Monthly Archives: October 2025

Review: Fekei (Qtopia)

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Venue: Qtopia (Darlinghurst NSW), Oct 8 – 18, 2025
Playwright: Sarah Carroll
Director: Sarah Carroll
Cast: Melissa Applin, Natalie Patterson, Kikki Temple, Lawrence Ola, Naisa Lasalosi, Mele Telefon
Images by DefinitelyDefne Photography

Theatre review
Akanisi returns to her hometown in Fiji for what was meant to be a relaxing visit, but the trip quickly becomes fraught with tension when her girlfriend Sam joins her, with her family remaining unaware about Akanisi’s queerness. Fekei by Sarah Carroll explores how postcolonial societies grapple with the lingering influence of Christian doctrines that have bred prejudice and shame. Yet, it also reveals how deeply rooted cultural traditions can offer resilience and acceptance, standing firm against the harmful legacies of biblical indoctrination.

It is a sincere work by Carroll — tenderly written and often humorous in its portrayal of cultural idiosyncrasies. Their direction, however, lacks refinement; the rawness of approach occasionally renders scenes forced or unconvincing. Yet, Luna Ng’s commendable lighting design provides a counterbalance, its sensitive evocation of atmosphere helping to guide the audience through the production’s emotional shifts.

Melissa Applin brings a quiet sincerity to Akanisi, while Natalie Patterson infuses Sam with a buoyant, infectious energy. Yet the emotional core of their relationship never quite lands, and a stronger chemistry between the two would give the story greater pull. As Akanisi’s family, Kikki Temple and Naisa Lasalosi are a delight — playful, camp, and full of heart — offering both comic relief and genuine tenderness. In supporting turns, Lawrence Ola and Melehola Telefoni add texture and vibrancy, enriching the play’s portrait of everyday life in Fiji.

Queer people have every right to want acceptance, a pursuit that is both natural and deserved, though sometimes harmony is the closest we can come. The influence of religion in the Pacific runs deep; after more than two centuries of Christian indoctrination, its unravelling will take generations. During her fleeting return home, Akanisi cannot hope to rewrite her grandmother’s faith, but within their shared customs lies an older wisdom: one that values peace, patience, and the quiet endurance of love.

www.qtopiasydney.com.au

Review: Chicken In A Biscuit (Old Fitz Theatre)

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Venue: Old Fitzroy Theatre (Woolloomooloo NSW), Oct 3 – 18, 2025
Playwrights: Mary Rachel Brown, Jamie Oxenbould 
Director: Mary Rachel Brown
Cast: Mandy Bishop, Jamie Oxenbould
Images by Becky Matthews

Theatre review
Mary Rachel Brown and Jamie Oxenbould’s Chicken in a Biscuit stitches together a handful of comic vignettes about pets and their humans. It is a playful collection that mostly delivers on its promise of amusement, serving up easy laughs and moments of recognisable absurdity. The writers occasionally flirt with taboo, but never quite bite down; the material remains amiable, lightly absurd, and ultimately harmless. Pleasant enough, but it never risks enough to truly surprise.

Brown’s direction keeps everything tidy and contained, resulting in a show that feels carefully packaged but rarely surprising; a safe bet for audiences who prefer their theatre comfortable and uncomplicated. Kate Beere’s production design injects a colourful vibrancy, touched with camp flair, that lifts the show above the merely ordinary. Aron Murray’s lighting, video, and sound design provide atmospheric support and emotional precision, opting for reliability over experimentation.

Featuring Oxenbould and Mandy Bishop in multiple roles—human, feline and canine—Chicken in a Biscuit maintains a tone of confident control. The performers’ technical proficiency and evident commitment ground the production, providing a stability that facilitates audience engagement. Their comedic timing is deft and reliable, though attempts at emotional depth inadvertently reveal the text’s limitations, exposing a lack of substantive resonance beneath the humour.

When creative writing turns to anthropomorphism, an act of mirroring takes place. It reveals us as a species that defines itself relationally — understanding what we are only by imagining what we are not. Through the animal, we are stripped of pretence, order and normative hierarchy, made to think in other languages, to locate identity in a space far removed from the familiar. Perhaps, at the heart of it, what we desire most is transformation itself — for to be human is so often to long to be something, or somewhere, else.

www.oldfitztheatre.com.au | www.instagram.com/fixedfootproductions

Review: Rent (Sydney Opera House)

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Venue: Sydney Opera House (Sydney NSW), Sep 27 – Nov 1 2025
Book, Music & Lyrics: Jonathan Larson
Director: Shaun Rennie
Cast: Jesse Dutlow, Googoorewon Knox, Tana Laga’aia, Calista Nelmes, Kristin Paulse, Henry Rollo, Harry Targett, Imani Williams
Images by Pia Johnson, Neil Bennett

Theatre review
When Jonathan Larson completed his magnum opus Rent in 1996, he could not have foreseen that the bohemian enclave of New York City he celebrated was already in its twilight. Within a year, Rudy Giuliani’s iron-fisted mayorship would begin reshaping the city, erasing the fragile counterculture that had given Rent its heartbeat. Nearly three decades on, some of its echoes have softened, but the core refrain remains. The story of an underclass ignored by a complacent American mainstream feels newly pertinent in an era marked by authoritarian politics and cultural division.

Whether Larson’s writing truly earns its lofty reputation is open to debate, but Shaun Rennie’s direction in this revival is beyond question. His staging shimmers with a visual splendour that conjures spectacle without betraying the grit of a neighbourhood on the margins. What once risked sounding trite in Rent is here imbued with unexpected sincerity, the familiar refrains lifted into something that feels palpably meaningful.

Dann Barber’s set design astonishes in its detail and completeness, evoking both the era and the grunge locale with unflinching accuracy, while offering theatricality that never ceases to enthral the eye. Ella Butler’s costumes bring striking authenticity to a multitude of characters, yet always sustain a visual harmony across the stage. Paul Jackson’s lighting is profoundly evocative, conjuring memory and emotion in equal measure, and captivating us with an endless stream of potent imagery.

The cast is uniformly endearing, each performer delivering not only exceptional vocal power but also a sincerity that grounds the musical’s sweeping emotions. Calista Nelmes all but stops the show with her riotous, electric turn as Maureen in “Over the Moon,” while Harry Targett imbues Roger with an actorly intensity that lends the production its beating heart. Equally praiseworthy are Luca Dinardo’s choreography and Jack Earle’s musical direction—both infused with passion and executed with polish, their work bold in vision and shimmering with invention, breathing new vitality into a show that has long lived in the cultural imagination.

Perhaps the most crucial truth that Rent represents is that, in much of American culture and tradition, those at the bottom rungs are deemed undesirable—or even expendable. The AIDS crisis laid bare the ease with which Americans could turn on one another, exploiting capitalist values or religious fervour as justification for prejudice and cruelty. Today, the same currents ripple through a new era of fascism, as communities are singled out, scapegoated, offered up as sacrificial lambs to feed the hunger for false promises and hollow triumphs. The musical’s story, though decades old, pulses with uncanny relevance, a mirror to a society still grappling with whom it chooses to value and whom it casts aside.

rentmusical.au