Ask any Sydneysider what they were doing on 15 December, 2014 and they’ll likely come up blank. Remind them that it was the day of the Lindt Café siege in Sydney’s Martin Place and you’ll probably get a much more detailed response.

Sydney playwright Katie Pollock’s new play Human Activity takes a kaleidoscopic, indirect look at that event’s immediate aftermath via characters whose passage through the city has been suddenly brought to a halt.

We encounter a woman on her way to a covert medical appointment at a Macquarie St clinic who falls into fraught conversation with a rough sleeper in Angel Place; an elderly couple on an annual pilgrimage to retrace the last steps of their adopted daughter; a private security guard caught up in the mounting chaos; and two women attempting to make a buck off the back of the crowds selling tribute flowers and cold drinks. A pack of private school kids mill around, scared, excited and entitled. We also meet some of the precinct’s avian residents – a cockatoo and a flock of pigeons.

Atharv Kolhatkar and cast in Human Activity. Photo © David Hooley

Pollock obliquely refers...