Tag Archives: drama

Review: Dixon & Daughters (Old Fitz Theatre)

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Venue: Old Fitzroy Theatre (Woolloomooloo NSW), Sep 18 – Oct 3, 2026
Playwright: Deborah Bruce
Director: Kim Hardwick
Cast: Vanessa Downing, Rylea Eilis, Romney Hamilton, Linda Nicholls-Gidley, Danette Potgieter, Sarah Jane Starr
Images by Campbell Parsons

Theatre review
Mary has just been released from prison, and although her daughters and granddaughter are trying to restore some sense of normality, this is a household built on fractures that refuse to stay buried. Deborah Bruce’s Dixon & Daughters takes longer than necessary to arrive at its emotional centre, but once its central wound is exposed, there is no questioning the play’s urgency. Its wit is sharp and often disarming, yet it is the emotional weight of its drama that ultimately leaves the deepest impression.

Kim Hardwick’s direction is steeped in convincing naturalism. She creates a world of such lived-in authenticity that every exchange feels immediate and every relationship fully inhabited, drawing the audience into the family’s intimate dynamics before revealing the devastating force of what lies beneath. The realism never feels ornamental; it is precisely what gives the story its devastating emotional impact.

Vanessa Downing is formidable as Mary, refusing to soften the character’s abrasiveness or blunt cruelty. It is an unsparing performance that allows us to confront both the harm Mary has inflicted and the remorse she struggles to articulate. Sarah Jane Starr is equally compelling as Briana, bringing razor-sharp acerbity and infectious vitality to a woman shaped by trauma yet fiercely committed to breaking its cycle. Romney Hamilton’s Julie is quietly heartbreaking from the outset, before delivering the production’s most emotionally shattering moments when the drama reaches its fullest intensity. Linda Nicholls-Gidley lends Bernie a stoic resilience that evokes the British “keep calm and carry on” ethos, while always revealing the grief simmering beneath her composure. As the youngest generation, Danette Potgieter and Rylea Eilis bring Ella and Leigh an appealing blend of youthful innocence and surprising emotional intelligence.

Mia MacCormick’s set is equally deserving of praise. Her two-level design effortlessly accommodates the play’s shifting locations within Mary’s home, while vividly capturing the cramped material reality of England’s working class. It is an economical design rich with social detail, telling its own story about the conditions in which this family has endured.

Across three generations of women, Dixon & Daughters traces the enduring consequences of domestic violence. The patriarch is the obvious perpetrator, but Bruce is interested in something more insidious: the web of institutions, expectations and silences that enable abuse to persist and perpetrators to evade accountability. It is easy to condemn Mary for her silence and inaction. The play asks us to confront the more uncomfortable truth that her choices were shaped by a system designed to reward obedience and punish resistance under white patriarchy. To hold Mary solely responsible is to imagine, borrowing Audre Lorde’s famous formulation, that the master’s house can be dismantled with the master’s tools. Justice lies not in isolating one woman’s failure, but in exposing the structure that made it possible in the first place, and then committing to build a better replacement.

www.oldfitztheatre.com.au | www.tinydogproductions.com.au

Review: Housework (Sydney Theatre Company)

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Venue: Sydney Opera House (Sydney NSW), Sep 5 – Oct 17, 2026
Playwright: Emily Steel
Director: Shannon Rush
Cast: Laurence Boxhall, Franca Lafosse, Indira Naidoo, Johnny Nasser, Emily Taheny, Susie Youssef
Images by Prudence Upton

Theatre review
Emily Steel’s Housework tells the story of the Australian federal government, or more precisely, the messy machinery that keeps our democracy running. Staffers of every rank, members of parliament, frontbench ministers and even the occupant of the nation’s highest office populate its world. Each understands the gravity of their responsibilities and the far-reaching consequences of their decisions, yet none manages to navigate the system with complete dignity or unimpeachable integrity.

Some argue that the system is broken; others contend it was always built to accommodate corruption. Housework is less interested in resolving that debate than in exposing just how pervasive the compromises and backroom dealings have become. Like the proverbial sausage, the business of government is something we would rather not watch being made.

Steel’s play is at its most compelling when it invites us to sit with uncomfortable ethical ambiguities. The plot itself is admittedly predictable, but the questions it raises are anything but simple. Its structure can feel overly straightforward, and its comedy occasionally too restrained, yet Shannon Rush’s direction ensures the production never loses momentum. The pacing is buoyant, the energy infectious, and we remain eager to discover what fresh moral compromise awaits around each corner.

