Welcome back to The Village Square, where strange things happen gently. High in the hazy mountain air lies a town where birds steal dreams from sleeping residents, machinery parts are made from vegetables, and music and language flow together in the river.
It is a place where the extraordinary sits comfortably alongside the everyday, and where the townsfolk navigate lives shaped by joy, sorrow, memory and imagination.
Following its sold-out Melbourne Fringe debut, The Village Square returns with a new cycle of whimsical stories and original compositions, bringing together the distinctive talents of narrator Richard Piper, cellist Zoe Knighton and guitarist Robbie Melville.
The collaboration creates a theatrical world built around storytelling and music, with Piper’s narration guiding audiences through a series of contemporary folk tales while Knighton and Melville provide the accompanying musical landscape.
The new stories venture further into the peculiar life of the Village. In A Friend Of Yours, an unknown dog arrives in town and quickly charms the residents before mysteriously disappearing. One Way Ticket follows a stonemason who, deafened by the shock of tragic events, sets about building a bell tower for a flock of birds.
In The Well, an innkeeper attempts to restore the town’s water supply by bringing together sorrowful memories and a fake gold ring.
Across these stories, the everyday and the fantastical occupy the same space. The Village has its own peculiar inhabitants, traditions and mysteries, yet the stories remain grounded in familiar human experiences of connection, loss, remembrance and hope.
At the centre of the production is the creative partnership between Piper, Knighton and Melville. Their work brings spoken storytelling and live music together in a format that sits somewhere between theatre, concert and contemporary folk tale.
The return of The Village Square continues an ongoing exploration of how stories can be told through the interplay of words and music, creating a world in which the unusual is accepted as part of everyday life.
For audiences returning to the Village, there are new stories to discover. For those encountering it for the first time, the invitation remains the same: step into a town where birds have their own mysteries, vegetables can become machinery, rivers carry music, and nothing is quite as it first appears.
The Village Square
The Motley Wherehaus – The Cavern, 432 Queen Street, Melbourne
Season: 12 – 18 October 2026
Bookings: www.melbournefringe.com.au
For more information, visit: www.robbiemelville.com for details.
Image: Zoe Knighton, Robbie Melville and Richard Piper star in The Village Square – photo by Agatha Yim