with Back To Back Theatre ensemble member, Simon Laherty, and Artistic Director & Co-CEO, Bruce Gladwin.
It’s 9:30am on a Thursday and Tutti — Geelong Arts Centre’s beloved café — has settled into its post–coffee-rush calm. Into this soft hum stroll precinct neighbours and Back to Back Theatre icons Simon Laherty and Bruce Gladwin, sneaking in a quick chat before plunging into another day of high-voltage rehearsals. The vibe is relaxed, but the driving force behind their latest work is running very, very hot.
For more than 30 years, Back to Back Theatre has been one of Australia’s most daring, decorated, and deliciously unpredictable companies — a Geelong-born trailblazer powered by an ensemble of actors with disabilities who continue to reshape what contemporary performance can be. Under the artistic guidance of Gladwin and Co-CEO and Executive Producer Tanya Bennett, the company has toured the globe, collected major awards, and earned international acclaim. And at the centre of many of these creations is long-time ensemble member Simon Laherty, who joined the company in 2003 and remains one of its most magnetic, joyfully distinctive collaborators.
Now, Back to Back returns home with a brand-new world premiere at Geelong Arts Centre: I AM IN A PARASOCIAL RELATIONSHIP WITH BRITNEY SPEARS, starring Laherty as Australia’s self-proclaimed number-one Britney fan on a wild mission to protect his pop princess. The show gleefully dances on the line between reality and fantasy — which makes sense, given that the initial spark came straight from Laherty’s imagination.
“I came up with the story three years ago,” he explains. “It’s about me wanting to be with Britney to get rid of all of the publicity and all of the negativity from her life and the conservatorship. There’s singing and dancing — but not her music.”
Laherty, whose two-decade career with the company includes major touring works such as small metal objects, Ganesh Versus The Third Reich, Food Court, and The Shadow Whose Prey The Hunter Becomes, developed and self-directed the piece as part of Back to Back’s ensemble-led solo series. But this isn’t just fandom — it’s a deep dive into connection.
“Simon has a very strong interest in Britney Spears — he’s her number one fan — and he has led this process,” Gladwin says. “The project actually began pre-Covid, but a lot of the devising happened during lockdowns online. The script is built from improvisations where Luke Ryan, the other performer, would role-play Britney, and Simon would play himself.”
Out of those sessions grew an entire imagined scenario: “In the material, Simon invites Britney to come to Geelong to stay with him in his spare room in Wandana Heights,” Gladwin continues. “It’s an active, rich fantasy about a reality where Simon and Britney can be together in one place.”
However, this is no simple pop-star love letter. In classic Back to Back fashion, the work digs deeper — and darker — than it first appears.
“The performance itself is quite comic,” Gladwin notes. “We’re not realising Britney through costumes or sequins. It’s just Luke playing the text in the style similar to that of John Clarke and Bryan Dawe doing their interviews.”
The humour, however, is the doorway into something far more complex.
“It’s a meta-theatrical work — a mystery the audience has to unpack.”
Bruce Gladwin Back to Back Theatre Artistic Director & Co-CEO“It’s a story about Simon and Luke putting on a show about Britney Spears, but it’s also a story about espionage, where the audience is being trapped. Simon has a theory that many of Britney’s problems come from over-obsessive fans, and he’s capturing evidence of this in his work. It’s a projected fantasy — and a critique — of parasocial relationships.”
Laherty’s Britney obsession isn’t just a character detail; it becomes the lens through which the show examines the bizarre, sometimes harmful machinery of modern celebrity worship. The piece explores the distortions, attachments, and imagined intimacies that fandom culture creates — and the unintended damage it can cause.
And yet, after all the twists, interrogations and unmaskings, one thing remains hilariously, stubbornly unchanged.
“Simon has an encyclopedic knowledge of Britney Spears — he’s read her recent biography four or five times,” Gladwin says.
“More than once,” Laherty clarifies. “Maybe about 100 times.”
Gladwin laughs. “He has interviews, videos, everything you can imagine. It’s been a deep dive into research.”
But even after dissecting the culture of fandom and laying bare how messy and intrusive it can be, Laherty’s devotion stands firm.
“I still like her no matter what,” he says — not defensively, but like it’s the simplest truth in the world.
In the end, that’s the delicious paradox of the show: a piece that critiques obsession, unpacks harmful attachment, and still embraces the earnest, unshakeable glow of one man’s pop-star admiration.
It’s just one of the groundbreaking works under the Back To Back Production schedule heading to Geelong Arts Centre in 2026. Laherty will also feature in the ACMI Touring Exhibition of CHARGE! Agincourt. An ACMI Commission as generously supported by Rachel Griffiths and Andrew Taylor, the Back to Back ensemble take Shakespeare’s Henry V with a fresh cinematic interpretation. Named after the play’s pivotal battle, Agincourt is the latest in the company’s expansive body of screen-based works.
Back To Back Theatre continue their reign as boundary-pushing theatre-makers and it’s revealed at Geelong Arts Centre.