Shitty (Belvoir 25a) ★★★★

Written by Chris Edwards. Belvoir 25a. 7 – 24 Feb, 2024.

Life in your late 20s is hell, and that collective trauma is playing out in three short horror/comedy pieces downstairs at Belvoir 25a under the anthology title, Shitty. Because what’s more horrific than turning 30 and looking for love?

Meg Hyeronimus (who was great in Cherry Smoke at KXT Broadway last year) and Levi Kenway open the show as Emily and Ben – two young, hot, self-possessed actors who meet and hook up while in a production of Hamlet. He’s Hamlet, she’s Hamlet’s mother Gertrude, and their sexual chemistry is definitely giving the production a very unusual tone. After a night of karaoke with the cast, the couple start being stalked by text messages telling them they’re shitty people. They arrive every day. But after some amateur sleuthing it starts to look like this isn’t just the work of their bitter exes.

In the second, Frankie (Mark Paguio) and Darcy (Roy Joseph) are dealing with their own different trauma and are looking for love in all the wrong places. Frankie’s just returned to Sydney for the first time since his abusive father died, while Roy is heartbroken from the end of his last relationship. Grindr, party drugs, sex and love turn into a messy cocktail as they meet on Oxford St and push through their own pain to hook up. But only one of them will have a happy ending.

And the third piece sees a group of school friends get together on the verge of their 30th birthdays to have a girls-weekend in the country. Told through the eyes of Evie (Ariadne Sgouros – also a stand out in Ensemble Theatre’s Midnight Murder at Hamlington Hall) things get twisted when they play a game of hide & seek after consuming some edibles. As Evie wanders the rental house looking for her friends, she discovers the basement…

There are common threads that connect these three tales of ghosts and the supernatural. Toxic technology and apps are present in everyone’s lives, from text messages to Grindr to AirBnb, our digital lives are gateways for evil in more ways than one. Writer Chris Edwards takes a horror trope and in each instance gives it an extra twist to turn things on their heads. The first and second are variations on ghost stories, while the third plays with “cabin in the woods” tropes. And like the best horror stories, these ones are filled with very human comedy that keeps you swinging from laughter to screams and back again. 

Keeping things short (all three hover around 30 min in duration) is perfect for this kind of quick hit of fear and loathing. The middle piece (the longest, told in three short scenes) is the most fulfilling for its double narrative and full arc, although the scene changes where a little discombobulating – it felt like we were starting a whole new story. The two other pieces stumble slightly in their attempts to find a resolution but taken as sketch-comedy-horror they all deliver.

The real strength of Shitty lies in its cast and direction by Zoë Hollyoak. Everyone on stage is a superb comic storyteller and this is a sterling showcase for all of them (the key demographic for the audience should be every casting director in Sydney). The five performers get to play with flirty comedy, domestic drama and screams, a lot of screams. As each of them is essentially giving us a campfire ghost story, the room is transfixed.

Also a major shoutout to the other main performers on the stage – the lighting by Morgan Moroney that has its own cheeky and creepy personality from scene to scene and plays well with the minimal set by Hailley Hunt and sound design by Madeleine Picard. Horror is always best felt rather than seen and their work push our imagination into exactly the right places.

As we entered the theatre, I joked to my friend that calling the show Shitty could be tempting fate but instead it’s a sign of confidence. There are thrills and (literal) spills in this furiously funny evening of horror hits. I can’t recommend Shitty enough.