Tag Archives: comedy

Review: Tartuffe (KXT on Broadway)

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Venue: KXT on Broadway (Ultimo NSW), Oct 2 – 17, 2026
Playwright: Phillip James Rouse (after Molière)
Director: Phillip James Rouse
Cast: Annie Byron, Deborah Galanos, Julian Garner, Lucy Miller, Tamara Lee Bailey, Dominique Purdue, Travis Howard, Will Thomas
Images by Phil Erbacher

Theatre review
The most significant difference between Phillip James Rouse’s adaptation and Molière’s Tartuffe is the extent to which the former secularises the story of a religious impostor. Recasting the play for a contemporary audience without the historical baggage of Christianity is an understandable strategy, particularly in an age populated by grifters who exploit our willingness to believe in false gods of various kinds. Yet Rouse’s adaptation also demonstrates how difficult it is to replicate the particular satisfaction of Molière’s original, whose success rested in no small part on its incisive critique of the Church and religious hypocrisy. There is something especially gratifying about exposing the failings of an institution that claims moral authority, and Rouse’s largely secular retelling sacrifices some of that critical potency in the process.

Rouse’s direction is animated by a commitment to comic exuberance, and the production is undeniably energetic and boisterous, with an unmistakable vein of camp running throughout. Not every member of the cast, however, manages to sustain this heightened comic register with sufficient consistency. Fortunately, Julian Garner strikes precisely the right tone in the title role, delivering a delicious combination of scheming opportunism and self-serving delusion. He brings both presence and charisma to Tartuffe, making the character’s duplicity as entertaining as it is exasperating. Deborah Galanos is equally noteworthy as Orgonelle, a female reimagining of Orgon, imbuing the role with a flamboyance and emotional intensity that sit comfortably within the absurdist, grotesque sensibility of Rouse’s direction.

The stage is populated with multicoloured balloons which, whatever their intended symbolism, provide a measure of visual engagement. Anna Gardiner’s costumes combine elements of the classical European aesthetic of Molière’s period with a more contemporary sensibility, while Richard Whitehouse’s lighting remains largely at full intensity, sustaining the production’s relentlessly heightened comic energy. Matty James’s sound design is effective during the play’s more sinister passages, but at other times seems to work against the actors’ attempts to generate laughter. The resulting incongruity has a certain curiosity value, although it ultimately proves more distracting than illuminating.

If religion no longer commands the same hold over us that it once did, the con artist has hardly disappeared. The objects of our credulity have simply changed. Today, we are sold rockets promising journeys we will never undertake, to destinations we have little desire to visit, and persuaded to part with our hard-earned money for ephemeral digital investments bearing fashionable names but possessing no intrinsic value.

We congratulate ourselves on our moral clarity, our education and our capacity for informed judgement, yet we willingly purchase candles supposedly redolent of anatomy and vote for the ultra-rich, who repeatedly demonstrate that they regard us less as citizens than as opportunities for exploitation. The contemporary Tartuffe need not pretend to speak for God; he need only convince us that he knows something we do not. And judging by our collective willingness to believe him, business is very good.

www.kingsxtheatre.com | www.instagram.com/raus_aus

Review: Catch As Catch Can (Old Fitz Theatre)

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Venue: Old Fitzroy Theatre (Woolloomooloo NSW), Oct 9 – 31, 2026
Playwright: Mia Chung
Director: Anna Houston
Cast: Andre de Vanny, Robin McLeavy, David Soncin
Images by Phil Erbacher

Theatre review
The Lavecchias and the Phelans of New England have been friends for decades. They lead unremarkable American lives, guided by conventional values, and encounter difficulties that feel devastatingly consequential to those experiencing them, yet are hardly extraordinary in the broader scheme of things. It is precisely this ordinariness that gives Mia Chung’s Catch as Catch Can its emotional force. The dialogue is hyperrealistic, its rhythms, vocabulary and repetitions capturing the texture of everyday speech with uncanny fidelity. Yet Chung’s audacious dramatic structure transforms this apparent naturalism into something extravagantly theatrical. Her stipulation that just three actors portray six characters, traversing generations and gender, creates a startling interplay between the familiar and the estranging.