Emily Taheny anchors the production with admirable conviction and clarity as chief of staff Anna, finding a balance between farce and emotional credibility that gives the play its centre of gravity. Susie Youssef brings impeccable comic timing to Ruth, although the character could benefit from greater psychological accuracy. Franca Lafosse is thoroughly enjoyable as the relentlessly upbeat junior staffer Kelly, even if the writing saddles her with an implausible, and irritating, level of naivety. Johnny Nasser is outstanding as Paul, capturing the character’s constant oscillation between decency and opportunism with remarkable nuance.

Ailsa Paterson’s set convincingly evokes the imposing architecture of Australia’s colonial-era government institutions, embodying both their grandeur and their emotional coldness. It is an apt visual metaphor for the bureaucratic culture the play interrogates. At times, however, the performance space feels too expansive for scenes set in supposedly clandestine rooms, and several lengthy exits tip into unintended comedy.

Housework excels at illuminating the flaws embedded within our political system and, by extension, the ways those flaws ripple into everyday Australian life. It offers no easy remedies, nor does it pretend reform is simple. Instead, it insists that honest scrutiny is a necessary first step. Democracy, the play suggests, is sustained not by believing our institutions are clean, but by refusing to look away when they are not.

www.sydneytheatre.com.au | www.statetheatrecompany.com.au

Review: Forget Me, Please (Old Fitz Theatre)

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Venue: Old Fitzroy Theatre (Woolloomooloo NSW), Sep 1 – 11, 2026
Playwright: Sophie Davis
Director: Jessica DiCosta
Cast: Kala Gare, Shannen Alyce Quan
Images by Lucy Parakhina

Theatre review
Andrea and Sasha are bound by a love that is as fervent as it is fraught, yet their union remains inescapably constrained by Andrea’s deteriorating mental health; an affliction that compels her toward radical, perhaps irreversible, measures in pursuit of restoration. Forget Me, Please, Sophie Davis’ ambitious if uneven work, presents itself simultaneously as an intimate romance between two women and as a work of science fiction with grand designs that it ultimately falls short of fully realising.

What elevates the material beyond its narrative limitations is Jessica DiCosta’s direction, which is marked by a palpable sensitivity to the fragile dynamics of a troubled romantic entanglement. DiCosta renders every subtle inflection of this demanding relationship with credibility, while her sustained commitment to dramatic intensity transforms what might otherwise have been a pedestrian storyline into something more compelling. Complementing this visual and emotional texture is the score by Jessica Meier and Alex Meier, whose music accomplishes the crucial work of atmospheric modulation, ensuring the production never lapses into monotony and frequently deepening the sensual undercurrents that animate this queer love story.

At the heart of the piece are Kala Gare and Shannen Alyce Quan, whose onstage partnership proves as formidable as it is finely calibrated. Each performer operates with admirable restraint, threading nuance through every scene, yet both locate precisely the right moments to unleash a raw, affecting intensity. It is, above all, the calibre of their acting that renders the production memorable. They captivate individually, but it is the unambiguous chemistry they have cultivated together that persuades us to invest in the turbulent vicissitudes of their characters’ complex bond.

Sasha harbours the understandable hope that love alone might mend Andrea’s fractured psyche, yet she arrives, as so many before have, at the more sobering truth: however majestic or all-consuming love may feel, it remains no panacea for wounded souls. Andrea must undertake a deeply personal journey of reckoning and recovery, one for which Sasha, despite her devotion, cannot be a companion.

www.oldfitztheatre.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

Review: Equus (KXT on Broadway)

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Venue: KXT on Broadway (Ultimo NSW), Aug 21 – Sep 5, 2026
Playwright: Peter Shaffer
Director: Brockman
Cast: Cloud Fernandez-Montoya, Sophie Gregg, Stephen Madsen, Jay-James Moody, Gus Murray, Linda Nicholls-Gidley, Shalamah Tautaiolefue, Ryan Yeates
Images by Daniel Boud

Theatre review
It was in 1973 that Peter Shaffer wrote Equus, the story of 17-year-old Alan Strang, a boy who blinds six horses with a metal spike. At its heart, Equus is a play about desire: where it comes from, how it is shaped, and the destruction that can follow when it is denied. As a gay man born in the early twentieth century, Shaffer was almost certainly drawing, at least in part, on the devastating consequences of harbouring desires deemed socially taboo.

More than half a century later, director Brockman brings the play’s submerged queerness unmistakably to the surface. Where Shaffer had to veil the politics of Equus beneath explorations of religion, psychotherapy and obsession, Brockman’s contemporary interpretation points directly to the machinery of social stigmatisation and the wounds of marginalisation.

