Ari – whom we meet in Tsiolkas’s novel waking up, yawning, and then masturbating – is the nihilistic ‘immigrant son’ of Greek working-class parents. Alienated and self-loathing, he is, by his own admission, drug-fucked and directionless, a pursuer of chemical thrills, anonymous sex, and little else. Over the course of one summer night, a kind of Orpheusean sojourn into the underworld, Ari roams the four corners of Melbourne, luridly expressing his contempt for each one. The east is a mass of highways, suburbs, hills, rich cunts; the whitest part of the city. The north may be more diverse, peppered with Arab, Italian, Greek, and Vietnamese communities, but it’s still ‘unrelentingly flat’, filled with ‘ugly little brick boxes’ and ‘roads to nowhere’. Ari swaggers/staggers in and out of parties, clubs, and Greek nights, cars, taxis, and house parties, chasing more and more hits – of drugs, sex, and a beautiful blond named George, who may or may not be straight.

This adaptation is, in its way, reasonably faithful to the book, even if it understandably sacrifices some of the nuance of the source material. In the novel, for example, Ari partly redeems the eastern suburbs via a reminiscence of family drives to a ‘a rainforest so beautiful that it looked like it came out of some lush dream’. It’s impossible to imagine the misanthropic Ari of the play indulging in such sentimentalism. What this adaptation does import is the sparseness and directness of Tsiolkas’s prose, written in immersive first-person present tense – a natural fit for the stage.

Danny Ball as Ari in Loaded (photograph by Tamarah Scott).

So too does the play effectively reproduce the book’s viscerality, its rushing flow of smells and sounds and sensations. Ari doesn’t so much see his world as inhale it, huffing his way through an olfactory sensorium – alcohol, semen, garbage, sweat, piss. At the same time, his life reverberates to the sound of his favourite music: old school disco, ‘I Want You Back’, M.I.A.’s ‘Bad Girls’ (‘live fast, die young, bad girls do it well’).

In his program note, Tsiolkas writes of his initial worry that transposing Loaded from the mid-1990s to the early-2020s might not be able to be ‘carried off convincingly’. Presumably, Tsiolkas overcame his misgivings, but I am not convinced this adaption resolves this problem. While little if anything is compromised by Tsiolkas and Giovannoni’s more superficial updates to the source material – the addition of mobile phones, dating apps, references to contemporary culture and so on – something more fundamental feels at stake as a result of bringing the novel up to date. 

It may be easy to forget, but 1995 is as far away from us in time as 1967 was from Loaded’s publication. In other words, worlds apart. The explosion of house and techno, the influx of ecstasy and heroin, the coming of age of a generation of queer men after AIDS – these things and more, captured so dynamically in Tsiolkas’s novel, have no real equivalents in 2023. One could argue that Ari’s furious rejection of labels prefigures the pushback to our own, deeply identitarian moment, but if so why not retain the novel’s original setting?

I think there’s a similar disconnect between the form of Loaded and the time period this adaptation takes place in. In its more socially conservative day, Tsiolkas’s novel – branded as ‘dirty realism’ or, in a phrase Tsiolkas derided, ‘grunge lit’ – was doubtless provocative in its centring of the experiences of a queer Greek man in sexually explicit, if not graphic, terms. But, if it once did, Loaded no longer shocks, and its contemporisation fails to connect it up with the socio-politics of a time when queerness, much like the inner north both revered and reviled by Ari, has been thoroughly gentrified.

And yet, despite my reservations, Loaded has much to recommend it. In the novel, Ari tells us that he has the ‘fuck-ya-I-don’t-give-a-shit attitude perfected to an art form’. So too does Danny Ball, who gives an utterly commanding performance, imbued with rock star-like cockiness and charisma. Dressed in shorts or track pants and a tank top (and, occasionally, just his briefs), Ball struts and parries like a cage fighter, perpetually in motion, his mop of black curls like an inverted, hurriedly sketched crown. Inveigling one moment, hectoring the next, he captures the full dimensions of Ari’s rebelliousness and rage, his ability, sometimes within the space of moments, to both seduce and brutalise. From time to time a vulnerability emerges, a softness glimpsed only for a moment until that, too, is sharply withdrawn. You can’t take your eyes off him.

Nicolazzo’s direction injects a good deal of energy into the proceedings but remains sensitive to the task of achieving a balance between the sometimes exhausting torrent of words and moments of near-transcendence, such as when Ari embodies a drag performer’s tribute to his late mother. A revolve is used mercifully sparingly to underscore passages in which time seems to slow down or speed up.

Nathan Burmeister’s sunken, circular set, impressively lit with a lot of near-floor level lights by Katie Sfetkidis, is framed by two huge archways, one shinily tiled like the walls of a club, symbols perhaps of Ari’s threshold-crossing passage into the play’s shadow realms. A narrow semicircular platform centerstage, as well as an elevated strip of floor along the back wall, allow Ball to stake his preening claim to even more of the space, which is otherwise bare. Only Daniel Nixon’s rather muted sound design, curiously shying away from the thrusting club music which animates Ari’s life (except for a galvanising opening burst of Sister’s Sledge’s ‘Lost in Music’) seems out of place.

In all other respects, this is an immaculately unified production which demands to be seen for Ball alone, even if Tsiolkas and Giovannoni’s play remains an awkward vehicle for a performance so rivetingly vital.

Loaded continues at the Malthouse Theatre until 3 June 2023. Performance attended: 11 May.