Playwright

Free Theatre's first public production in Australia was Stir Fry, performed by Adam Forbes, Fia Hamid-Walker, and Ria Soemardjo with Pongjit, Richard, and Janita as part of the Melbourne Fringe 2017 at the Footscray Community Arts Centre. The 2 shows combined live music (Ria's singing, frame drumming, gongs, flute) with Thai dance in a scenario centred on an Australian multicultural event. It offered a critique of Australia's multiculturalism, posing the question as to whether it represented a genuine process of intercultural engagement or a mask for systemic racial discrimination, feeding into a dialogue with audiences on stage and in chat circles.

In April 2016, to mark the third anniversary of the Rana Plaza tragedy, various grassroots, labour, and ethical fashion groups in Melbourne—including Oxfam Australia and the Union Aid Abroad-APHEDA network—hosted commemorative street actions. Activists used guerrilla street theatre, symbolic die-ins, and flash mobs in key shopping precincts like Bourke Street Mall