The production is as pointed in its message as it is atmospheric in its rendering. Brockman, who also serves as set and lighting designer, uses light to construct a performance space that recalls the stable where the unspeakable occurred, illuminating the action in ways that evoke desire and its eternal companion, brutality. The fluid movement between warm and cold tones mirrors the play’s shifting moral landscape, inviting us to question ideas of sin and transgression when set against the force of human instinct.

Dr Emily Brayshaw’s costumes remain in harmony with the production’s dark visual palette, while introducing subtle variations in colour and texture that keep the stage picture richly alive. Milo Mclaughlin’s sound design establishes a sombre timbre befitting the material’s gravity, though the persistence of his repetitious drone occasionally dulls the audience’s engagement.

Ryan Yeates delivers an admirably naturalistic Alan, bringing a vulnerability that makes the character feel both psychologically complex and undeniably real. He is simultaneously victim and perpetrator, embodying a story that first emerged at the dawn of the gay rights movement in Britain. Opposite him, J. James-Moody gives an extraordinary performance as Dr Dysart. He navigates Shaffer’s dense, philosophical dialogue with remarkable precision, revealing its intricate emotional and intellectual textures without sacrificing clarity. Beyond the cerebral pleasures of his performance, James-Moody is also devastatingly visceral, particularly in moments of profound self-loathing and emotional torment—qualities that become the defining concerns of Equus in 2026.

Equally remarkable is Shalamah Tautaiolefue, who inhabits the various horses throughout the play. Rather than simply anthropomorphising the animals, Tautaiolefue expands the production’s interrogation of taboo to encompass questions of gender, race and body size. Working with movement director Jeremy Lloyd, they create an entirely non-verbal performance of astonishing imagination and beauty, one that remains captivating from the opening moments to the final scene.

Alan has been taught to hate, perhaps unconsciously, but certainly within an Abrahamic tradition that leaves no ambiguity about who and what deserves contempt, and that habitually justifies violence as a form of atonement. His desires curdle into hatred for himself and for the horses; lacking any means to reject or subvert his indoctrination, he follows the only logic available to him, and strikes out at the thing he loves most, in a tragedy about the catastrophic consequences of teaching someone that love itself is sinful.

www.kingsxtheatre.com | www.danielcottier.com.au

Review: Harlots (Old Fitz Theatre)

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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.

www.oldfitztheatre.com.au | www.newghoststheatre.com

Review: Imelda (KXT on Broadway)

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Venue: KXT on Broadway (Ultimo NSW), Jul 31 – Aug 15, 2026
Playwright: Donita Cruz
Director: Aden Abeleda
Cast: Alex Gonzalez, Tamara Lee Bailey, Ahlex Leyva, Teresa Tate Britten
Images by Andrea Magpulong

Theatre review
Maria Clara has lost her mother, yet the spectral visitations that haunt her remain tantalisingly ambiguous—are they truly her mother’s spirit, or the surreal presence of Imelda Marcos? For this Filipina-Australian woman, the relationship with her homeland is fractured and uneasy, much like the complicated affection many Filipinos still hold for the Marcos dynasty. Donita Cruz’s Imelda offers thoughtful insights into the diaspora experience alongside fascinating reflections on the Philippines’ recent history. Yet the work would be strengthened by a more deliberate establishment of its premise and a richer introduction to its characters. Director Aden Abeleda might also deepen the audience’s connection to the material by devoting greater care to context and conceit.

Teresa Tate Britten proves highly watchable as the actor at the centre; her tremendous focus is captivating in itself, even when the text stays too resolutely in the ephemeral. Alex Gonzalez, playing Maria Clara, struggles to fully inhabit the emotional terrain the role demands, never quite achieving the conviction required. Supporting players Tamara Lee Bailey and Ahlex Leyva, however, bring welcome textural and tonal variety to the piece. Both are memorable for grounding the atmosphere with considerable gravity, lending weight to a story that resonates deeply with many.

Rachel Adams’s set design shows little ambition, though EJ Zielinski’s lighting compensates somewhat, rendering supernatural spaces with a welcome theatricality. Video projections by Alyssa Dimarucut and Donita Cruz add memorable touches, their cultural specificity enriching the experience in ways the physical production does not.

