Tag Archives: play

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: 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 Unfriend (Sydney Theatre Company)

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Venue: Roslyn Packer Theatre (Sydney NSW), Sep 29 – Oct 31, 2026
Playwright: Steven Moffat
Director: Simon Phillips
Cast: Ty Arnott, Brooklyn Davies, Huw Higginson, Alex Lee, Helen Thomson, Tim Walter, and Ben Wood.
Images by Prudence Upton

Theatre review
The play’s prologue issues an early warning of sorts, deriding those who read publications such as The Guardian and suggesting that politically engaged people, particularly those on the left, derive a peculiar pleasure from being outraged by the news they consume. In doing so, Steven Moffat seems to announce that The Unfriend is deliberately apolitical, positioning itself outside the anxieties and ideological conflicts of the contemporary world before proceeding to make us laugh without engaging with any of the concerns that occupy us as real people.

Debbie and Peter meet Elsa while on holiday and, in an unfortunate lapse of judgement, invite her to stay at their English home. When they subsequently discover that Elsa is suspected of six murders, they have ample reason to reconsider their hospitality, yet find themselves incapable of actually disinviting their American guest. There is, perhaps, something enduringly recognisable in the British tendency towards excessive politeness, but comedy built around the inability to say no has arguably exhausted itself. The joke has been rehearsed so many times that its once-awkward charm has long since given way to trite familiarity.

Director Simon Phillips appears entirely conscious of the broadness of the comedy he has inherited. An extended sequence of toilet humour not only refuses to apologise for its vulgarity but positively revels in it, as though the production were declaring that this is precisely what we have come to see. There is no pretension, Phillips seems to insist, but neither is there any ambition towards intellectual or aesthetic sophistication. The production embraces its coarseness with an almost defiant lack of embarrassment.

Elsa is played by the eminently accomplished Helen Thomson, who demonstrates an impressive ability to extract comedy from almost anything, however banal or clichéd the material. Alex Lee and Tim Walter bring considerable energy to their portrayals of the painfully polite couple, supplementing their characters’ social awkwardness with an appropriate absurdity that helps sustain the increasingly implausible narrative. Ty Arnott and Huw Higginson likewise make the most of their eccentric characters, producing moments of genuine theatrical pleasure even when the comic mechanisms themselves remain conspicuously and toe-curlingly obvious.

The set design by Isabel Hudson is also worthy of commendation. Its immaculate evocation of middle-class respectability provides the production with a visual sumptuousness that compensates, to some extent, for the cheapness of the comic devices employed in the action itself. The contrast is almost revealing: the stage looks substantially more elegant than the material unfolding upon it.

Ben Phillipe wrote in 2021 that “if you have a life that leaves you fool proof to politics, your politics approximate to ‘privileged.’” For many of us, the present is experienced as a period of genuine emergency, making it difficult to accept the notion of political neutrality as an innocent artistic position. When artists, or indeed anyone with a public platform, declare themselves apolitical, it can instead suggest a position of sufficient privilege to permit looking away, to disregard the forces of social and political disintegration taking place around them.

The problem is not simply that such detachment can appear complacent. It is that the idea of being untouched by politics is itself a political luxury. We live within structures in which our lives are inevitably interconnected, and the rot permitted to fester in one part of society rarely remains contained there. More troubling still, indifference to the persecution of others risks creating the conditions in which authoritarian and fascistic tendencies can become increasingly emboldened. The targets may change, but the machinery of persecution does not require a permanent target; once one group has been exhausted, another can readily be found.

The Unfriend may therefore succeed on its own terms as an uncomplicated comedy, but its insistence on keeping politics at arm’s length becomes increasingly conspicuous. What the production treats as an escape from contemporary anxieties can also be understood as an unwillingness to confront them. In a moment when so much of public life is defined by precisely the political concerns the play chooses to dismiss, that refusal to engage begins to feel less like neutrality than a statement in itself.

www.sydneytheatre.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: 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: 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: 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: The Boys Are Kissing (Qtopia)

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Venue: Qtopia (Darlinghurst NSW), Aug 12 – 29, 2026
Playwright: Zak Zarafshan
Director: Gavin Roach
Cast: Aisling Delahunt, Max Fernandez, Sonya Kerr, Willa King, John Michael Narres, Shab Tavakol
Images by Robert Catto

Theatre review
Amira and Chloe have fled London in search of breathing room, trading cramped city living for a house with a garden where their nine-year-old might roam. The trade-off, as they discover, is steep: the regional school gates prove far less hospitable than the cosmopolitan playgrounds they left behind. As an interracial lesbian couple, they increasingly find themselves at odds with other parents, a tension that Zak Zarafshan mines to brilliant effect in The Boys are Kissing, conjuring moments that veer from the absurdly comic to the quietly devastating. It is a play that feels genuinely of the post-marriage-equality moment: intellectually grounded without being preachy, its moral architecture sturdy enough to propel the narrative yet never so heavy that it drags the storytelling under.

Director Gavin Roach approaches the material with an admirable vigour, infusing the production with an urgency that reminds us queer rights remain a fight rather than a fait accompli. Yet the execution never quite matches the intention, with the production itself lacking the crispness necessary to draw us fully into the story. The cast often appears under-rehearsed, and while there are moments of genuine theatrical delight, their connections to both character and narrative lack sufficient depth. This diminishes not only the gravity of the material, but also the sense of joy and possibility that ultimately lies at its heart.

Raphael Gennusa’s lighting design brings welcome variation and texture to the atmosphere, although some scenes requiring more substantial shifts in location are not transformed quite convincingly enough. Akesiu Poitaha, meanwhile, deserves commendation for an extensive sound design that effectively transports the action beyond the mundane into spaces that feel altogether more evocative.

As queer people, we have long carried the responsibility of making life more bearable for generations of queer people yet to come. Now that it is increasingly common for us to have biological children of our own, the question of what we leave behind—and the kind of world our children will inherit—feels more consequential than ever. Yet the method by which we pursue that legacy need not change dramatically. We need only hold fast to the same principle that has always served us: the simple, unwavering demand for equality.

www.qtopiasydney.com.au | www.instagram.com/a_hello_darling_production

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