Review: They Will Be Kings (Qtopia)

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Venue: Qtopia (Darlinghurst NSW), Feb 11 – 21, 2026
Playwright: 
Director: Kaz Therese
Cast: Beks Blake, Danica Lani, Chris McAllister, Angel Tan
Images by Jessica Hromas

Theatre review
Four drag kings converge in They Will Be Kings to excavate the layered narratives of their becoming. Chase Cox, Dario di Bello, Fine China, and Jim Junkie each emerge from distinct origins, propelled by singular raisons d’être—yet together they orchestrate a meditation on gender’s fluid architecture. Against the grain of a world that insists upon the fixed polarity of male and female, their collective performance unravels the artifice of such certainties, illuminating instead the protean, unruly nature of identity itself.

Under Kaz Therese’s direction, the production achieves a wonderful alchemy—transmuting four distinct sensibilities into an elegant, unified architecture. They Will Be Kings emerges as a clever meditation on gender variance: its ontological textures, its protean expressions. Each performer—Beks Blake, Danica Lani, Chris McAllister, and Angel Tan—contributes a singular artistic vocabulary, yet coheres through an ethos of collective intentionality. The result is not mere showcase but invocation: an ensemble that summons the audience toward expansiveness, demanding not passive reception but active transformation of mind and heart.

Gender presents a fundamental paradox. It functions as a system built on fixed categories, yet lived experience constantly spills beyond these boundaries into territory that resists easy definition. Humans inevitably sort one another into boxes, yet what we most desire is freedom.
 
Gender, at its best, offers pleasure, play, and genuine self-expression; yet too often it serves darker purposes—erasure, marginalisation, the violent enforcement of conformity. It is something we can resist, yet also something we can savour. To understand how it works—its mechanisms of control—is essential if we hope to move beyond its restrictions and dangers, transforming vulnerability into agency.