IRL (KXT on Broadway) ★★

Written by Lewis Treston. The Other Theatre in association with Bakehouse Theatre. KXT on Broadway. 25 Apr – 10 May, 2025.

Lewis Treston, the Brisbane playwright behind the camp-Austen Hubris & Humiliation and the manic-crime-comedy Hot Tub, arrives at KXT on Broadway with his take on pop cultural fan culture and Xennial internet dating – IRL. 

Alexei (Andrew Fraser) is a Tumblr teen, exploring his blossoming sexual expression online and living out his dream Disney Princess life in cosplay. He’s been talking to a nice guy online, Thaddeus (Leon Walshe), who is a little film nerd with lots of thoughts about big topics. They finally plan to meet at Brisbane’s Supernova Convention, a Comic-Con for fans of all sorts of pop culture media, from anime, to computer games, film, TV and comics books. But Alexei is nervous, he’s coming in Princess cosplay… What will Thaddeus think? 

So Alexei concocts a plan. Seeing as they’ve never met in person before, or shared photos online, he’ll see how Thaddeus reacts to his cosplay before revealing his identity. That way, if Thaddeus freaks out, Alexei can just walk away. But when Thaddeus falls for the anonymous Princess, things get complicated. How can Alexei get around the lie? And what’s going on with Alexei’s best friend, Taylor (Bridget Haberecht), an actress who is a guest at the con but seems to be very publicly going off the rails? 

Treston is an entertainer, there’s rarely more than a token “big message” to his plays, and the same goes for IRL which waves in the direction of subtext but is more interested in trying to make you laugh than having anything meaningful to say. There’s a lot of plot, and a lot of characters, in the mix. Most of which turns out to be random noise in the long run, as Treston throws in improbable event after improbable event to get the characters where they have to be. 

It’s almost as if the play were being made up as it goes along. We’re often treated to long backstories of characters who have no real bearing on the story and subplots that exist simply to be weird (or to cover a costume change). It feels like one of those Marvel TV shows that got substantially rewritten and reworked in post-production resulting in characters appearing and disappearing with little context or consequence, and a mish-mash of tones.

And the confines of independent theatre budget and space are really evident. It’s clear this production doesn’t have the resources required to bring this story to the stage and the results are sloppy and confused. There’s a world of difference between wearing an off-the-rack dress and the skill and passion of genuine cosplayers. It’s hard to suspend your disbelief when the characters are talking about a hand-stitched bespoke outfit, but you’re seeing a pair of baggy K-Mart trackies. The set decoration looks like it was raided from a Salvos without a clear visual plan. Without the production values to elevate the fantasy elements of the script, the heightened characters or the action, we’re left with a compromised, confusing, mess. It doesn’t help that Alexei changes into the costume of DC’s The Flash (and no one needs to be reminded of that movie &/or drama).

This lack of production elements could be forgiven if the play’s script and/or the performances were outstanding as a counter-weight, but things fall flat there as well. Treston’s script throws out vague ideas about identity, insecurity and the commercialisation of our communal myth-making, but can’t follow them through with any exploration and insight. Instead we get pointless hallucinations, a musical number and a superhero battle that has no grounding in emotion or character. It’s just stuff happening on top of stuff, without the Hollywood budget to at least distract us with spectacle.

Which leaves the cast floundering, often literally just pacing up and down the KXT traverse stage, shouting out dialogue and delivering false emotions in place of real characters. Alexei and Thaddeus’ love story is charmless and unearned. Alexei is particularly unlikable in the overtly selfish way he treats both Thaddeus and Taylor. Taylor’s entire storyline is bewildering and pointless – treating her mental health as a punchline. When she does go full “Dark Phoenix” it felt more like X-Men: The Last Stand than the Chris Claremont classic comic book (for those not well-versed in this stuff, that’s definitely a bad thing). Don’t even bother questioning the internal logic behind it all – there is none.

As the show began I whispered to my friend that as a longtime pop culture nerd myself (who was on Tumblr a lot in the early noughties and has attended a number of Comic-Cons) I was either going to hate IRL or be completely on board with it, and sadly it’s the former. While I don’t feel like the play is mocking fan culture, it is definitely not steeped in it enough to translate it to the stage. The scope of the script clearly outstretched the resources and imaginations of the creatives. Those hoping for a fun night like last year’s Harry-Potter-slash-fiction themed [Your Name] (which also starred Andrew Fraser) will need to look elsewhere.