Venue: Roslyn Packer Theatre (Sydney NSW), Sep 29 – Oct 31, 2026
Playwright: Steven Moffat
Director: Simon Phillips
Cast: Ty Arnott, Brooklyn Davies, Huw Higginson, Alex Lee, Helen Thomson, Tim Walter, and Ben Wood.
Images by Prudence Upton
Theatre review
The play’s prologue issues an early warning of sorts, deriding those who read publications such as The Guardian and suggesting that politically engaged people, particularly those on the left, derive a peculiar pleasure from being outraged by the news they consume. In doing so, Steven Moffat seems to announce that The Unfriend is deliberately apolitical, positioning itself outside the anxieties and ideological conflicts of the contemporary world before proceeding to make us laugh without asking us to engage with any of the concerns that occupy us as real people.
Debbie and Peter meet Elsa while on holiday and, in an unfortunate lapse of judgement, invite her to stay at their English home. When they subsequently discover that Elsa is suspected of six murders, they have ample reason to reconsider their hospitality, yet find themselves incapable of actually disinviting their American guest. There is, perhaps, something enduringly recognisable in the British tendency towards excessive politeness, but comedy built around the inability to say no has arguably exhausted itself. The joke has been rehearsed so many times that its once-awkward charm has long since given way to trite familiarity.
Director Simon Phillips appears entirely conscious of the broadness of the comedy he has inherited. An extended sequence of toilet humour not only refuses to apologise for its vulgarity but positively revels in it, as though the production were declaring that this is precisely what we have come to see. There is no pretension, Phillips seems to insist, but neither is there any ambition towards intellectual or aesthetic sophistication. The production embraces its coarseness with an almost defiant lack of embarrassment.
Elsa is played by the eminently accomplished Helen Thomson, who demonstrates an impressive ability to extract comedy from almost anything, however banal or clichéd the material. Alex Lee and Tim Walter bring considerable energy to their portrayals of the painfully polite couple, supplementing their characters’ social awkwardness with an appropriate absurdity that helps sustain the increasingly implausible narrative. Ty Arnott and Huw Higginson likewise make the most of their eccentric characters, producing moments of genuine theatrical pleasure even when the comic mechanisms themselves remain conspicuously and toe-curlingly obvious.
The set design by Isabel Hudson is also worthy of commendation. Its immaculate evocation of middle-class respectability provides the production with a visual sumptuousness that compensates, to some extent, for the cheapness of the comic devices employed in the action itself. The contrast is almost revealing: the stage looks substantially more elegant than the material unfolding upon it.
Ben Phillipe wrote in 2021 that “if you have a life that leaves you fool proof to politics, your politics approximate to ‘privileged.’” For many of us, the present is experienced as a period of genuine emergency, making it difficult to accept the notion of political neutrality as an innocent artistic position. When artists, or indeed anyone with a public platform, declare themselves apolitical, it can instead suggest a position of sufficient privilege to permit looking away, to disregard the forces of social and political disintegration taking place around them.
The problem is not simply that such detachment can appear complacent. It is that the idea of being untouched by politics is itself a political luxury. We live within structures in which our lives are inevitably interconnected, and the rot permitted to fester in one part of society rarely remains contained there. More troubling still, indifference to the persecution of others risks creating the conditions in which authoritarian and fascistic tendencies can become increasingly emboldened. The targets may change, but the machinery of persecution does not require a permanent target; once one group has been exhausted, another can readily be found.
The Unfriend may therefore succeed on its own terms as an uncomplicated comedy, but its insistence on keeping politics at arm’s length becomes increasingly conspicuous. What the production treats as an escape from contemporary anxieties can also be understood as an unwillingness to confront them. In a moment when so much of public life is defined by precisely the political concerns the play chooses to dismiss, that refusal to engage begins to feel less like neutrality than a statement in itself.
