The Natural Horse | Salad Days Collective

Image: PIP Theatre

The Natural Horse is a deeply strange play, in more ways than one. A dark comedy about an ex-Soviet family and their struggles with the American dream, it's a work with a lot of lofty concepts and low-brow comedy, much of which is achieved with a scrappy heart that I appreciated. Unfortunately, some of the key structural elements of The Natural Horse just didn’t work for me, and left me wondering what the play was going for.

From a purely technical standard, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again here - any show at PIP Theatre will have stellar production quality, and The Natural Horse is no exception. The set design was lush and considered, and the score and sound utilised throughout gave the work a sense of ethereal stillness that helped settle me into the eclectic mood of the play. Lighting switched between naturalistic house scenes, magical realist snowstorms, and disco parties with ease, carrying the performers into these shifted states quickly and effectively.

Image: Brisbane Festival

Regarding the play itself, I spent a lot of the runtime being quite confused - not necessarily in response to the absurdist elements of the script, but in its disparate tone and certain key choices from the creative team.

Presumably set in 2019 if we go by references to a 23 year old Timothee Chalamet, The Natural Horse felt distinctly like a COVID play, with its thematic focus on legacy, homes, and familial conflict. But these themes, and the scenes which focus on them, all felt like they were coming from different plays. The Natural Horse could’ve easily been a relationship drama between two young midwestern lesbians, an absurdist comedy about the psychic link between a girl and her strangely horny horse, or a bleakly funny play about an immigrant family and their financial difficulties, but it felt like all and none of these at the same time. These disparate elements, punctuated by a folkloric interest in the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, left me feeling a bit lost, and unsure of what the playwright wanted me to take away from the work.

The comedy in The Natural Horse, however, is frequent and thorough, hitting comedic beats and styles with enough breadth that there is sure to be something for everyone somewhere in the runtime. Even when some bits didn’t work for me, it was never long until there was something that tickled me. I was particularly delighted by Lauren Dillon’s Kirk J. Olsen, a neighbouring horse salesman performed with a drag-like quality that left me consistently laughing, with a reference to his bloodtype being “Olsen Positive” resulting in an embarrassingly loud cackle from me.

Being an American play about ex-Soviet immigrants, The Natural Horse contained quite a bit of accent work - unfortunately, very little of it worked for me. Coming across less Chekhov and more Team America, the Russian accents throughout the play began to grate on me after the mid-way point. The generic American accents employed by the family’s two children felt similarly geographically lost, with some words tripping up the performers and impacting their performance. I was left wondering if I would have felt more engaged had each performer spoken in their natural voice - after all, if I’m able to suspend my disbelief enough to watch a life sized horse puppet walk around for two hours, surely some Australian accents aren’t much more work to ignore. The choice to crosscast matriarch Svetka also felt odd to me - with the only other crosscast character being neighbour Kirk, who fell into a much more firmly comedic role, the choice felt like it lacked purpose. I couldn’t tell if this choice was made by the writer or Salad Days, and by the time the play ended I was still unsure.

Unfortunately, The Natural Horse didn’t work for me - while I appreciated many of its thematic and comedic elements, I felt like they didn’t coalesce in a way that felt meaningful or purposeful. In saying this, it’s entirely possible that the play will speak to you, and I encourage readers to form their own opinion on the work. I applaud Salad Days Collective’s continued commitment to staging unconventional and lesser known works, and hope to watch them continue to put on deeply strange theatre for years to come. I may not have liked The Natural Horse, but I certainly liked what it represents in the current theatrical landscape of Magandjin.

The Natural Horse played 23 September to 4 October 2025 at PIP Theatre as part of the 2025 Brisbane Festival.

Image: Brisbane Festival