Tag Archives: drama

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: Islander (ATYP)

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Venue: The Popsy (Sydney NSW), Oct 6 – 17 , 2026
Creator: Amy Draper
Book: Stewart Melton
Music & Lyrics: Finn Anderson
Director: Hayden Tonazzi
Cast: Georgia Laga’aia, Rebecca Ordiz
Images by Robert Catto

Theatre review
On the remote Scottish isle of Kinnan, a young girl named Eilidh discovers a beached whale calf, and fails to save it. Soon after, a mysterious stranger named Arran washes ashore from the very waters the whale departed, and an improbable friendship takes root between them. Islander, a 2017 musical written for two performers with a score composed almost entirely of the human voice, unfolds from this slender premise into something altogether more affecting.

Finn Anderson’s songs are wonderfully imaginative, possessing a transcendent quality that seems to reach out and hold the audience. Lauren Shaw’s musical direction is thrilling in its unpredictability, and together with Otto Zagala’s atmospheric sound design and Cameron Bartle’s exquisite sound engineering (a technical feat deserving of particular praise) the production’s aural landscape proves quite remarkable. The plot, drawn from Scottish folklore, is genuinely engaging, though when it reaches its dramatic apex, events take on a sudden, hurried momentum that leaves one somewhat disoriented; the abrupt shift in pace introduces a trace of incoherence into what had been, until then, a carefully measured narrative.

Visually, the set is spare, comprising a simple circular platform, but it is in the costumes that production designer Angelina Daniel makes her strongest impression, crafting pieces that speak to our affinity for the aesthetic traditions of the Pacific region. Tim Hope’s lighting could perhaps afford to be more extravagant, yet there is an unmistakable melancholy woven into his design that resonates beautifully with the production’s ecological undertones. Director Hayden Tonnazi imbues the staging with an emotional intensity that renders the experience genuinely compelling; there is a crispness to every element that keeps the audience rapt throughout.

Performers Georgia Laga’aia and Rebecca Ordiz are nothing short of astonishing. Their precision is matched only by their flawless chemistry, one senses a rigour of rehearsal behind every gesture, every harmony, and their storytelling is so assured that surrendering to it feels effortless.

Beyond the stage, the production carries an urgent resonance. The state of our ecology is, by any honest measure, in disarray. We are but one species among millions, yet the scale of our impact is immeasurably outsized. To witness the consequences of that impact, is to confront an uncomfortable truth: we are custodians of this planet, whether we accept the mantle or not. That we have so often behaved as plunderers instead is, beyond question, a profound shame.

www.atyp.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: 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