Review: The Dapto Chaser (Ensemble Theatre)

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Venue: Ensemble Theatre (Kirribilli NSW), Jun 29 – Jul 25, 2026
Playwright: Mary Rachel Brown
Director: Anna Houston
Cast: Peter Carroll, Marco Chiappi, André de Vanny, Justin Rosniak
Images by Prudence Upton

Theatre review
The Sinclairs have made a ruin of their lives, pouring everything into the quixotic pursuit of greyhound racing. In Mary Rachel Brown’s The Dapto Chaser, we watch generations of men tether themselves to a fixation they mistake for destiny, convinced that persistence alone will deliver them from their circumstances. To the audience, the arithmetic is mercilessly clear: the house never loses. It is tempting to read their devotion as mere folly, the wages of poor choices. Yet Brown invites us to recognise a more uncomfortable mirror. Most of us may not wager on the dogs, but we commit to capitalism with a comparable fervour, persuaded that the system pays out fairly to those who play by the rules. The truth, of course, is that capital rewards capital; the rest of us navigate by dim light, following the doctrines handed down by those who profit from our faith.

Brown’s play is not, at its core, a political treatise, though it certainly concerns itself with Australian class structures. First and foremost, it is a masterclass in wit, delivered with precision and velocity. The humour, rich in ocker texture, will prove satisfying especially to those who favour that particular style of language. Anna Houston’s direction sharpens the comedy to a needlepoint, mining every beat for maximum effect so that even viewers who find the cultural milieu foreign will be laughing despite themselves. Her attention to dramatic architecture is equally assured, inflating the stakes until they feel perilous, and securing our emotional investment with deceptive ease.

The production design reinforces this immediacy. Simone Romaniuk’s set and costumes evoke poverty not as aestheticised misery but as lived-in dilapidation, telling their own visual story with unflinching honesty. Between scenes, Matt Cox’s lighting and Madeleine Picard’s score seize every opportunity for theatrical flourish, enriching the dramaturgy while lifting the production into something more expansive than naturalism.

At the centre stands Justin Rosniak as Cess, delivering a performance of captivating intensity. His emotional volatility and fearless comic timing ensure we remain locked to the family’s trajectory, finding entertainment and pathos in equal measure. He is ably supported by Peter Carroll, Marco Chiappi, and André de Vanny, all of whom demonstrate the skill this bittersweet comedy demands.

We want the Sinclairs to break their patterns, to glimpse the impossibility of the dreams they have chased for so long. More than that, we are left wondering whether our own capitalistic commitments—to the promises of merit, of fair reward, of the system’s eventual benevolence—are any less delusory than a winning ticket at the track.

www.ensemble.com.au

Review: First, Do No Harm (KXT on Broadway)

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Venue: KXT on Broadway (Ultimo NSW), Jun 24 – Jul 4, 2026
Playwright: Grace Malouf
Director: Charley Allanah, Grace Malouf
Cast: Kate Bookallil, Barry French, Richard Hilliar, Josh Merten, Shan-Ree Tan
Images by Laura Elaine

Theatre review
Alexei is an Olympic hopeful whose swimming career has begun to falter at just nineteen years of age. He harbours a secret that is compromising his athletic performance, yet revealing it would invite controversy of the most personal kind. As the burden of concealment becomes unbearable, the truth can no longer remain hidden.

Grace Malouf’s First, Do No Harm transcends its ostensible sporting milieu to interrogate a far more fundamental proposition: the sovereignty of the body itself. The drama excavates the reverberations of a single individual’s corporeal self-determination, tracing how such a decision propagates through the social fabric with disquieting complexity. Malouf’s dramatic structure may lack formal daring, yet it grips with undeniable force; what it sacrifices in stylistic flair, it repays in intellectual and emotional depth. The work avoids theatrical showmanship, but its careful thought is unmistakable, emerging from an unflinching engagement with a subject that remains, in contemporary discourse, not only relevant but urgent.

Co-directed by Malouf and Charley Allanah, the production forgoes imaginative spectacle for an almost austere directness—an approach that, rather than diminishing the work, forges an uncommon intimacy with its audience, engaging both intellect and affect with precision. The staging distills narrative to its essential elements; this reduction, though occasionally risking oversimplification, ultimately crystallises the play’s conceptual preoccupations with remarkable efficacy.

Holden Jane Cohle’s production design requires more work to invite visual interest, while Theodore Carroll’s lighting offers occasional moments of striking inventiveness, even if such flourishes are used sparingly. Ellie Wilson’s sound design is likewise understated, but it rises effectively to the demands of the drama at key emotional moments.

