Nina Culley

The beloved Melbourne International Comedy Festival is well and truly in full swing, with more than 680 shows lighting up venues across the city. Phew, our abs are hurting already! With so many comedians to see and not enough time, we have sent out a batch of reviewers to dig deep and suss out the best of the fest this year. Whether it's a weird and wonderful show, a national treasure or a rising star, check out our reviews and see what tickles your fancy.  Want to review the show over a drink? Check out the best late-night bars in Melbourne.  

The universe, Emma Howlett reminds us at the outset of her dense, intellectually fizzing play — fresh from the Edinburgh Fringe and now running at Jermyn Street Theatre — doesn't care about us. Four particles take to the stage and announce as much: we’re specks, briefly conscious, adrift in something incomprehensibly vast and strange. A wheel is spun. Who will each particle become? Aether is framed as a lecture: the audience are the pupils handed whiteboards and asked mid-show to sketch Ptolemy's geocentric model of the universe. Within that conceit we follow a patchwork of vignettes that juxtapose and intercut across time, gender, discipline and cosmos. The cast morph via accents, physicality and drawn-on moustaches into a procession of real women who wrestled with the universe's secrets: Hypatia, the philosopher murdered in 415 AD for her pagan scholarship; Vera Rubin, whose evidence for dark matter was denied recognition; Adelaide Herrmann, the illusionist who took over her husband's act after his death and became one of the most celebrated performers of her age. Each figure, beyond the play's broader comment on sexism in STEM, has been chosen to chart the continued cost of curiosity. Whether the play always makes that case clearly enough amid the chaos is a different matter (pun intended). Aether finds its footing in its character-driven moments rather than its themes. Gemma Barnett is dazzling across multiple roles — most searingly as Hypatia before her death— and it's h

History has not been kind to Mary Todd Lincoln. Wife to one of America’s most mythologised presidents, she outlived Abraham Lincoln by nearly two decades, having already endured the deaths of three of her four children, public vilification, financial ruin and eventual institutionalisation, signed off by her own son, no less. She became, conveniently, the ‘mad widow’: a cautionary footnote to a Great Man’s story, recently introduced to a new generation after her absurdist depiction in Broadway smash Oh, Mary!. So, really, it’s no wonder that she’s keen to rewrite her story. And rewrite it she tries. John Ramson Phillips’s Mrs President, first staged in 2025 and revived after further dramaturgical development, returns to Charing Cross Theatre with a different cast, the same writer, and director (Bronagh Lagan) and, unfortunately, the same issues. In this version, Keala Settle (The Greatest Showman) takes on the role of Mary, entering swathed in a floral pink frock, a nod to the real Mary’s iconic outfits, standing out against a swampy green set (Anna Kelsey). She’s working with famed Civil War photographer, or ‘the father of photojournalism’ as he was known, Mathew Brady (Hal Fowler), who is determined to capture the ‘real’ her - or at least the version of her he imagines to be real. At first, she embraces the process, declaring that she needs ‘a new image that will change people’s perception of me’. But Brady’s pursuit of artistic immortality soon curdles, as he hovers behind

‘Romance’ instinctively calls to mind red roses and glossy, youthful love stories. Easier to overlook is the romance of those rarely centred at all: the older generation. Sweetmeats, from writer Karim Khan and director Natasha Kathi-Chandra, offers just such a love story – slow-burning and cocooned in domestic simplicity. Two widowers, Hema (Shobu Kapoor) and Liaquat (Rehan Sheikh), meet at a Type 2 diabetes management course. It’s hardly a classic meet-cute, but it’s a plausible one, particularly given how disproportionately the condition affects South Asian communities. As with most romances, they begin by bickering. Hema, who calls herself a ‘scary Indian woman’, is admonishing, organised and a stickler for the rules, packing healthy snacks and dishing out barbs and sharp sideways glances. Liaquat, whom she initially labels the more neutral ‘Bhai’, is playful and nonchalant: padding about in slippers, sneaking mithai (sweets) and tuning out with his headphones. In time, they bond over shared language and, of course, food: cardamom barfi, ladoos and sweet mangoes eaten while waiting for lifts home. It’s here that the details of Aldo Vázquez's set comes into focus: two floral lounge rooms, a row of plastic chairs, a bus stop scattered with dried leaves and crumpled bottles. With Hugh Sheehan's immersive sound design, you could almost forget you're in a theatre and not eavesdropping on a London street. Khan's writing is comedic and charming, peppered with culturally specific