As performers move between the roles of mother and son, or father and daughter, the production illuminates the peculiar intimacy of family life, and the ways in which those closest to us become embedded in our emotional worlds. Familial bonds can be so profound that the boundaries between our feelings and those of others begin to blur, leaving us unable to distinguish where one person’s emotional experience ends and another’s begins. Chung’s formal conceit makes this entanglement physically manifest, as the same bodies give expression to different generations, suggesting that our identities are never entirely our own, but are shaped by the people whose lives intersect with ours.

The text presents extraordinary challenges for its performers, yet Andre de Vanny, Robin McLeavy and David Soncin do considerably more than rise to the occasion. Together, they deliver a production of astonishing precision and emotional depth, an achievement that feels almost impossible until witnessed firsthand. Their artistry is confoundingly impressive: their technical command is beyond question, their concentration unwavering, and their familiarity with the material’s intricate demands remarkable. The speed and complexity of the exchanges require not only exceptional memorisation and coordination, but an acute sensitivity to the subtle distinctions between characters. That the actors accomplish this with such fluency, while preserving the humanity of each individual they portray, is a testament to their formidable skill.

Director Anna Houston gives the production a sense of immediacy and urgency, maintaining a propulsive momentum from beginning to end without sacrificing the emotional complexity of the material. We find ourselves awestruck by the seemingly superhuman feat unfolding before us, but this is far more than a technical exhibition. The virtuosity of the performances serves a deeper purpose, bringing ordinary lives into extraordinary focus and allowing us to recognise something of ourselves in the characters’ vulnerabilities, disappointments and attachments. The production’s achievement lies in making the improbable mechanics of its theatrical form feel entirely natural, while rendering the familiar business of living profoundly affecting.

Aron Murray’s lighting and Steve Toulmin’s sound design contribute atmospheric nuances with admirable restraint, each responding sensitively to the emotional trajectory of the drama. Together with Kate Beere’s thoughtful set design, they create an understated beauty that eschews spectacle in favour of something more elemental: a quiet reverence for the sacredness of everyday existence. The production understands that the significance of a life need not be measured by extraordinary events, but may reside in the accumulated weight of small interactions, private sorrows and seemingly inconsequential choices.

The play begins with Theresa and Roberta engaged in conversation and concludes with their sons, Tim and Robbie, occupying a separate but structurally related scenario. With the same two actors embodying these respective pairs, the ending establishes a formal echo of the beginning, suggesting that the patterns of human experience are neither isolated nor confined to a single generation. There is something almost cyclical in this arrangement, as though the characters are caught within a continuum in which lives, relationships and emotional struggles recur in altered forms. The structure evokes spiritual conceptions of existence as an interminable cycle, standing in intriguing tension with the predominantly Western tendency to understand life and death as discrete, linear events.

Perhaps this is where Catch as Catch Can extends beyond the intimate confines of family drama and towards a more expansive philosophical proposition. So much destruction, whether ecological, socioeconomic or interpersonal, arises from a failure to recognise the continuity between our actions and their consequences. We behave as though the damage we inflict belongs to the immediate present, or to someone else’s future, rather than to a shared continuum of existence. What we leave behind does not simply disappear when we do; it persists in the lives of others, in the structures we sustain and in the conditions inherited by those who follow us. To recognise this is to understand karma not merely as a spiritual abstraction, but as an ethical principle of consequence and responsibility. How profoundly different our lives might be if we understood that nothing we do is entirely self-contained, and that the world we bequeath to others is inseparable from the choices we make today.

www.oldfitztheatre.com.au | www.empresstheatre.com.au

Review: Next To Godliness (New Theatre)

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Venue: New Theatre (Newtown NSW), Oct 6 – 31, 2026
Playwright: Alastair Brown
Director: Madeleine Withington
Cast: Sonya Kerr, Alice Livingstone, Alisha O’Brien, Nathan Farrow, Brendan Kater, Jessica Carter, Sophie Newby, Harrison Collis-Oates
Images by Bob Seary

Theatre review
We descend into the underworld, where cleaners must scrub away evidence before the police arrive, and a contract killer plies her trade for both profit and pleasure. Next to Godliness by Alastair Brown offers a day in the lives of three women on the wrong side of the law. The criminal underbelly is ordinarily rich territory for drama, but this comedy yields precious few genuine laughs, and its plot never ignites.