Myth-making is, after all, a fundamental human impulse. We are creatures who must find ways to comprehend a world that remains endlessly mysterious; the not-knowing can feel agonising, even anxiety-inducing. To forge personal and communal identities—however provisional, however fluid—is itself a kind of necessity. And to move through life with direction, with hope for what lies ahead, requires that we craft the best possible version of volatile narratives, if only to carry us through the fleeting present.

www.kingsxtheatre.com | www.instagram.com/sapatosangelscollective

Review: Goodnight Sweet Prince (Old Fitz Theatre)

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Venue: Old Fitzroy Theatre (Woolloomooloo NSW), Jul 31 – Aug 15, 2026
Playwright: William Shakespeare (an adaption of Hamlet by Liesel Badorrek, Raj Labade, Jack Twelvetree)
Director: Liesel Badorrek
Cast: Raj Labade, Jack Twelvetree
Images by Campbell Parsons

Theatre review
Goodnight Sweet Prince offers a seventy-minute distillation of Hamlet, gathering the play’s most searing moments of introspection into a concentrated portrait of psychological unravelling. Yet in privileging the prince’s interiority, the adaptation strips away Shakespeare’s chiaroscuro—the interplay of levity and darkness, of courtly intrigue and metaphysical dread—leaving behind something closer to a single-note meditation on grief.

Liesel Badorrek’s direction sustains a formidable emotional pitch, executed with considerable polish. The result, however, is a production that feels curiously remote: relentlessly intense yet strangely unaffecting, as though the audience were observing anguish through reinforced glass.

Keerthi Subramanyam’s set design finds poetry in ruin. Drawing on the internal dilapidation of Shakespeare’s characters, the staging evokes decay with arresting beauty—flickers of faded grandeur and decadent ornamentation lending the production a visual richness that partially compensates for its emotional austerity.

Verity Hampson’s lighting is exuberantly theatrical, responding to the text’s most dramatic registers with bold, heightened imagery. Ross Johnston’s sound design is similarly ambitious, tracking every cadence of the abridged script with almost forensic attention. The score works so diligently to underscore each emotional beat that it threatens to become a co-narrator, at times articulating as much of the story as the words themselves.

Raj Labade brings formidable concentration and raw feeling to the title role; his Hamlet is never less than utterly committed. Yet the compression of the text ultimately estranges us from the very suffering it seeks to dramatise. We recognise the authenticity of the anguish without being invited to share it. Jack Twelvetree moves with remarkable ease between Horatio and an array of supporting characters, his versatility shining through in sharply differentiated performances that lend the production welcome breadth and texture.

There is, finally, the question of relevance. It grows increasingly difficult to locate our sympathies within the precincts of royalty; the historical convention of identifying with kings and queens now feels almost exotic. Suffering may be universal, but our compassion need not be indiscriminate. Perhaps there is a quiet liberation in withholding our empathy from those whose privilege has been maintained, across generations, at the cost of so many others’ disadvantage.

www.oldfitztheatre.com.au | www.instagram.com/goodnightsweetprinceplay

Review: Bennelong In London (Sydney Theatre Company)

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Venue: Wharf 1 Sydney Theatre Company (Walsh Bay NSW), Jul 18 – Aug 16, 2026
Playwright: Jane Harrison
Director: Ian Michael
Cast: Googoorewon Knox, Guy Simon
Images by Daniel Boud

Theatre review
An actor preparing to audition for the role of Bennelong—that celebrated Aboriginal diplomat from the turbulent dawn of colonisation—finds himself doing more than rehearsing lines. In the quiet of his living room, he summons the historical figure into startling, flesh-and-blood existence. What follows is a conversation across centuries: the ancestor clarifying his legacy, the actor grappling to comprehend it from a vantage point more than two hundred years removed.

Jane Harrison’s Bennelong in London is a work of remarkable intellectual architecture—thoroughly researched, astutely considered—yet it never sacrifices emotional immediacy for scholarly rigour. From a contemporary Aboriginal perspective, it interrogates Aboriginality and colonialism with clear-eyed acknowledgment of the endlessly complex entanglements that define life on colonised Indigenous lands. The play holds space for contradiction: the difficulty of honouring the past while pressing forward into the present, all the while remaining unflinching about the injustices visited upon this country’s rightful custodians. Though its themes run deep and serious, the work brims with humour, much of it arising from the friction between two men separated by epochs yet thrown together in intimate proximity.

Director Ian Michael handles this tonal balancing with supreme deftness, blending levity and sorrow in an exploration of identity and legacy that speaks as urgently to First Nations peoples today as it does to settlers. The emotional texture of the storytelling finds especially potent expression in James Peter Brown’s music, whether threading subtly beneath the action or rising to prominence as a centrepiece of the staging. Brown’s compositions pull the audience deep into the work’s intense sentimentality, rendering abstract historical grief into something viscerally moving.

