Purpose (Sydney Theatre Co) ★★★★

Written by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. Australian Premiere. Sydney Theatre Co. 2 Feb – 22 Mar, 2026.

Winner of the 2025 Tony Award for Best Play, the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the 2025 New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, Purpose comes to Sydney on the shoulders of a lot of expectation.

So, is Purpose all it’s cracked up to be? I mean, I assume the first thing you looked at was the star rating, so you already have a pretty good idea where I’m going…

Nazareth “Naz” Jasper (Tinashe Mangwana) returns to his family home just as a snowstorm hits, forcing his neighbour Aziza (Sisi Stringer), who drove him there, to agree to stay the night before heading back to New York. As Aziza meets the family, she’s shocked to discover that her quiet neighbour is in fact the son of civil rights activist legend Solomon Jasper (Markus Hamilton) — a fact Naz has carefully kept hidden.

As the family gathers to celebrate the belated birthday of matriarch Claudine (Deni Gordon), it’s immediately clear there’s a lot simmering beneath the surface. When they finally sit down for dinner, the revelations come thick and fast.

The set-up for Purpose could easily be that of a manor-house murder mystery: a big, beautiful house filled with complex characters, cut off from the world. There’s a stern father, revered publicly but tyrannical at home. A powerful, manipulative mother holding the family legacy together through sheer force of will. Solomon ‘Junior’ (Maurice Marvel Meredith), a disgraced former politician recently released from prison, and his bitter wife Morgan (Grace Bentley-Tsibuah). And in Naz, the wayward youngest son who’s avoided the family drama for years, now finally coming home.

Someone, or something, is going to die tonight, even if it’s only metaphorically.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ script is a sharp-eyed blend of competing emotional needs, touching on dozens of ideas with wit and agility. When the characters are in direct conflict, the writing is energetic and busy without ever feeling overwhelming. Jacobs-Jenkins mines his characters for natural comedy (whether from everyone’s assumption that Aziza is Naz’s secret girlfriend, or from the bitter disdain of Junior’s wife) while allowing the drama to simmer just beneath the surface.

In doing so, the play dissects the complex legacy of men like Jesse Jackson and Dr Martin Luther King Jr, whose political impact has been complicated by revelations of personal failings. It also turns that lens inward, asking us to consider our own legacies: those we leave in our careers, our families, and even on the planet itself.

The cast all get opportunities to shine, leaning into both the humour and the rage of the material. Markus Hamilton’s Solomon is a compelling portrait of an older man wrestling with his future. His struggles to come to grips with the spectrum of modern sexualities is one of the night’s biggest laughs.

Sisi Stringer’s Aziza — who moves from wide-eyed admiration to mounting horror as events unfold — is a breath of fresh air in the Jasper household. Deni Gordon is terrific as the manipulative, fiercely protective mother and power behind the throne, while Grace Bentley-Tsibuah brings sharp side-eye and earns every laugh she gets.

The most divisive aspect of Purpose is its heavy reliance on Naz’s fourth-wall-breaking monologues. This is a memory play, with Naz stepping in and out of the action to deliver long stretches of narration. Sometimes these moments add clarity or help land a joke, but more often they sap momentum with pages of dry exposition. It’s in these extended narrations that the play begins to stumble, and I found myself dreading the musical cue that signalled yet another break from the action. Mangwana and director Zindzi Okenyo struggle to inject life and dynamism into what can feel like emotionally deadening pauses.

This is a negative in an otherwise gorgeous production. Jeremy Allen’s set is rich and expansive, complete with an almost comedically long staircase for the cast to descend on cue, while the costumes add layer upon layer of texture to the characters. Kelsey Lee’s lighting is almost sitcom-like in its consistency and clarity.

Still, Purpose is an excellent play — and one that earns its accolades. It delivers its ideas wrapped in genuinely hilarious moments and populated by characters who feel fresh and recognisably human. In the end, it acknowledges just how vital a sense of meaning is to us all, and how difficult that meaning can be to find in modern life.