Director Madeleine Withington marshals her performers with commendable precision, and the production maintains a consistent visual elegance, yet neither can compensate for the frailty of the writing. Tom Bannerman’s set design is handsomely proportioned and meticulously finished, its textures lending an aura of mystery, while Julian Dunne’s lighting is admirably dynamic, shading the storytelling with hints of menace and drama. The cast of eight display a dedication that is nothing short of admirable; even in the absence of wit or narrative momentum, they attack the material with boundless energy and unwavering commitment.

Next to Godliness aspires to be a portrait of colourful characters in unorthodox occupations. One could draw a parallel based on the curious kinship between criminals and artists: the former takes from society, the latter gives to it, yet both stand similarly beyond the boundaries of conventional life. A further truth is that artists so often command less respect than rogues, despite the fact that so much of life’s pleasures flow from their work.

www.newtheatre.org.au

Review: Stocktake (25A Belvoir)

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Venue: Belvoir St Theatre (Surry Hills NSW), Oct 4 – 25, 2026
Playwright: Jess Zlotnick
Director: Tasha O’Brien
Cast: Lib Campbell, Lucy X Dunning, Bridget Haberecht, Megan Kennedy, Kate Skinner
Images by Jane Coates

Theatre review
In one of the thousands of women’s clothing stores scattered throughout Australia’s shopping malls, a group of employees is required to conduct a stocktake after hours. Nobody particularly wants to be there, but the realities of economic survival demand that people suppress their own inclinations, grit their teeth and endure, if only to ensure that there is food on the table.

Jess Zlotnick’s Stocktake is a searing indictment of the plight of the working class under contemporary late-stage capitalism, although it is equally likely to be remembered for its riotous comedy. Clearly informed by lived experience at the lower rungs of the retail hierarchy, Zlotnick’s writing is as keenly observed as it is wildly imaginative. The play marries an acute understanding of low-wage precarity with surreal manifestations of systemic oppression, exposing the increasingly grotesque consequences of oligarchic power in a world where economic inequality continues to deepen.

Director Tasha O’Brien brings an uncompromising sense of gravity to a production that makes no attempt to disguise its solidarity with the working class. At the same time, she finds inventive ways to exploit the increasingly absurd circumstances, ensuring that the material remains as theatrically engaging as it is politically charged. The result is a work that insists we laugh even as the full indignity of our circumstances unfolds before us. O’Brien renders the injustices experienced by wage earners with admirable clarity, while layering each indignity with such irreverent humour that the production becomes both comedically irresistible and politically inescapable.

The visual elements of the staging are somewhat less assured. Hampered by obvious budgetary constraints, production design by Alice Vance and lighting by Caity Cowan do not always achieve the sophistication the material might warrant, although these limitations do little to diminish the overall effectiveness of the production. Harry Reid’s sound design is a particular strength, establishing an unsettling sense of metaphysical distortion that helps persuade us of the increasingly outlandish phenomena unfolding within an otherwise unremarkable clothing store.

The five-woman ensemble impresses through its collective commitment to this proletarian indictment. There are discernible disparities in performance experience and technical proficiency, but the cast’s collective achievement is consistently compelling. Together, the performers create a theatrical experience whose force derives less from individual virtuosity than from the cumulative power of their shared endeavour, lending the work a resonance that extends beyond the circumstances of its characters.

In an era of unprecedented billionaire wealth and the prospect of the world’s first trillionaire, it is tempting to succumb to political despondency, to assume that the battle has already been lost and that the 99 per cent is powerless to alter a trajectory seemingly destined for catastrophe. Stocktake, however, repeatedly reminds us that its women retain a measure of agency, even when the choices available to them are profoundly constrained. They must continually make decisions, often between alternatives that offer little more than different forms of deprivation. Such choices can appear futile, their outcomes dictated by a system that makes survival itself contingent upon submission.