The one-night stand is comedy’s gift that keeps on giving: a pressure cooker of intimacy, regret, hope and awkward logistics. David Ireland’s Most Favoured takes that familiar morning-after scenario and, then twists it into something weirder. The short show premiered in Scotland in 2013 and was memorably billed a ‘theatrical snack’. Now Most Favoured get its London premiere at Soho Theatre, in a new production, but still clocking in at a brisk 45 minutes. Director Max Elton confines the production to set designer Ceci Calf’s nondescript, three-star-looking hotel room: a timber bed frame and rumpled sheets wrapped in a striped polyester bed-runner. In this anonymous space, Mike (Alexander Arnold) drifts nonchalantly around the hotel room, while Mary (Lauren Lyle) is exhilarated. She reveals that she has, for the first time in her life, felt loved, and she is determined to make Mike understand the significance of that fact. He, however, has also experienced a first: he’s tried KFC, and is understandably fixated on the finger lickin’ goodness. That bucket of chicken becomes the play’s central running joke and, eventually, its structural crutch. The awkwardness escalates when Mary reveals why she has been picking up men for at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. (I mean, where else do people find ‘glamourous’ specimens — I mean, men — with good genes?) The pair function as effective foils. Lyle gives Mary unfiltered, Glaswegian charm, shot through with moments of genuine, eye-waterin

Rollercoasters and death may sound like a strange subject for a musical but Ride the Cyclone at Southwark Playhouse spins them into its own brand of jaunty strangeness. Premiering in Canada in 2009 and running off-Broadway in 2015, it has taken almost 15 years for the Jacob Richmond and Brooke Maxwell-penned show to make it to the UK. It begins with a freak rollercoaster accident dispatching six teens to a limbo presided over by the Amazing Karnak (Edward Wu), a mechanical oracle perched inside a fortune-telling booth. Suspended above a compact, adaptable set — a rotating platform and projections flickering at its centre — Wu strikes the perfect balance of ominous overseer and animatronic RuPaul, warming the audience up with cheeky meta-jokes about theatre etiquette. When the teens arrive, they’re joined by Jane Doe (Grace Galloway), a mysterious girl with no memory and no head, and informed — albeit in riddles — of the rules of a contest in which only one of them will earn a second chance at life. Each must plead their case: Ocean (Baylie Carson), the pro-democracy overachiever with a moral compass; Noel (Damon Gould), the romantic with hopes of living it out in Paris; Mischa (Bartek Kraszewski), the rage-filled rapper with a surprisingly tender underbelly; Ricky (Jack Maverick), the formerly mute comic-book-loving fantasist; and Constance (Robyn Gilbertson), the ‘nicest’ girl in town, who carries more emotional heft than she lets on. It all sounds pretty dark, but Richmond

After what feels like an infinity of iterations of Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, finding something genuinely new or interesting in it is a difficult feat. But it’s something that writer-director Tanika Gupta’s pulls off in her new take for the Orange Tree. She reimagines Ibsen’s restless anti-heroine as a mixed-heritage actress in postwar London, still suffocating under societal expectations, but now also constrained by race, class, gender, and reputation in a new Britain. It is 1948. The Blitz scars are still visible, but a veneer of gentility has returned. Inside a pristine Chelsea mews house — Simon Kenny’s blinding white-on-white set is simple but effective — Hedda (Pearl Chanda) lives with her dependable new husband, George (Joe Bannister). Outwardly, she’s living the dream: a glamorous ‘retired’ film star, she’s still admired (and feared) for her beauty and clout. But beneath that polish, she’s suffocating — aching for the freedoms enjoyed by those around her. Gupta’s inspiration comes from real-life film legend Merle Oberon, who famously concealed her South Asian heritage to survive Hollywood’s racist studio system under the Hays Code (the strict moral censorship guidelines that ruled American cinema until the late 1960s). That parallel gives Gupta’s Hedda a modern edge while retaining Ibsen’s familiar structure — the domestic cage, the manipulations, the doomed flirtations. Around Hedda orbit familiar figures: Leonard (Jake Mann), the brooding playwright; John Brack (

