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.
Suzy Goes See 