Yet it is precisely through this recurring insistence on the necessity of choice that the play offers glimpses of what courage might mean under such conditions. Courage emerges as the fragile determination to act when every available option appears inadequate, and when the prospect of meaningful change seems increasingly remote. In a world determined to diminish us, surrendering the possibility of resistance would amount to accepting the very conditions from which we long to escape. Perhaps it is useful to imagine courage as something almost supernatural, a miraculous instrument capable of delivering us from circumstances that otherwise seem insurmountable.

www.belvoir.com.au

Review: A Room With A View (Belvoir St Theatre)

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Venue: Belvoir St Theatre (Surry Hills NSW), Oct 3 – Nov 1, 2026
Playwright: Grace Chapple (from the novel by E.M. Forster)
Director: Hannah Goodwin
Cast: Kate Atkinson, Tom Conroy, Tomáš Kantor, Hayley McElhinney, Nathalie Morris, Patrick Williams, Luke Wiltshire, Charles Wu
Images by Brett Boardman

Theatre review
There is little doubt about the enduring significance of E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View. Its examination of class and its suppressive force, particularly in relation to women, alongside its critique of women’s complicity in upholding patriarchal values, allows the novel to retain considerable contemporary resonance more than a century after its publication. In this stage adaptation, Grace Chapple wisely foregrounds the novel’s quietly radical feminist undercurrent, and much of the dialogue glitters with a welcome modern wit. Yet for all the charm of Forster’s prose, one suspects the source material was never entirely suited to the stage: a slender plot, more texture than event, strains to sustain a full evening of theatre.

Chapple endows each character with endearing particularity, and the cast is easy to follow; even so, the narrative grows rather lacking in its later stretches, precisely when one expects tensions to crest. Director Hannah Goodwin’s instinct, then, to compensate with sheer theatricality, is well founded. It is her mischievous reimagining of key scenarios, in tandem with choreographer Elle Evangelista, that supplies this production’s visceral pleasures. A tennis match, a lakeside swim, an impromptu road trip — these sequences abandon dialogue altogether and surrender instead to the irreducible magic of live performance, to wonderful effect. Madeleine Picard’s sound design and Grace Ferguson’s music amplify these moments of heightened theatricality beautifully, while Amelia Lever-Davidson’s lighting conjures unexpected textures against a disappointingly drab set by Zoë Atkinson, who fares far better with costumes that evoke the period elegantly without ever encumbering the performers.

As Lucy, Nathalie Morris is immediately likeable and impressively attuned to both the comedy and pathos of the role. Yet the abrupt psychological transformations her character undergoes remain difficult to fully comprehend. Her love interest, George, is played by Luke Wiltshire with an appealing vulnerability. More immediately memorable, however, are the production’s comic crowd-pleasers, with Kate Atkinson, Tomáš Kantor and Hayley McElhinney displaying exquisite timing and an instinctive understanding of the humorous possibilities of their characters. It is ultimately the production’s entertainment value, rather than the dramatic force of its source material, that makes the strongest impression.

At the story’s conclusion, we witness a woman breaking free from the shackles that have entrapped so many women for centuries. Lucy’s experience, however, is presented as an exception: her freedom appears to be the consequence of her individual courage to love, a courage that enables her to escape the constraints imposed upon her. But there is something troubling about this formulation. It is not that women have historically lacked courage. The more difficult truth is that courage alone is rarely sufficient to overcome the deeply entrenched forces that constrain women’s possibilities for genuine fulfilment.

Lucy changes the circumstances of her own life, largely through an act of individual defiance. But this is where the story feels less convincing from a contemporary feminist perspective. Emancipation cannot depend solely upon the exceptional courage of an individual woman to resist the structures around her. It is far more often through solidarity, collective action and the dismantling of those structures themselves that meaningful liberation becomes possible. Lucy may find her way out, but the question that lingers is what happens to all the women who she leaves behind.

www.belvoir.com.au

Review: The Elevator (Ensemble Theatre)

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Venue: Ensemble Theatre (Kirribilli NSW), Sep 18 – Oct 18, 2026
Playwright: Eloise Snape
Director: Anthea Williams
Cast: Di Adams, Leeanna Walsman, Shirong Wu
Images by Prudence Upton

Theatre review
The CEO of Eco Engines finds herself trapped inside her company’s AI-operated lift alongside two employees. The claustrophobic setting is tense enough, but it is the recent fatal accident involving one of Eco Engines’ autonomous vehicles that truly exposes the fault lines between them. Eloise Snape’s The Elevator is set in the near future, at a moment when the proliferation of robotics is accelerating and corporations seize every opportunity to automate in pursuit of profit, with scant regard for the ethical consequences left in their wake.