If you’ve ever felt Lucy Westenra got a terrible deal (#justiceforlucy and all that), the Lyric Hammersmith’s new spin on Dracula is here to set the record straight. Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s adaptation takes Bram Stoker’s 1897 gothic classic and shifts the focus to the women sidelined in the original. It also joins a lineage of feminist retellings: in Liz Lochhead’s 1985 Dracula, Lucy and Mina embraced their vampiric transformation, while Morna Pearson’s 2023 Mina’s Reckoning was staged with an all-women and non-binary cast — productions that, for all their boldness, received a mixed reception. Here, Mina (Umi Myers) delivers a moving performance, puppeteering a play within a play, in which the survivors of Dracula’s incursion to London serve up a cautionary tale — and lament Lucy’s fate in long stretches of exposition, a real tension killer. For those familiar with the novel or its many adaptations, the constant need to catch us up on plot points can feel especially tedious. With Mina and Lucy (Mei Mac) at the centre, the ensemble — Jack Myers as Jonathan Harker included — circles in and out as stand-ins for multiple roles, but their presence, and their purpose, feels thin. But definitely not as thin as the role of the men in this production. In Stoker’s original, Harker, Van Helsing, and Lucy’s various suitors are men of action — rational champions of science and medicine rallying to protect ‘their’ women — while Mina and Lucy, though scandalous for their time, were still bou

The puppies are back in town. Following its 2022 premiere at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, 101 Dalmatians returns for a limited summer run — this time wagging its tail across the proscenium stage of the Eventim Apollo. It’s an ambitious transfer, reimagined with a heavy dose of 1950s retro styling that nods to both Dodie Smith’s original 1956 book and the classic early Disney aesthetic. Just like in Smith’s original, Zinnie Harris and Douglas Hodge’s adaptation follows Pongo, Perdita, and their many, many puppies as they’re pursued by the maniacally glamorous Cruella de Vil, who has set her sights on their spotty pelts. Under Jimmy Grimes’s direction (it was originally directed by Tim Sheader), a small army of puppet dogs (and a few cats) springs to life through the skilful hands of visible puppeteers. It definitely takes a moment to adjust — the puppets sit very close to uncanny — but once you’re in, you’re in. The clear standout froim teh cast is Britain’s Got Talent winner Sydnie Christmas as Cruella. She devours the stage with the kind of cartoonish gusto you want in a Disney villain —all cackles, claws, and costume changes. Dressed by Sarah Mercadé in a parade of outfits that wouldn’t be out of place in a Lady Gaga tour wardrobe, she’s camp in all the right places. The rest of the cast, including Aston Merrygold (of British boyband JLS) as bumbling henchman Jasper and Laura Baldwin as Danielle, bring plenty of energy. However, the show’s tear-jerking emotional core nev

  Having premiered at the Old Vic in 2017 – and gone on to conquer the West End and Broadway – Girl From the North Country has lost none of its potency as it returns to the theatre where it all began — a dreamy, sepia-soaked production of character-driven vignettes and reimagined Bob Dylan songs. It’s 1934 in Duluth, Minnesota – Dylan’s actual birthplace – and the Great Depression is chewing through the soul of the town. At the centre of this dustbowl drama is the Laine family, struggling to keep their guesthouse (and each other) from crumbling under debt, loss, and the weight of time. Nick Laine (Colin Connor) is a man burdened by a bubbling anger — the same kind that seems to course through the town — while his wife Elizabeth (Katie Brayben) floats between madness and sudden, unnerving clarity. Their adopted Black daughter Marianne (Justina Kehinde) is pregnant, unmarried, and navigating her place within the world. Their house is a revolving door of boarders: hustlers, dreamers, a smooth-talking preacher, and a boxer down on his luck (think 1930s sitcom). The 23-strong company moves fluidly between character, chorus, and live band. Simon Hale’s arrangements of 20 Dylan songs float in the spaces between joy and hardship. Stripped-back renditions of ‘Forever Young’ and ‘I Want You’ drift through wood-panelled walls and empty whisky bottles. Some numbers are so radically reimagined you’ll barely recognise them — like Brayben’s raw, ragged and impossibly controlled version of