Josh Merten inhabits Alexei with a passion that never tips into histrionics, grounding an ostensibly implausible psychological condition in emotional authenticity. His performance renders the extraordinary not merely credible but viscerally immediate. Richard Hilliar, as Alexei’s father and villain of the piece, Robert, constructs a figure of compelling contradiction—simultaneously antagonistic and vulnerable, comprehensible yet beyond easy absolution. Kate Bookallil, Barry French, and Shan-Ree Tan complete the ensemble with commendable proficiency.

The ordeal Alexei endures may be deeply unsettling, yet the play insists on a challenging idea: however objectionable his desires seem, only he has the right to decide. First, Do No Harm shows us how much we tend to believe that our own views entitle us to govern how others live. The production offers a vital reminder that the most durable achievement of democratic life lies not in consensus, but in our mutual tolerance—the willingness to allow one another the liberty to inhabit our own lives.

www.kingsxtheatre.com

Review: House Of Rot (Hayes Theatre)

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Venue: Hayes Theatre Co (Potts Point NSW), Jun 23 – 28, 2026
Director: Dino Dimitriadis
Cast: Paul Capsis, Adam Noviello, with Victoria Falconer
Images by Gianna Rizzo

Theatre review
Much like the women of the celebrated documentary Grey Gardens, Addy and their parental counterpart exist in a state of mutual captivity—inseparable, yet hardly serene. House of Rot unfolds principally through torch songs and standards drawn from the past century, with dialogue kept to a bare minimum.

Though its form is fundamentally cabaret, its theatrical scope renders it far more substantial than the category typically permits—a distinction owing much to Leila Enright’s economically incisive dramaturgy. Brockman’s lighting, in particular, demands recognition for the artistic elevation it brings; consistently mesmerising, it possesses the rare capacity to arrest time itself—an effect crucial to a narrative about two people locked in a vicious cycle of tender devotion and bitter dependency. We behold them frozen, unable to advance, yet we are compelled to discern whatever sublimity resides in their stasis.

Victoria Falconer’s musical direction harnesses the transcendental power of song, reshaping familiar numbers into freshly romantic configurations that cohere into a unified whole. The result is a work that either articulates a meaningful narrative—subject to each spectator’s personal interpretation—or, at minimum, facilitates a visceral experience that proves both persuasive and resonant, propelled by an unmistakable sense of deliberate intention. Falconer remains onstage throughout, providing flawless accompaniment while also delivering the show’s prologue and epilogue.

Paul Capsis inhabits the parental figure with a baroque sensibility, wielding a singular fusion of the macabre and the glamorous. The effect is not merely visually arresting but emotionally penetrating; Capsis conveys instantaneous gravitas through every gesture and saunter, even when the rational mind struggles to assign immediate meaning to these portrayals. Such impact derives not solely from the visual plane, but from vocal capacities now the stuff of legend—enthralling precisely because of their steadfast refusal of conventional prettiness. Adam Noviello, though not yet possessing the seasoned depth to fully match a living legend, nevertheless sings with comparable skill, albeit in a wildly divergent register.

Nicol & Ford’s costumes distil the essence of the Edies into a contemporary idiom, evoking eroded wealth, regrettable choices, and unvarnished beauty to ensure we fall in love with these characters anew. Dino Dimitriadis’s direction does more than retell the saga of entwined aristocratic Americans; by placing Capsis and Noviello in parallel, Dimitriadis transposes the Grey Gardens mythology into a narrative of intergenerational queerness—one that speaks to the inheritance of trauma alongside more wondrous bequests.

House of Rot interrogates how a community ought to move forward in a world that, while ostensibly growing more accommodating, also seems to demand the shedding of cultural particularities. It aches for queer people to claim a luminous future, yet warns with a tremor in its voice that we must not surrender every trait that makes us who we are—must not melt ourselves down to be palatable to those who have never once, not for a single heartbeat, considered loosening their grip on power. To do so would be to lose not merely our history, but the very pulse of what makes us consequential and irreplaceable.

www.hayestheatre.com.au | www.greendoortheatrecompany.com

Review: The Roommate (Ensemble Theatre)

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Venue: Ensemble Theatre (Kirribilli NSW), Jun 19 – Jul 25, 2026
Playwright: Jen Silverman
Director: Lee Lewis
Cast: Lucy Bell, Belinda Bromilow
Images by Brett Boardman

Theatre review
Sharon, newly divorced, finds herself unmoored—liberated from the obligations of marriage and motherhood yet utterly unprepared for autonomy. Having spent decades in Iowa as wife and mother, she has never cultivated an identity beyond servitude; the sudden absence of duty leaves her not merely free but adrift, hollowed out by a life lived in reflexive deference to others. Into this vacuum steps Robyn, a transplant from New York whose existence—vivid, self-determined, almost voluptuously full—represents a universe Sharon can scarcely comprehend, let alone inhabit. The collision between these two women proves both transformative and darkly comic; what begins as an education becomes an emancipation.

