Outside the apartment, the Catastrophe is raging. After the Emergency six years before, a combination of nuclear ruin, atmospheric deterioration, epidemic disease and internecine warfare has emptied the City streets. Only children, curiously immune to both the crippling illness and war politics, venture out through the urban pollution to collect supplies and conduct business, ostensibly in their parents’ names. Anna, mother of two teenage boys, is holed up inside and attempting to stay sane. Formerly a lawyer and relapsing frequently with the new disease, she conducts online affairs under a pseudonym, promoting the underground spread of health-preserving vaccines. Her absent husband, Seb, has long been conscripted to the Front. Anna’s mothering of her children is inflected by complex interdependence and power inversions, honed through long years of domestic isolation. One of her two boys is a daughter, Honey, whose distorted childhood freedom of the street is now threatened by her oncoming puberty. Honey assumes the boyish identity, Jack, which allows her to keep leaving the house, but this places her at risk of infection as well as on-street conscription if identified as an adult. Jack’s relationship with her mother becomes strained, as she grapples with her own maturing body, her mother’s ill-health, the looming restrictions of adulthood and her delegated role as her mother’s Voice. Meanwhile, in a setting as yet untouched by the Catastrophe, Southland Kiwi farmer Nick views the global situation pragmatically, with an agricultural eye. Only partially aware of the dystopia outside the still-locked borders of New Zealand, Nick’s isolated rural community seems far-distanced from such cataclysmic events. Now suddenly, a strange new disease begins spreading amongst the young cattle Nick is grazing on his family farm. Suspecting that some part of the Catastrophe has reached the far South, Nick begins to research online, and he becomes obsessed with the disasters occurring outside New Zealand. As he invests more in his online persona, the international Catastrophe and the people living through it become more urgent to him than the issues of his own farm and family. Spanning the fractured global story of our times, Unvoiced: A Fairytale draws on a range of voices from our post-pandemic moment. This unfurling dramaturgy of disorder juxtaposes divergent perspectives, news-clippings, flashbacks and fever dreams to weave a twisted fairytale in five Acts. Its flickering reportage of tentatively connected storylines explores a near-future in which disaster-hardened adults become entrapped in worlds of their own making, while the younger generation become carriers of disease, sexual violence, cynicism and disabling propaganda. Personal and social trauma embeds in family narratives and becomes intergenerational. New forms of identity and relationships unfold in the digital landscapes which connect us loosely, shaping personalities and raising troubling questions about who and where we really are. Which parts of our lives are merely invented, and by whom? What do we really know about our world, and how do we know it? Is the Catastrophe already upon us, or has it been fabricated online, and within us, by paranoid and sickening minds? Through haunting fragments and unfinished stories, woven with wistful nostalgia for what we have already lost, Unvoiced: A Fairytale warns of the potential human devastation arising out of the nightmarish conflagration of war, politics, disease and climate catastrophe.