis’ saga of Dido Hunter and the Hunter-White family on Surfers Paradise is not that far removed from the aristocratic family in The Cherry Orchard, right down to its concerns about property, inheritance, legacy and inter-generational rupture. This, more than anything, made me want to direct this incandescent play, the realisation that Lewis’ immediate, contemporary, preposterous gem was just as rooted in the foundations of theatrical tradition, to tell us something about who we are, as uncomfortable or silly as that may be.
It’s been a great privilege to lead this production, not only because of the opportunity to direct this remarkable play from a very dear friend, but to do so with such a remarkable cast and creative team. All of them have approached Hot Tub with intelligence, rigour, imagination and a keen understanding of what it requires—not to impose additional style upon it but to listen intently to everything it has to say, like holding a sea shell up to your ear or reading the auguries in the seas and the stars. We have all approached this production with the determination to make a great piece of theatre, one we can be proud of, one that can do justice to Lewis’ play and one, we hope, will thrill, delight, baffle and move its audience.
A friend once said that every show you make is for someone special in your life. This one is for my wonderful, fabulous stepmother. I thought of her every day working on it.
Enjoy your stay on the Gold Coast!