In The Roommate, Jen Silverman crafts a narrative that transcends the familiar midlife-awakening template. The play interrogates the architecture of submission—how the rules imposed upon Sharon were never benign conventions but instruments of subjugation, internalized so thoroughly that freedom itself becomes disorienting. Silverman understands that metamorphosis is not merely political but physical: a woman relearning her own appetites, her own voice, her own capacity for transgression. Director Lee Lewis approaches Sharon’s trajectory with evident relish, mining the text for its comic exuberance while never trivializing the radical nature of her reinvention. The production recognizes that joy, here, is itself a political act—the pleasure of a body and mind finally claiming ownership of themselves.

Lucy Bell delivers a performance of remarkable dexterity as Sharon, charting the character’s evolution from desperate, almost feral hunger to something approaching sovereignty. She locates the absurdity inherent in Sharon’s naïveté without condescending to it, and grounds the later acts of rebellion in genuine emotional stakes. There is both levity and gravitas in this portrait of self-discovery; Bell renders Sharon’s awakening not as a gentle blooming but as something more disruptive, more voracious.

As Robyn, Belinda Bromilow offers a necessary counterweight—less exuberant than Bell, perhaps, but possessed of an authenticity that prevents the dynamic from collapsing into caricature. Robyn is not merely the catalyst for Sharon’s transformation but a woman undergoing her own quiet excavation, similarly engaged in the arduous work of self-definition.

The production design by Simone Romaniuk operates with astute visual economy, evoking the American landscape through carefully calibrated contrasts—costume and spatial details that externalize the friction between Robyn’s cultivated cosmopolitanism and Sharon’s unexamined provincialism. Matt Cox’s lighting provides understated but precise atmospheric modulation, tracing the characters’ shifting psychological registers without ostentation. Madeleine Picard’s compositions, deployed during scene transitions, maintain narrative momentum with inventive sonic textures that sustain our anticipation for each new development.

What resonates most profoundly is the play’s recognition that Sharon’s ignorance has been structurally cultivated—partly self-imposed, yes, but largely enforced by a hegemony that reduces her to fungible labor, a minor component in an indifferent apparatus. Yet The Roommate refuses easy binaries of victimhood and liberation. Robyn, too, is in flight from a past that no longer fits; her apparently charmed existence conceals its own disillusionments. The feminist dimension of Silverman’s work is unmistakable but never didactic—her argument extends beyond gender to encompass anyone reduced to instrumentality, anyone whose self-possession has been systematically eroded. The play ultimately insists that claiming one’s life is not a single dramatic rupture but a continuous, often comic, occasionally terrifying process of becoming.

www.ensemble.com.au

Review: Straight Panic (ATYP)

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Venue: The Popsy (Sydney NSW), Jun 16 – 27 , 2026
Playwright: Lachlan Parry
Director: Lily Hayman
Cast: Andrew Fraser, Emma Kew, Esha Jessy, Pierse Cant, Evelina Singh
Images by Phil Erbacher

Theatre review
Set in Sydney, 2005, three discrete locales stage simultaneous scenes of casual, despicable homophobia—communities unwittingly laying bare their prejudices for the audience’s scrutiny. Straight Panic, Lachlan Parry’s triptych of short plays, interrogates the extent to which attitudes toward gay people have—or conspicuously have not—shifted across two decades. Though characters and settings diverge, Parry’s exuberant wit remains the production’s through-line, unmistakable and relentless. Director Lily Hayman leans fully into the text’s intentional absurdity, yielding a production memorable for humour that oscillates between the brazenly broad and the unexpectedly subtle.

