Things to do in Sydney today

The first act of Australian theatre, television and media polymath Nakkiah Lui’s new play is an extraordinarily funny and incisive political satire. Three Canberra insiders – Vic (played by Lui herself), Zaza (Michelle Lim Davidson) and Chris (Anthony Taufa) – are frustrated that despite their immense skills and education none has the political clout they need to change the country for the better. The reason for their struggle is simple: Vic is Aboriginal, Zaza is Korean and Chris is Tongan. They have to stand by watching mediocre white man after mediocre white man rise to positions of power. And now the Sovereign Territory Bill – a dangerous political tool designed to placate the far right and entrench white supremacy through talk of Australian “values” – is before parliament. One night at a Canberra nightclub, fuelled by an effective amount of cocaine, they hatch a plan to beat those mediocre white men at their own game. They find their own mediocre white man, turn him into a political puppet, and direct him all the way the senate. The laughs come thick and fast for all of the first act, particularly when the trio are transforming their puppet (played to absolute comedic perfection in jelly sandals by Hamish Michael) into the perfect white man. Seeing this group of young people of colour construct an image of whiteness from their own perspective is very funny, and a subversive act in and of itself. There’s even a musical number (thanks to Paul Mac and Steve Francis) t

This is a review of the 2019 Melbourne season of Cake Daddy at Midsumma Festival. There’s been a lot of discussion about identity in the general community, and it’s a theme that has come to dominate this year’s Midsumma Festival. We’re talking about gender identity, sexual identity, racial identity. Disability is finally fully on the agenda. But fat? Well fat, according to mainstream social norms, just ain’t right. More than this, it’s wrong, even has a whiff of immorality about it. It isn’t only the people who fall outside the ideal of physical beauty who are trapped by this mentality; all of us have become dangerously obsessed with our bodies, and the fuel that drives them, and we’re looking around for someone to blame. Ross Anderson-Doherty is a Belfast theatre-maker who has descended on Melbourne’s Midsumma like a giant pink inflatable swimming aid, and he’s here to tell us all about, wait for it… Cakewatchers! It’s a new, totally fabulous, completely indefatigable weight loss scheme, unlike all the other, failure-inducing weight loss schemes that have come before. This one has three central tenets: “Watch the cake!”, “Know your cryminals!” [sic] and “Practise your manoeuvres!”. Ross is going to take us through and out of this new routine, with a touch of autobiography on the way down. Cake Daddy is best described as a three-way collaboration between Anderson-Doherty, playwright Lachlan Philpott and director Alyson Campbell; an attempt to wrangle the separate aesthet

The Yorkshire moors are often described as a desolate (think ‘wiley, windy’) place, and they hold a certain reputation in the literary imagination as a setting for gothic romance. The Brontë sisters grew up on the moorlands, and their Romantic literary outputs capture that dark, wild feeling of isolation, obsession and early feminist ideation over and over again. The Moors, a new play by American writer Jen Silverman, takes every trope in the Brontë handbook and queers it – collating their lonely estates and governesses and attic prisoners and shocking romances, and remixing them into an arch, surrealist play about love and anger and obsession. And also a talking dog. Emilie (Brielle Flynn) has been summoned to work as a governess in an isolated Moorland home, seduced by the hand of the head of the household, Bramwell. However, his sister Agatha (Romy Bartz), clearly in control of the home, won’t let her meet him. The other sister, Huldey (Enya Daley), dreams of fame and sadness, and confides in her diary. The maid seems to be the same person (Diana Popovska), and all the rooms seem to be same, and Emilie is told that life is different here, on the moors. As she becomes consumed by the world of the sisters and their schemes, the family dog (Thomas Campbell) falls in love with an injured moorhen (Alex Francis). The script is lively and camp even when it comments on queer desire and unhealthy possession, female oppression and rage, and is written to be sharp and blackly c

This is a review of the 2018-19 Melbourne season of Peter Pan Goes Wrong. In 2017, Melbourne audiences chortled and guffawed – no doubt at times even choked on their own windpipes – through the hilarity that was The Play That Goes Wrong. It wasn’t the first farce of that year but it was by far the best, leaving local efforts like The Homosexuals and Noises Off for dead. The question is, can the producers step into the same river twice? Peter Pan Goes Wrong promises to up the laughs and the chaos, to be more wrong than the previous play that went wrong. Does it succeed at being a bigger failure? Perhaps not, but it’s certainly fun watching it try. It starts very much like its predecessor, with “stage hands” mugging and ad-libbing their way around the auditorium. Of course, this seeming looseness is actually extremely calculating, lubing us up, getting us in the mood for the riot and mayhem to follow. It’s only when the director Chris Bean (Connor Crawford) comes out, with his assistant/co director Robert (Luke Joslin), that we begin to sense the tensions underpinning this theatrical endeavour. We launch quickly into the production of Peter Pan itself, and within minutes we realise it’s a production that is doomed. Doomed for the actors, directors and producers; comedy gold for us. Anyone who saw The Play That Goes Wrong will recognise the beats, the set-ups and even the specific gags that made that show so funny. What’s remarkable is how amusing it is the second time around

Much is made of theatre’s cathartic quality. It’s an art form beloved for its ability to give audiences safe passage as they experience and exorcise the knotty parts of the human condition by bearing witness to stories. But Sydney Theatre Company’s Mary Stuart, in a new adaptation by Kate Mulvany and directed by Lee Lewis, offers a different kind of catharsis: the act of reclaiming women’s stories with empathy, insight and, crucially, by allowing women of the past to finally have a voice. Much like in STC’s 2018 production of Saint Joan, this is a play written by a man that has been terraformed into a play about women, by women. In both Shaw’s original work about Joan of Arc and Schiller’s 1800 play about Queens Mary and Elizabeth, much of the action was driven by the men around them – their jailers, operatives and informants – rather than giving voice and heft to the women at the centre. In this new, freshly 21st century Mary Stuart, Kate Mulvany re-shapes the drama to give the women their own points of view. Mulvany writes with witty specificity and finely honed anger to tell the story of two queens imprisoned in very different ways. Mary Stuart’s confinement is of course literal: she has spent 19 years locked away by cousin Elizabeth under charges of treason. Elizabeth I, reigning queen of England, is a prisoner of circumstance: a self-titled Virgin Queen, hemmed in and reduced to sometimes ineffectual figurehead by her responsibilities and her court. Her crown is her on