219 messages and the play Benj Beatty couldn't ignore

03 October 2026

There are 219 unheard voicemail messages sitting on director Benj Beatty's phone.

One of them belongs to a dead man.

Benj never met him.

The man left the message and died the following day. More than a year later, the recording is still there, buried among the voices of the living, unheard.

Benj can't quite bring himself to press play.

“To listen now would seem like desecrating a grave,” he says.

“So it stays, hidden amongst the voices of the living. If I listened, would he know? If I left a message, what would I say?”

It is difficult to imagine a play finding its director more neatly.

This October, Benj makes his Ballarat National Theatre directorial debut with Sarah Ruhl's Dead Man's Cell Phone, a darkly funny and wonderfully peculiar play that begins with another phone belonging to another dead man.

This one won't stop ringing.

Jean is sitting alone in a café when the mobile phone on the next table rings.

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And rings.

Eventually, she answers it.

Its owner, Gordon, is dead.

What begins as an impulsive act of kindness pulls Jean into the bewildering life of a man she never
knew and into the family, relationships and secrets he left behind.

It is an absurd premise. It is also an oddly recognisable one.

Our phones have become repositories for enormous pieces of our lives. Photographs. Conversations. Arguments. Love letters disguised as text messages. Voices we can summon long after the person who owned them has disappeared.

For Benj, that uncomfortable space between technology and human connection is where Ruhl's play becomes particularly interesting.

“Exploring this blurring of the lines between the heard and the unseen, how technology connects us as humans while robbing us of our humanity, is why I'm excited to be bringing Dead Man's Cell Phone to BNT.”

And he has assembled a cast to inhabit Ruhl's strange world.

Chantal Amber leads the production as Jean, with Tim Constantine taking on the dual roles of Gordon and his brother Dwight. Melissa Lawrence plays The Other Woman and The Stranger, Fiona Reilly is Gordon's mother Mrs Gottlieb, Laura Edmondson plays his widow Hermia, and Faith Stanes joins the ensemble.

The production will also carry Ballarat National Theatre onto the state-wide stage. BNT has entered Dead Man's Cell Phone in the 2026 Victorian Drama League Awards, which celebrate community theatre from across Victoria. Adjudicators travel the state to see productions in performance, and companies can enter just one drama or comedy each year.

BNT chose this one.

But before awards, adjudicators or anything else comes an audience.

And perhaps that's where Dead Man's Cell Phone really belongs.

In a darkened theatre, surrounded by strangers, watching a woman answer a dead man's phone and disappear into the life on the other end of it.

Meanwhile, somewhere in Benj Beatty's own phone, message number 219 is still waiting.

He hasn't listened yet.

Perhaps some messages aren't waiting to be heard.

Perhaps they're simply waiting to remind us who's no longer there.

Dead Man's Cell Phone
23 October – 1 November 2026
Ballaarat Mechanics' Institute
117–119 Sturt Street, Ballarat Central

Tickets:
https://events.humanitix.com/bnt-dead-mans-cell-phone/tickets