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.
Suzy Goes See 