The ensemble of five proves uniformly winning: each performer deploys confidence and exuberance to animate distinct personalities, rendering all three narratives urgently contemporary. Their chemistry is palpable, their collective delight infectious; the audience succumbs readily to their charm. Soham Apte’s production design achieves elegance through restraint, facilitating narrative clarity without unnecessary embellishment. Tyler Fitzpatrick’s lighting and Daniel Hertern’s score operate with comparable efficiency—accomplished, unostentatious, and entirely effective.

Straight Panic may refrain from delivering its political thesis with strident force, yet it demonstrates that certain behaviours resist sanitisation regardless of the humorous gloss applied. Across these narratives, we witness the evolution of public discourse: while private sentiment remains unknowable, the vocabulary of prejudice has acquired constraints. This is not progress in its ideal form, perhaps, but it is progress nonetheless—and not to be dismissed.

www.atyp.com.au

Review: Truck Driver (Sydney Opera House)

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Venue: Sydney Opera House (Sydney NSW), Jun 16 – 20, 2026
Playwright: Jonny Hawkins
Director: Nell Ranney
Cast: Jonny Hawkins
Images by Daniel Boud

Theatre review
Jonny Hawkins’ solo performance Truck Driver traces the continental crossings of Chiko, a long-haul driver whose solitary labour—ferrying cargo and livestock across vast distances—sustains the invisible arteries of contemporary consumption. Yet Hawkins refuses the easy reduction of their protagonist to mere instrument; Chiko is, above all, a consciousness in motion, his interior life rich with unspoken rumination. Only the chance encounter with a hitchhiker occasions the rare transmutation of thought into speech, exposing the profound isolation that structures his existence. In this respect, Chiko belongs to that vast, uncelebrated multitude upon whose labour modern life silently depends, and Hawkins’ play offers an uncommon aperture into the psychological textures of working-class experience—its resentments and generosities alike—in what reads as a sustained act of narrative restitution.

If the dramatic architecture occasionally strains under the weight of its own ambition, the work’s capacious humanism remains beyond question. As performer, Hawkins possesses an irrepressible charm that gracefully compensates for the text’s intermittent monotony. Their Chiko is at once vindictive and jovial, the archetypal larrikin rendered with sufficient vulnerability to forestall mere caricature. Even when the character ventures into objectionable territory, Hawkins maintains an empathic tether, eliciting from their audience not condemnation but the more complex gift of suspended judgment. There is, moreover, a palpable theatrical intelligence at play—highly entertaining in its artifice, yet grounded in an authenticity that never permits the performance to collapse into mere showmanship.

Nell Ranney’s direction demonstrates exceptional sensitivity, calibrating each line with interpretive nuance and liberating Hawkins’ physicality to move with fluid inventiveness, transfiguring what is, in literal terms, an essentially static predicament. Isabel Hudson’s set design—a miniature truck, perfectly proportioned to the stage’s dimensions—conjures both the monumental heft of these machines and, by implication, the outsized moral stature of the man who commands one. Nick Schlieper’s lighting and Steve Toulmin’s score make their most arresting impression in the highly dramatised prologue, where kinetic exhilaration establishes an almost visceral immediacy; yet for the bulk of the production, both designers exercise remarkable restraint, attuning the audience to the subtle frequencies of Chiko’s inner life.

The majority of our populace remains structurally invisible, even as we presume to understand the collective consciousness that shapes our political destinies. Chiko is, in certain respects, precisely the figure we might anticipate; yet he continually confounds expectation, revealing unexpected capacities for reflection and metamorphosis. He is, in the end, perpetually underestimated and perpetually taken for granted—a condition the play refuses to let us forget.

www.softtread.com.au

Review: Everyone Knows I’m A Pervert (KXT on Broadway)

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Venue: KXT on Broadway (Ultimo NSW), Jun 10 – 20, 2026
Playwright: Taylor Fernandez
Director: Beatrice Blackwell
Cast: Jade Fuda, Jenny Guigayoma, Jake Walker
Images by Laura Elaine

Theatre review
Chastity writes erotica online, openly disclosing a catalogue of unconventional sexual desires and proclivities. While she strives to resist feelings of shame surrounding these impulses, doing so proves far from straightforward. In Everyone Knows I’m A Pervert, Taylor Fernandez places considerable emphasis on the interior life of its protagonist, yet fails to construct a compelling dramatic framework around her. The result is a work whose central character never becomes sufficiently engaging, and without a robust narrative to sustain interest, the play struggles to establish a firm footing.

Beatrice Blackwell’s direction leans heavily into the script’s eccentric — and, it must be said, frequently laboured — humour, while doing little to compensate for its dramaturgical shortcomings. Consequently, the production often feels less like a coherent theatrical experience than an unrelenting barrage of noise and activity: at best energetic, at worst exhausting.