Snape’s decision to confine three women with radically different perspectives inside a malfunctioning lift creates fertile ground for an interrogation of some of today’s most pressing technological and moral dilemmas. The play is astute in its examination of accountability, corporate power and artificial intelligence, but much of its comedy fails to land. Anthea Williams’ direction is similarly unable to unlock the script’s humour, leaving the first half feeling laboured and occasionally awkward. Once the production relinquishes its obligation to be funny and allows its darker instincts to take over, it becomes something considerably more compelling.

Leeanna Walsman’s Margot, the CEO, is perhaps a touch too naturalistic, never quite locating the heightened absurdity of a ruthless executive in crisis mode. Yet her final monologue is extraordinary, delivering the production’s emotional and intellectual climax with breathtaking force. Shirong Wu brings irresistible effervescence to Alison, the company’s PR specialist, injecting buoyancy into scenes that might otherwise collapse under the weight of exposition. As maintenance worker Ollie, Di Adams is somewhat restrained emotionally, but her grounded presence lends the play an essential moral gravity.

Kelsey Lee’s set and lighting design cleverly overcome the visual limitations of a story confined entirely to a lift. Through meticulously calibrated shifts in colour, intensity and atmosphere, she creates imagery of surprising richness and variety within an inherently static environment. Daniel Herten’s sound design is equally effective, its ominous undertones gradually intensifying until they become an almost subliminal expression of the characters’ mounting dread.

From the outside, it is easy to imagine that Margot could simply refuse the responsibilities that violate her conscience. Yet the play’s more unsettling insight is that she no longer believes refusal is available to her. She has travelled too far down a path that now feels irreversible, where technological progress and commercial expansion have become moral absolutes rather than choices.

The Elevator ultimately suggests that it may already be too late to appeal to the conscience of tech oligarchs, many of whom appear consumed by self-aggrandising visions of inevitable technological and economic advancement. If there is hope of averting the nightmare scenarios that accompany our most prominent innovations, it lies not with those building the machines, but with governments willing to regulate them and with a public prepared to insist on accountability before progress becomes truly irreversible.

www.ensemble.com.au

Review: My Fair Lady (Sydney Opera House)

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Venue: Sydney Opera House (Sydney NSW), Sep 10 – Oct 31, 2026
Book & Lyrics: Alan Jay Lerner
Music: Frederick Loewe
Director: Karen Johnson Mortimer
Cast: Freddy Hellier, Reg Livermore, Tony Llewellyn-Jones, Claire Lyon, Robyn Nevin, Nathaniel Parker, David Whitney, Anne Wood
Images by Jeff Busby

Theatre review
What remains timeless about Eliza Doolittle’s story is how readily young women, even today, continue to be seduced by promises of a more elevated existence, if only they surrender enough of themselves to become the woman patriarchy prefers. She believes that by shedding her old habits and bending herself into the shape demanded by a hegemonic society, fulfilment and success will naturally follow. It is a fantasy that has endured remarkably well.

In many ways, this decades old My Fair Lady is a story about the glass ceiling. No matter how obediently a woman submits to patriarchal expectations, she is never permitted to arrive at a place of genuine equality or satisfaction. Karen Johnson Mortimer’s direction foregrounds this reality, allowing us to feel the accumulating disappointments Eliza endures after voluntarily subjecting herself to relentless humiliation and objectification. From today’s vantage point, we recognise the truth of it: even if self-possession is possible within prevailing paradigms, submission to what others want rarely pays adequate dividends.

Claire Lyon is instrumental in making this encounter with a familiar story feel unexpectedly fresh. She gives Eliza a spine of steel without ever betraying the character as written, revealing a woman whose resilience grows alongside her refinement. Lyon’s singing and physicality are impeccable, both technically and artistically, but it is her portrayal of a woman gradually acquiring wisdom rather than polish that proves most compelling.

Nathaniel Parker has the thankless task of playing Professor Henry Higgins, a character who has only become more objectionable with the passing decades. Fortunately, Parker possesses an innate tenderness that makes Higgins just charismatic enough for us to understand, however reluctantly, why Eliza might be drawn into his orbit.

The production design is highly accomplished, if occasionally too reverential in its traditionalism. The absence of one iconic costume from the 1964 film is a disappointing omission, but Cecil Beaton’s original millinery designs and John Isaacs’ exquisite wig work lend the production an undeniable elegance and visual sophistication.

