What's in a name? Playwright James Hazelden reveals the very strange moment his play named itself.
It might seem logical that a surreal mystery, comprised of three inter-connected stories, would take its name from the three parts of an insect, but the reason I called my new play ‘Head | Thorax | Abdomen’ is a lot weirder.
I had accidentally dropped a small piece of apple into my computer keyboard and, during one of Melbourne’s hot spells, the keyboard became infested with ants. A day later, while I was typing the script that would become ‘Head | Thorax | Abdomen’, the ants started to emerge from the keyboard. The keyboard was black. The ants were black. It looked like the keyboard was coming to life and fracturing into tiny, crawling monsters. They were on my hands. They traced dark lines across my desk and up my arms. I was looking at the screen and didn’t notice until I felt little pin-prick tickles on my skin.
It was a superb, accidental allegory for the play. Beneath our carefully constructed, tenuous realities, there dwell complex ecosystems, poised to feast on our remains. Ants are prehistoric - perfect machines that relentlessly eat and breed and colonise, existing below our shaky, human edifices. What better title than the structure that comprises these brilliantly remorseless creatures? Ants are even mentioned, obliquely, during one of the play’s most climactic moments.
The title, Head | Thorax | Abdomen, is always written with the vertical line separating the words so that they form a subtle calligram of an ant - a visual reminder of what lives under our keyboards, waiting to carry us away and consume us.
James Hazelden
LA MAMA PRESENTS Head | Thorax | Abdomen
8-26 April 2026
FIND OUT MORE AND BOOK HEAD | THORAX | ABDOMEN
James Hazelden is an award-winning playwright, director, musician, podcaster, writer and performer from Melbourne, Australia. His work has been staged at La Mama, The Courthouse, Fortyfivedownstairs, Victorian College of the Arts, The Butterfly Club, and for the Melbourne International Comedy Festivals, Edinburgh Fringe Festivals, Melbourne Fringe and Adelaide Fringe. In addition to his plays, James has also co-written and directly five seasons of the wildly successful Mystery Radio Theatre series of live radio comedies. He also co-writes and co-presents the Theatre of the World comedy podcast, and performs live original soundtrack music to old silent films with The Ang Fang Quartet.
James has performed with Man Bites God, The Triffids, Bob Franklin, Circus Oz and Tim Minchin, as well as his own solo songs and one-man shows. His music is on Bandcamp. There’s loads more. Google him.
Show images by Darren Gill.
Headshot by Glynn Lavender.