Born on a Thursday (Old Fitz) ★★★½

Written by Jack Kearney. World Premiere. New Ghosts Theatre Company. The Old Fitz Theatre. 28 Nov – 14 Dec, 2025.

Whenever you see a dining table on a set, you know you’re in for some serious domestic drama. Jack Kearney’s Born on a Thursday delivers some hard family truths, anchored by a seamlessly powerful performance from Sharon Millerchip.

April (Sofia Nolan) has unexpectedly returned home from Europe, where she was a professional ballet dancer. Her mother Ingrid (Millerchip) greets her with an instantly cool reception. Ingrid is busy caring for her son Isaac (Owen Hasluck), who suffered a traumatic brain injury 18 months ago.

The mood is lightened by their neighbour and long-term family friend Howard (James Lugton), who is busy working in the garden. Ingrid’s old friend Estelle (Deborah Galanos) also appears, bringing warmth where Ingrid brings frost. As the months pass and the family learns to live with each other again, more buried trauma slowly surfaces.

The cast are truly excellent, offering lived-in performances that suggest decades of shared history. Among this sea of great acting though, Millerchip is the clear standout. Her portrayal of a hard-working, no-nonsense matriarch — determined not to let anyone down but with little room for anything else — is exceptional. Meanwhile, Ingrid’s mission to push the local football club to take responsibility for Isaac’s injury bubbles beneath the family tensions, adding another layer of pressure.

Sofia Nolan’s April offers both a rejection of her mother’s ethos and a reluctant respect for it. Their chemistry speaks volumes. Even with only a few exchanges about the past, it’s obvious April grew up with a demanding mother. Their natural rhythms reveal a deep and complicated history.

Isaac’s brain injury presents a challenging role for Owen Hasluck, yet his performance never wavers. I can’t judge the accuracy from personal experience, but his clarity, intention and portrayal of Isaac’s distress feel real and intense.

I’d also like to formally request another Old Fitz production with a Christmas connection for James Lugton in 2026. It would complete an odd but delightful trilogy of Lugton Christmas dramas after last year’s terrific Snowflake (returning at Ensemble in the new year) and now the opening Christmas-set scenes of Born on a Thursday. Once again, his work is gentle, powerful, and full of intense love.

Much of this beautiful naturalism rests on director Lucy Clements’ shoulders. Her approach is empathetic and grounded in honest emotion rather than plot mechanics. The audience is welcomed into the house (brought to life by Soham Apte’s lovely design) and invited to inhabit the rituals of this family.

Despite commentary surrounding the production, the sporting injury is not the centre of the narrative. It serves instead as a point of pressure on all the characters. Life’s unfairness presses down on each of them, and while they deal with their own struggles, Isaac is never treated as a problem to be solved. He is part of the fabric of their day-to-day existence. While his challenges are more obvious, he is not the only one with scars to deal with.

Kearney’s script is well crafted, though a little woolly in places. His dialogue rings with truth — it sounds like the way people really speak, occasionally lifted by the sort of one-liner we all wish we could summon in the moment. The play isn’t particularly plot-driven, and at over two and a half hours, it does start to waver as some scenes linger.

What you’ll carry with you at the end is Sharon Millerchip’s extraordinary performance as a mother willing to go to the ends of the earth for her children. We don’t see her on our stages nearly enough, so make the most of this chance to watch her own the space.