Most of us learn the hard way that patriarchy will disappoint us, no matter how completely we capitulate to its demands. Eliza may have been poor at the story’s outset, but she was never truly miserable; it is only after embarking on her transformation into a so called lady that unhappiness takes hold. She undoubtedly gains education, confidence and social mobility through Higgins’ tutelage, but her greatest reward is an enlightenment altogether different from the one she was promised. The real transformation is not in becoming a lady, but recognising the cost of trying to become someone else’s ideal.

www.myfairladythemusical.com.au

Review: How My Light Is Spent (KXT on Broadway)

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Venue: KXT on Broadway (Ultimo NSW), Sep 11 – 26, 2026
Playwright: Alan Harris
Director: Braiden Toko
Cast: Jane Angharad, Renée Billing, Pita Lolohea, Kira McLennan, James Smithers
Images by Robert Catto

Theatre review
Jimmy is 34 and living back at home after the collapse of his marriage, having lost both his wife and daughter. He has found work at a drive-through doughnut shop, but his only genuine source of comfort is a weekly call with a phone sex operator named Kitty. Jimmy rarely speaks about his emotional turmoil, yet it is immediately apparent that he is failing to cope. As parts of his body begin to disappear from sight, Alan Harris offers a poignant allegory for a man slowly fading into oblivion.

How My Light is Spent may find Jimmy at the lowest point of his life, but rather than wallow in despair, it delights in the strange and the whimsical. Its humour is graceful and quietly inventive, maintaining an air of lightness throughout without sacrificing emotional substance. By the time it reaches its conclusion, the play has arrived somewhere unexpectedly moving, giving its eccentricity genuine purpose.

Braiden Toko’s direction wholeheartedly embraces the play’s eccentric spirit while exercising remarkable restraint. Every quirky flourish is handled with a light touch, ensuring the production never feels self-conscious or eager to charm. There is a confidence in its gentleness that becomes deeply captivating, making it a pleasure to watch a work that never insists upon its own cleverness.

That same sophistication extends to the visual design. James Smithers’ set is striking in its remarkably polished execution of simple ideas, creating a world that feels playful without becoming overly decorative. Clare Sheridan’s lighting and Anthony MacDermott’s score are similarly understated, bringing warmth and sensuality with precision and sensitivity. Together they create a theatrical language that is quietly magical, without having to tip into excess.

Smithers also delivers a beautifully judged performance as Jimmy, bringing an essential innocence that makes the character immediately sympathetic. His greatest strength lies in his lightness of touch; by refusing to foreground Jimmy’s suffering, he allows the pain to emerge naturally and all the more powerfully. Jane Angharad gives Kitty an affecting realism, sidestepping the familiar clichés associated with sex workers to create someone grounded, compassionate and entirely believable. Supporting performances from Renée Billing, Pita Lolohea and Kira McLennan provide the production with much of its buoyancy, the trio bringing charisma and creativity, while sustaining the show’s distinctive sense of style.

The beauty of whimsy is its ability to make familiar truths feel newly discovered. By embracing unpredictability, it pushes language, perspective and convention into unexpected places, inviting us to see ordinary experiences through different lenses. Human beings possess boundless imagination, yet so much of adult life demands rigidity, routine and predictability. When confronted with life’s challenges, we often find ourselves repeating the same futile patterns, endlessly beating dead horses. In valuing whimsy, we may find a kind of salvation, beginning with the courage to think, feel and imagine differently.

www.kingsxtheatre.com | www.secrethouse.com.au

Review: Mum Club (Griffin Theatre Co)

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Venue: Belvoir St Theatre (Surry Hills NSW), Aug 22 – Sep 20, 2026
Playwright: Jorjia Gillis
Director: Ian Michael
Cast: Alex Malone, Megan Wilding, Ruby Teys, Stephanie Somerville, Zarif
Images by Phil Erbacher

Theatre review
Having relocated from the west coast to the east, Sadie finds herself adrift in Sydney’s inner west, tethered to a newborn whose refusal to sleep renders the infant considerably more than merely demanding. Bereft of her customary support networks, she seeks refuge in a local mothers’ group, only to discover that the ways of white people offer little solace to an Aboriginal woman navigating alien terrain. In Mum Club, Jorjia Gillis reframes the experience of colonisation through the intimate lens of young motherhood, contrasting the slow, precarious work of genuine human connection with the frictionless, transactional relationships so readily furnished by a capitalist social order.

