Venue: Old Fitzroy Theatre (Woolloomooloo NSW), Aug 21 – Sep 6, 2026
Playwright: Emma Wright
Director: Janine Watson
Cast: ‘Ana Ika, Ella Prince, Hannah Waterman, Jo Downing, Madeline Li, Megan O’Connell
Images by Phil Erbacher

Theatre review
In Emma Wright’s Harlots, we are plunged into a subterranean world where the enigma of Hermione and Paulina’s sixteen-year vanishing—one of Shakespeare’s most tantalising narrative ellipses in The Winter’s Tale—finds its resolution. Within this liminal realm, we discover that Shakespeare’s other silenced women, too, have withdrawn into convalescence. Liberated from the patriarchal architectures that muted and effaced them, they pursue not merely restoration but a radical reimagining of their lives, forging identities unscripted by the tragedies that once defined them.

Wright adroitly interweaves characters from four discrete Shakespearean dramas, though the execution is not without its lapses: certain scenes fail to compel, and stretches of dialogue, deliberately opaque, risk estranging the audience rather than drawing it inward.

Janine Watson’s direction grounds the production in an emotional realism that renders the characters’ psychological reckonings viscerally immediate, even when their interpersonal dynamics do not consistently captivate. Kate Beere’s set design conjures a space simultaneously fantastical and authentically rustic, while Aloma Barnes Siraswar’s costumes strike a romantic register, evoking the iconography of Shakespeare’s tragic heroines through a lens of reclaimed feminine beauty. Luna Ng’s lighting achieves a wistful ethereality, and Clare Hennessy’s sound design suffuses the production with an unrelenting gravitas befitting the conceptual weight at stake.

The ensemble of six delivers performances of uniform excellence, each actor imprinting a distinct interpretive signature upon their role while sustaining a coherent presentational aesthetic. Madeline Li’s concluding monologue as Hero proves especially indelible—an outpouring of such raw authenticity and commanding power that it carries the production to its resounding climax.

The interrogation of gender, of course, extends far beyond engagements with Shakespeare and the classical canon. Patriarchal values permeate the very fabric of artistic production, naturalising conventions so thoroughly that they appear immutable, beyond scrutiny—yet it is precisely here that they must be dismantled and reconstituted toward more equitable ends. Patriarchy demands that theatre, like so much else, conform to particular aesthetic and affective regimes, thereby perpetuating its own dominance. And much of this occurs covertly: power achieves its greatest efficacy when it operates unseen, its mechanisms rendered invisible and its strictures undetectable.

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