Trent Suidgeest’s lighting design carries us fluidly between realism and the fantastical, lending credibility to whichever psychological territory the play chooses to inhabit, while discovering unexpected beauty in the theatrical transformation of an otherwise ordinary domestic space. Emma White’s set ingeniously weaves native flora into a contemporary living room, quietly signalling the duality embedded in everyday life for those negotiating Indigeneity amid persistent colonising forces. Her costumes, by contrast, adopt a more straightforward approach—two men from different centuries, simply dressed, simply meeting.

Googoorewon Knox is endlessly likeable as Bennelong, his charisma matched by a musicality that proves invaluable whenever the performance shifts into more traditional registers. Some of his storytelling occasionally lacks vividness—certain historical details risk being lost in the telling—yet the power of his ancestral invocation remains beyond question. Equally spirited is Guy Simon as the modern-day Aboriginal man seeking a history that is at once intimately personal and consequentially vast. The grace with which Simon pivots between lightness and gravity throughout the piece is genuinely astonishing, and his ability to bring such unguarded earnestness to this vital story feels especially precious in these cynical times.

Like every colonised being, Bennelong could only do his best within circumstances engineered for destruction. We might hope to resist with heroism, or at least to survive with grace, but the truth is more humbling: the everyday negotiations with pervasive, malicious systems of exploitation mean we will often fall short. Bennelong was far from perfect, yet we can see precisely why—and we can carry that understanding forward as inspiration, strengthening how we regard ourselves and one another in the ongoing, unfinished work of decolonisation.

www.sydneytheatre.com.au

Review: Dealing With Clair (Old Fitz Theatre)

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Venue: Old Fitzroy Theatre (Woolloomooloo NSW), Jul 10 – 25, 2026
Playwright: Martin Crimp
Director: Harry Reid
Cast: Arkia Ashraf, Bayley Prendergast, Daniel Fletcher, Jade Fuda, Olivia Hall-Smith, Talia Benatar
Images by Robert Miniter

Theatre review
It is 1986, and Clair is an ambitious young woman navigating London’s cutthroat real estate market, hell-bent on carving out a better life for herself. While showing a property, she encounters James, a man of apparent means who claims he is ready to buy—yet something about him lingers just beyond the edge of trust. Martin Crimp’s Dealing with Clair is rooted in a true story that once dominated British headlines, written for an audience who lived through its cultural aftershocks. Four decades later, and half a world away, the play still coheres for audiences who know nothing of the original scandal, though many of its finer social nuances inevitably fade in transit.

Director Harry Reid renders the central narrative lucid and gripping; the psychological chess match between Clair and James remains genuinely compelling. It is the surrounding scenes, however, that falter. Supporting characters appear designed to refract the social climate of the era, yet much of that commentary dissipates before it can land.

Daniel Fletcher delivers a superbly cunning James, skirting the line between earnest charm and quiet menace to create a villain who is both repellent and comprehensible. We despise him, yet we fully understand how Clair could be so thoroughly undone. Opposite him, Olivia Hall-Smith gives Clair a bright, infectious gregariousness that makes her ambition visible and visceral; we see the hunger for success that drives her to take reckless risks. Hall-Smith also threads a subtle innocence through the performance, a quiet suggestion of how modern capitalism preys upon the young, extracting sacrifices they could never have imagined.

Visually, the production is modest but serviceable. Soham Apte’s set is nimble and efficient, shifting locations without the drag of scene changes. Larisha Dowson-Taylor’s costumes largely succeed in transporting us back in time, though the supporting cast could use sharper visual signifiers to clarify who they represent within social dynamics of the time. Izzy Morrissey’s lighting deftly pivots between naturalism and heightened drama, lending the production an occasional, welcome jolt of theatrical intensity. The sound design, credited to Reid, is notably spare; a more aggressive sonic landscape would have done much to amplify the tension inherent in this disturbing tale.

Forty years on, one might hope that workplaces have grown safer for women, yet the truth is that most professional environments were built by and for men. We have spent decades retrofitting these spaces to accommodate broader participation, but we remain trapped in the architecture of an unjust foundation. Problems will continue to surface, and we will be forced to address each new iteration as it arises—because tearing it all down and starting over, it seems, remains beyond our reach.

www.oldfitztheatre.com.au | www.instagram.com/irregularprogramming.inc