Junior Acting Stream presents: Bustown

Lachlan Philpott is an award-winning Sydney-based writer and dramaturg whose work has been performed across Australia and internationally. In 2026, his play Truck Stop opened at La Comédie-Française in Paris to a sold-out season. His play Bustown, meanwhile, was being rehearsed by a group of junior high school students in North Strathfield.

Bustown is s post-apocalyptic junkyard dreamscape where hubcaps become umbrellas and a cult-like community awaits a saviour who may never come. It is anarchic, strange, and unexpectedly tender. Director Romy Bartz notes that “it speaks to that universal teenage desire to push against the boundaries, to question what has been inherited and to carve out a new path.”

The Junior Stream cast rose to material that demanded as much physically as it did emotionally. “This production has been shaped by the immense vulnerability and courage of its cast,” says Bartz. “They have committed to the imaginative world of Bustown with openness and bravery, embracing the fractured language, the ritualised movement, and the absurdism.”

That commitment paid off in an unexpected way. Philpott himself attended a performance and stayed to speak with the students afterwards. It’s the kind of moment that’s difficult to manufacture and impossible to forget: a group of young performers hearing directly from the writer what they’d made of his world.