There is, unquestionably, a formidable moral architecture underpinning Gillis’s work. Yet the play too often sacrifices its emotional integrity in pursuit of comedy, deploying humour with a conspicuous straining for effect rather than permitting the story’s inherent pathos to generate its own organic levity. The result is a tone that feels laboured and blunt, undercutting the subtlety of the material. Ian Michael’s direction, while never losing sight of the production’s urgent raison d’être, similarly overinvests in comic business that seldom finds its mark, leaving sequences that should sparkle with wit feeling instead effortful and flat.

It falls to Stephanie Somerville, in the central role, to anchor the production in something approaching authenticity. Fortunately, she is granted several passages of genuine gravity, and in these moments she is transcendent. When the script allows her to set aside the artifice of sitcom rhythms, Somerville breathes vivid life into Sadie’s predicament, forging an immediate and profound connection with the audience. We recognise, through her finely calibrated performance, the particular weight of being Aboriginal in an unfamiliar metropolis, and the crushing isolation of new motherhood in the absence of adequate familial or institutional support. The supporting ensemble commits itself with evident devotion – there is no doubting their diligence – but they are ultimately constrained by writing that affords them insufficient dimensionality to truly distinguish themselves.

On the design front, Cris Baldwin’s production work succeeds in conjuring an expansive spatial quality, allowing the mind’s eye to roam comfortably across the play’s various locales without the encumbrance of literalism. Verity Hampson’s lighting proves equally adept, distinguishing between the production’s naturalistic settings with tonal precision while luxuriating in moments of heightened theatricality. Particularly noteworthy is Brendon Boney’s score, which repeatedly salvages scenes where the text falters, furnishing the production with a dramatic urgency that the writing itself too often withholds. In a narrative freighted with anguish and righteous anger, Boney’s music emerges as perhaps the most reliable instrument for conveying intensity.

In Mum Club, we are reminded that meaningful connections are rarely forged overnight, and that the friendships born of convenience are often the least enduring. Genuine community demands time, patience and emotional investment; only through that sustained commitment can we build a life that feels truly meaningful. The play ultimately suggests that no one flourishes in isolation, and that our strongest selves are made possible by the strength of those who stand beside us.

www.griffintheatre.com.au

Review: Singapore Spotlight (Sydney Fringe Festival)

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Venue: Qtopia (Darlinghurst NSW), Sep 1 – 5, 2026

The Happier Place
Creator and performer: Jo Tan

Pretty Ugly
Creator and performer: Theo Chen

Theatre review
In The Happier Place, creator-performer Jo Tan inhabits Val, a radio DJ broadcasting from some distant, post-catastrophic future where the populace lives in perpetual dread of “dematerialisation.” On air, Val erupts into hysterical laughter and dispenses an endless torrent of absurdist humour, as though the act of denial itself were the last available bulwark against annihilation. The performance raises an unsettling proposition: that the fortitude required to confront unrelenting horror may be a virtue more honoured in the abstract than actually possessed. Through this lens, Tan’s work interrogates an array of pressing social concerns, including the climate crisis, censorship, mental health, each rendered with the gravity they merit.

Pretty Ugly, by contrast, offers creator Theo Chen centre stage, where he interpolates standards from the musical theatre canon with meditations on romantic failure and the labyrinthine agonies of self-image. The piece traces the insidious alchemy by which feeling unloved transmutes into the conviction of being unlovable; Chen’s pursuit of catharsis through performance proves as intellectually rigorous as it is emotionally disarming. His exploration of queerness is distinctly situated: that of a Gen Z Singaporean equipped with an expansive, theoretically informed understanding of gender and sexuality, yet nevertheless navigating a society whose conservatism remains stubbornly, even aggressively, queerphobic.

As performers, Tan and Chen could scarcely be more dissimilar. Tan is relentless, muscular, tightly bound to the architecture of her script; Chen is elegiac, meandering, orbiting a loosely sketched narrative rather than adhering to one. Yet what unites them, beyond the sheer magnetism of their respective presences, is an unwavering fidelity to honesty. Whether their material is invented or confessional, naturalistic or operatically heightened, both works seem to arrive at an identical terminus: that zone of consciousness where evasion is no longer tenable, and where the only remaining option is to look, however unbearable the sight.

www.singaporespotlight.com