Tag Archives: sydney fringe

Review: King (Sydney Fringe)

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Venue: New Theatre (Newtown NSW), Sep 24 – 27, 2025
Playwright: Jo Tan
Director: Tan Shou Chen
Cast: Jo Tan
Images by Elissa Webb

Theatre review
Geok Yen is a marketing executive by day and Matt’s dutiful girlfriend by night, roles she shoulders with care but never with equal reward. She is forced to shrink, to contort, her true voice muffled. Then, in a moment of accidental inspiration, she steps into the skin of a man named Sterling—and the ground shifts beneath her.

Jo Tan’s one-woman play King initially situates itself within familiar binaries, only to destabilize them as the narrative progresses. Its insights into sexism accrue gradually, building towards a textured critique that resists simplistic dichotomies. By layering complexity onto what appears at first conventional, Tan invites her audience to reconsider the very categories through which gender is perceived and enacted.

Directed with flair by Tan Shou Chen, King shifts seamlessly between comedy and drama in charting Geok Yen’s journey. Each comic twist carries within it a shadow, each burst of humour a reminder of the weight pressing beneath. Though rooted in Singapore, the play’s reflections on societal roles and gender imbalance transcend geography. The details may vary across cultures, but the paradigm it reveals is both universal and pertinent.

Jo Tan delivers a tour de force, slipping effortlessly between Geok Yen, Sterling, and a gallery of side characters, all conjured with wit, imagination, and playful precision. The craftsmanship of her performance is impeccable, but it is her irresistible charisma and the clarity with which she unfolds both story and moral, that captivates, delights, and provokes in equal measure. Also noteworthy are video projections by designer Brian Gothong Tan, which heighten the theatricality of the production and accentuate the fantastical dimensions of Geok Yen’s narrative, all while dazzling with their sheer visual spectacle.

King begins with a starkly binary view of life, but by inhabiting both extremes, Geok Yen moves toward a more nuanced understanding of her place in the world. From black and white emerges a spectrum of grey, within which she discovers the courage to begin embracing her authenticity. The terrors that once haunted her prove to be illusions, and the forces that seemed all-powerful are revealed as far less formidable than they first appeared.

www.sydneyfringe.com

Review: She Threaded Dangerously (Old Fitz Theatre)

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Venue: Old Fitzroy Theatre (Woolloomooloo NSW), Sep 18 – 27, 2025
Playwrights: Simon Thomson, Emma Wright
Director: Claudia Elbourne
Cast: Hamish Alexander, Claudia Elbourne, Karrine Kanaan, Alyssa Peters, Larissa Turton, Leon Walshe, Michael Yore
Images by Karla Elbourne

Theatre review
We follow four teenagers at an all-girls high school as their awakening sexualities threaten to steer them into dangerous waters. She Threaded Dangerously, by Simon Thomson and Emma Wright, examines the bold and unruly libidos of youth in a world that has never quite known how to hold them. Though natural and healthy, such desires are too often suppressed, and that stifling can lead to tragic consequence.

The play may at moments feel too obvious with its message, at others frustratingly vague, yet its courage in grappling with taboo subjects, including sexual abuse, is admirable. Under Claudia Elbourne’s direction, the piece pulses with vibrancy, sustaining our attention even as its restless, youthful exuberance occasionally edges toward a grating excess.

Laila McCarthy’s set design shapes the stage with sensitivity, delineating spaces that allow us to imagine the many locations of the narrative, accented by understated details that resonate with quiet effectiveness. Luna Ng’s lighting brings a striking theatricality, conjuring a remarkable range of visual textures that enrich the eye at every turn. Alexander Lee-Rekers’ sound design often sits too far in the background, but when required, it enters effortlessly to heighten the drama.

Claudia Elbourne, Karrine Kanaan, Alyssa Peters, and Larissa Turton breathe vivid life into the circle of friends at the play’s heart, tracing with playful candour the restless currents of adolescent desire. Each performer stands assured in her own presence, yet together they weave a portrait of friendship that feels generous and harmonious. Around them, Hamish Alexander, Leon Walshe, and Michael Yore embody the contradictions of conventional masculinity, shifting between its harsher veneers and the fragile emotions so often concealed beneath bravado.