On an otherwise bare stage, Holly Nesbitt’s lighting design shoulders much of the responsibility for generating visual interest, lending the production a welcome sense of theatricality and atmosphere. Zaphnath-Penaea Messenger’s sound design efficiently establishes locations and situations, though rarely aspires to anything more evocative or imaginative.

As Chastity, Jenny Guigayoma excels in the play’s occasional moments of vulnerability and poignancy, though such opportunities are regrettably scarce. Jade Fuda and Jake Walker assume a multitude of supporting roles, often with impressive versatility and commitment. Whatever the production’s flaws, the dedication of its performers is never in doubt.

Sexuality manifests differently in every individual, yet our reluctance to discuss these intimate dimensions of ourselves allows restrictive notions of acceptable sexual expression to persist. Chastity is entitled to regard herself as a “pervert”, but the term itself is ultimately devoid of meaning if we accept that there is no singular norm against which human sexual experience can be measured.

www.kingsxtheatre.com

Review: Shooting Hedda Gabler (Seymour Centre)

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Venue: Seymour Centre (Chippendale NSW), Jun 11 – 27, 2026
Playwright: Nina Segal
Director: Monica Sayers
Cast: Jane Angharad, Jennifer Rani, James Smithers, Alpha Sylla, Lib Campbell, Matthew Abotomey 
Images by Phil Erbacher

Theatre review
In Nina Segal’s Shooting Hedda Gabler, a Hollywood actor arrives in Norway to work beneath a film director celebrated as both visionary and enfant terrible. The parallel is deliberate: Segal subjects her protagonist to the same suffocating constraints that bind Ibsen’s heroine, collapsing the distance between the nineteenth century and our own to expose how tenaciously misogyny endures. Yet for all its darkness, the play is flecked with mordant wit, its sophistication rendering the medicine palatable without diluting its potency.

Under Monica Sayers’s direction, the production sustains a precarious equilibrium between entertainment and gravitas, ensuring its poignancy commands full attention. James Smithers’s set design achieves a marvellous synthesis of visual splendour and dramatic utility, while Charlotte Savva’s costumes evoke a distinctly Scandinavian restraint—elegant, immaculate, severe in their understatement. Travis Kecek’s lighting and Anthony MacDermott’s music operate with similar Nordic coolness, so subtly calibrated that one barely registers their presence until they tighten, scene by scene, an almost casual noose of foreboding.

Jennifer Rani, as the leading lady, navigates her character’s emotional trajectory with forensic precision, never permitting ambiguity about where she stands in her arc. James Smithers (doubling as the film director) imbues the despicable auteur with a nuanced malevolence that is all the more chilling for its theatrical relish—he leaves the audience no aperture through which to excuse his behaviour, yet remains magnetically watchable. Lib Campbell and Matthew Abotomey furnish the production with its most indelible comic textures, their performances audacious and outrageously inventive, offering necessary respite from the narrative’s unrelenting brutality.

The women of Shooting Hedda Gabler enjoy freedoms of expression unimaginable to the 1890s characters they portray, yet Segal suggests that such liberties are largely cosmetic. We may speak our minds and gesture at agency, but the architecture beneath— the structural mechanisms that shape female destiny—remains obstinately intact, fiercely committed to our subjugation. The play’s sharpest insight lies here: in the cruel illusion that progress has occurred when, in fact, the machinery has simply learned to disguise itself.

www.seymourcentre.com | www.secrethouse.com.au

Review: Mackenzie (Bell Shakespeare)

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Venue: The Neilson Nutshell (Sydney NSW), Jun 6 – Jul 18, 2026
Playwright: Yve Blake
Director: Virginia Gay
Cast: Billie Palin, Nikki Britton, Ryan González, Kimberly Hodgson, Anusha Thomas, Jane Watt
Images by Brett Boardman

Theatre review
When a soothsayer prophesies that Mackenzie will ascend from bit-part player in a children’s television programme to the apotheosis of global pop stardom—the eponymous “number one pop girl”—her trajectory, mapped deliberately onto the skeleton of Macbeth, charts the corrosive geometry of ambition: a vertiginous rise that darkens into regret. Yve Blake’s play with songs is, to its credit, irreverent and acidly witty; yet, like so many adaptations of Shakespeare, it cannot ultimately escape the reductive compression that accompanies transposing Elizabethan tragedy into contemporary vernacular. Still, the production yields genuine delights, not least a score that crackles with infectious pleasure.