There’s something relatable – and deeply funny – about a grandmother demanding to be brought potatoes and mixed spice, then grinning at her own audacity. That warmth and wit is central to Danny James King’s Miss Myrtle’s Garden, a tender play in which every cast member is as magnetic as the other. The story does indeed unfold in the overgrown Peckham garden of Miss Myrtle (Diveen Henry) – a space dense with ghosts and flowers. Into this tangled setting steps her grandson Rudy (Michael Ahomka-Lindsay), who has just moved in with his (secret) boyfriend Jason (Elander Moore). Rudy, wary of his sharp-tongued Jamaican grandmother and constrained by his job at a Catholic school, isn’t ready to come out, placing strain on them both. Moore’s Jason is vibrant and warm; Ahomka-Lindsay captures Rudy’s internal battle with a mounting heartbreak. Meanwhile, Henry’s comic timing is electric, and her facial expressions alone tell stories that stretch across decades. Myrtle is also slipping into dementia – a disease that disproportionately affects Black and South Asian communities. Her beloved cat, Sarah, is missing. She spends her days bickering with Eddie, her kind but slightly oafish Irish neighbour (a charming Gary Lilburn), whom she first catches urinating near her flowerbeds. What begins as comedy softens into a portrait of two lonely people reaching – awkwardly – for connection. The actors orbit each other with care, often lingering in meaningful silences or glances. New Bush boss Ta

Everyone loves a grifter. From Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley to Anna Delvey, we’re suckers for the charming anti-hero, the confidence artist who plays by their own rules. So it’s no surprise that House of Games — David Mamet’s 1987 film, adapted by Richard Bean for the Almeida in 2010 — still exerts a certain pull. Restaged at Hampstead Theatre, Bean’s revival invites us back into an underbelly of sleaze, scams, and high-stakes hijinks. We open in a therapy session between Dr Margaret Ford (Lisa Dillon), a Harvard-trained psychiatrist, and Bobby (Oscar Lloyd), an erratic gambler. When he mentions a shadowy place called The House of Games, Margaret follows him there (ethical code be damned) –ostensibly to help, but really because she’s bored and on the hunt for material for her next book. Here’s where you’ll need to suspend your disbelief: after just one visit, she’s in deep –drawn into the orbit of Mike (Richard Harrington), part Al Pacino, part De Niro, who offers her an insider’s view of the con. This crew are less Ocean’s Eleven, more low-rent grifters Dillon plays Ford with a cool restraint. Across her, Harrington’s Mike isn’t quite the smooth talker we might expect (there’s a whole conversation about dinner in between kisses), but he serves the story’s purpose: the man who knows exactly how to spot a crack and wedge himself into it. Mike’s crew are less Ocean’s Eleven, more low-rent grifters. A frail old-timer, a blustering ‘bartender’, and a sleazy gambler round out

Fifty years ago, David Williamson’s The Removalists barrelled onto the stage at Melbourne’s La Mama. Though loosely based on a true story, one can only imagine the reaction back then – gasps? Walkouts? Even now, in 2025, the play’s brashness hasn’t dulled. Police brutality, domestic violence, unchecked misogyny – it’s all still here. Director Anne-Louise Sarks (My Brilliant Career, A Streetcar Named Desire) stages this revival with a sharp eye for Williamson’s absurdist cynicism. The audience is seated in traverse – on both sides of the stage – as implicit witnesses. Sarks doesn’t try to modernise the text; instead, she leans into its 1970s setting (Matilda Woodroofe’s period-perfect costume design includes mustard dresses and flared jeans). The opening scene, set in a sterile police station cluttered with bureaucratic paperwork and buzzing under fluorescent lighting (a little too bright, perhaps), introduces Steve Mouzakis’ Sergeant Simmonds breaking in new recruit Ross (William McKenna). Ross rolls on his heels like a kid who’s wandered into the wrong classroom, while Simmonds mocks and steamrolls him – it’s classic schoolyard bullying. Just when the berating gets old, Eloise Mignon’s Fiona arrives, bruised and hesitant, with her sister Kate (Jessica Clarke), to report her husband’s latest assault. Now, suddenly, Simmonds is all charm. Of course, he’ll help. Of course, he’ll retrieve Fiona’s furniture. But, naturally, there’s a cost.  The set transitions cleverly – a makeup