Arki hasn't been sleeping well. At night, he is haunted by visions of fallen bodies. Arki isn't a soldier, nor a general, nor a civilian caught in the crossfire. He loves to game. And it's all just a game, isn't it?
Aaron hasn't been sleeping well. Day and night, he is haunted by visions from his recent tour in Afghanistan. But it's all in the past, isn't it?
Sayf hasn't been sleeping well. Someone pilfered the sword from his restaurant, and he's pretty sure it's that soldier from the other night. The loud one. The rude one. The one who reminds him of all the other Australian soldiers who stormed his home back in Afghanistan.
When the firing has ended and the game closed, how long will the damage remain? Melissa Reeves' Archimedes War presents a dark and comic study of the depersonalisation of modern warfare. After trauma, how do we pause? Resume? Exit?
Winner of the Griffin Award 2016 and Finalist for the Victorian Premier's Prize for Drama 2022.
'Beautifully structured, thoughtful, cunning in the way it puts its issues before us.' - Michael Brindley, Stage Whispers
MELISSA REEVES began her career in the theatre as an actor and circus performer. She did a writing apprenticeship of sorts with the Red Shed Company in Adelaide, before moving to Melbourne and working extensively with Melbourne Workers Theatre. Since then she has had plays produced by all the major Australian theatre companies, as well as many smaller independent theatres. Her plays include In Cahoots, Sweetown, Storming Heaven, Road Movie, Tough Girls, The Spook, Furious Mattress, and Happy Ending. She has co-written a number of plays including Caravan (with Angus Cerini, Patricia Cornelius, and Wayne Macauley) Magpie, (with Richard Frankland) and Who's Afraid of the Working Class? and Fever (both with Andrew Bovell, Patricia Cornelius and Christos Tsiolkas, composer Irine Vela). She has won four Premier's Literary Awards, numerous AWGIE Awards, the Rodney Seaborn Award, and an Australia Council Fellowship. Melissa also co-wrote the award winning screenplay for the film Blessed, based on Who's Afraid of the Working Class?