As a society, we often grow overprotective of girls, guarding their safety with puritanical notions that restrict freedom, stunt growth, and prolong immaturity. True development into womanhood requires the cultivation of confidence, a process that begins with the rejection of shame, particularly in relation to how we embrace ourselves as sexual beings. She Threaded Dangerously reminds us that what matters most is how we empower the young to voice their feelings—openly, fearlessly, and free from stigma or guilt—for it is through such articulation, as distinct from secrecy, that healthy growth truly flourishes.

www.oldfitztheatre.com.au | www.instagram.com/senseless.productions

Review: Plenty Of Fish In The Sea (Sydney Fringe Festival)

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Venue: New Theatre (Newtown NSW), Sep 17 – 21, 2024
Creators: Emily Ayoub, Madeline Baghurst
Cast: Emily Ayoub, Madeline Baghurst, Christopher Carroll
Images by Geoff Magee

Theatre review
Emily Ayoub and Madeline Baghurst’s Plenty of Fish in the Sea is a story about passion, involving three people on a boat, spending all of their time fishing. Inspired by something named Saint Cotriade, a village or maybe a Catholic deity, they have set off to concoct a special soup from their haul from the ocean. The results are both magnificent and devastating, as we discover in this work of exceptional whimsy.

Creators Ayoub and Baghurst are joined by Christopher Carroll, to form an extraordinary cast remarkable for their physical and facial agility, who deliver a performance memorable for its crisp precision and admirable for its collaborative harmony. Highly inventive in its conception, and executed with great vision and humour, Plenty of Fish in the Sea is a succinct piece of theatre that proves endlessly amusing and delightful.

Production design by Tobhiyah Stone Feller consists of a set that is magically malleable, and costumes that are both evocative and flattering. Dynamic lights by Victor Kalka offer wide ranging calibrations of atmosphere, helping us intuit surprising layers to this simple tale. Daniel Herten’s sounds and music manufacture excitement and intensity, in perfect synchrony with everything being depicted by the personalities on stage.

We learn from Plenty of Fish in the Sea that where there is passion, there could be abundance. Indeed, there are limitless forces that will impose restrictions, on anything one might choose to pursue, and it is incumbent on an individual to honour their own sense of truth. A person’s will could be made to bend, but a person’s essence has the natural inclination to resist, whether or not one wishes.

www.sydneyfringe.com | www.clockfiretheatre.com

Review: Dancefloor Conversion Therapy (Sydney Fringe Festival)

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Venue: The Atherden (The Rocks NSW), Sep 12 – 28, 2024
Playwright: Aunty Jonny Hawkins
Director: Mikala Westall
Cast: Aunty Jonny Hawkins
Images by @anbintheframe

Theatre review
It has been quite a journey for Aunty Jonny who, as a young adult, had been on track to becoming a star minister in the evangelical church system, to now extolling the virtues of dance parties, clad in titillating lingerie. The one thing that remains the same, is Jonny’s passion for proselytising. As witnessed in Dancefloor Conversion Therapy, a tongue-in-cheek presentation in the style of a sermon, the artist speaks of first-hand experiences, in order that we may be convinced of a state of transcendental divination that they so fervently advocate. 

Unlike Christianity however, Jonny’s proclamations are consciously and radically inclusive, informed by their personal journey as a queer person, emerging from a stridently heteronormative background. Now passionately embracing a new paradigm that is almost too neatly diametric in its opposition to their previous life, Jonny shares their love for something decidedly more chaotic and wild, as enthusiastic about debauchery as the old religion is about temperance and chastity.

Providing support on DJ decks and a lighting console is Mikala Westall, who as director of the piece, ensures that we encounter a highly endearing Aunty Jonny, in a show that is ceaselessly humorous, with a spiritual quality that is simultaneously ironic and authentic, that keeps us invested.

Jonny’s writing for Dancefloor Conversion Therapy is considered and clever, although not always rich or sufficiently complex in their personal expressions, from the perspective of someone who is evidently still in a tumultuous process of maturation and discovery.  Amusingly analogous with sectarian leaders of all kinds, are not only Jonny’s commanding charisma as performer, but also their steely certainty about the topics they preach. Not to presently draw a false equivalence though, for it is the fundamental concept of liberation that forms the heart of what the artist wishes to convey, which is entirely different from teachings of monotheistic traditions.

One might be hard-pressed to dream up a party that excludes absolutely no one, but we must always believe that freedom can be a state of being made available to all. This means that we must find ways to conceive of our enemies as having the freedom to be who they authentically are, the same way we wish for them to simply let us be who we are. Harmony is key, and we must all insist on it.

www.sydneyfringe.com | www.instagram.com/auntyjonny