Virginia Gay’s direction ensures the evening never flags, sustaining a kinetic entertainment that is matched by scrupulous attention to the calibre of performance across the ensemble. Elle Evangelista’s choreography compounds this dynamism, rendering the staging so relentlessly animated that one’s attention is held with almost hydraulic force. The design elements, however, are less uniformly successful.

Keerthi Subramanyam’s set never fully metabolises the space into the requisite theatrical world, though her costume work is inspired, capturing both the gaudy exuberance of pop iconography and the unvarnished textures of everyday existence with equal acuity. Kelsey Lee’s lighting is intricately conceived, yet it intermittently falters, lacking the baroque flamboyance demanded by the production’s high-camp register and marred by moments of technical clumsiness. By contrast, Tom Lowndes’s sound design is masterfully achieved, modulating between registers of levity and catastrophe while conjuring the supernatural against a ground of naturalism, thereby supplying the production with its genuine dramatic voltage.

What ultimately indelibly impresses, however, is the superlative standard of performance from every member of the cast. Kimberley Hodgson, in the central role, is nothing short of flawless. She excavates the psychopathology of the ambitious ingénue with forensic precision, tracing the arc from naivety to corruption with a granularity that reveals every shading of moral complexity. Her work is suffused with subtlety yet remains magnetically, consistently potent

Pop stars, like monarchs, occupy a stratosphere of existence that can feel hermetically sealed from ordinary relatability; Shakespeare’s genius, of course, lay in making the remote resonantly human. Mackenzie may never fully transcend the somewhat prosaic narrative of a celebrity life unravelling, but in its final accounting it offers an unflinching meditation on the perils of unmoored ambition—a caution that, in our present moment of unbridled rapacity, reverberates with mournful immediacy.

www.bellshakespeare.com.au

Review: W (Old Fitz Theatre)

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Venue: Old Fitzroy Theatre (Woolloomooloo NSW), May 29 – Jun 14, 2026
Playwright: Madelaine Nunn
Director: Rachel Chant
Cast: Danielle Cormack, Celeste Cortes-Davis, Edyll Ismail, Ally Morgan, Shannon Ryan, Grace Smibert
Images by Phil Erbacher

Theatre review
In Madelaine Nunn’s W, an elite women’s football team hurtles toward the season finals, yet the play’s dramatic momentum is diffused rather than concentrated. Between coach Sue and five players, our attention is parcelled out too sparingly; while team captain Rosie receives marginally more narrative real estate, her story never quite becomes the play’s anchoring centre. The result is a dramatic architecture that feels structurally tentative—compelling in its parts, yet uncertain of its whole.

What holds the production together is Rachel Chant’s astute direction. She renders each character with such precision and emotional texture that the ensemble transcends the script’s fractured architecture, making the evening dramaturgically coherent and, for the most part, gripping. Still, there is something irreducibly splintered about the writing itself—an episodic restlessness that prevents the work from achieving the satisfying unity it intermittently promises.

Among the cast, Shannon Ryan delivers a performance of unwavering commitment as Rosie, yet her isolation is palpable; she generates little chemistry with her fellow players, and that disconnection quietly erodes the production’s emotional foundation. Danielle Cormack, by contrast, thrives as Sue, crafting a character of terrific vitality—by turns hilarious and deeply, authentically felt. The remainder of the ensemble matches her standard with consistent excellence, balancing humour and emotional depth while executing Poppy Lynch’s movement direction with an athletic rigour that lends the staging a genuine physical exhilaration.

The design elements are equally accomplished. Meg Anderson’s set and Aloma Barnes Siraswar’s costumes combine visual vibrancy with meticulous detail, while Luna Yuet Yee Ng’s lighting is calibrated with exquisite sensitivity, seizing every opportunity for theatrical flourish and transforming it into something genuinely beautiful. Clare Hennessy’s sound design deepens the atmosphere at every turn, enriching the production’s dramatic texture without ever overwhelming it.

The play arrives at a cultural moment when many still refuse to acknowledge the insidious depth of everyday sexism; the marginalisation of women’s sport renders that denial impossible. Curiously, W never names misogyny outright, yet the additional labour these women endure to pursue their passion speaks with unmistakable eloquence. In the end, W tackles the extra miles women must run—but stops just short of naming the finish line they are forbidden to cross.

www.oldfitztheatre.com.au | www.newghoststheatre.com