Category: Comedy
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Shitty (Belvoir 25a) ★★★★
What’s more horrific than turning 30 and looking for love?
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Ruff Trade (The Motley Bauhaus) ★★★1/2
Ruff Trade starts off as a sex comedy about a 16th century male sex worker and unexpectedly ends up being a bitter tragedy. Strangely the heel-turn works, making for a satisfying, and gleefully historically inaccurate, short play.
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An Evening Without Kate Bush (Wharf 1 Theatre) ★★★1/2
Kate Bush is an icon, a legend, an enigma and she is NOT appearing at the Sydney Festival. But Sarah-Louise Young is!
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Ode to Joy (How Gordon got to go to the nasty pig party) (Neilson Nutshell) ★★★★
It’s like How Stella Got Her Groove Back but instead of using Taye Diggs, it uses ketamine.
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Tiddas (Belvoir) ★★★
When Anita Heiss’ Tiddas is funny, it’s damn funny, and when it’s didactic, it’s like having wikipedia recited to you. The two tones struggle to co-exist in Heiss’ stage adaptation of her 2014 novel about five friends whose book club becomes a meeting place for ideas, angst and more.
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Masterclass (Sydney Opera House) ★★★★
Feeling the energy in the theatre shift from gleeful laughter to uncomfortable tittering to bewildered joy and finally buzzing chatter is simply delicious. This is a brilliant example of how theatrical forms can be used to enlighten and subvert. Yes, it’s a two hander about sexism in the arts, but that description barely scratches the…
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Midnight Murder at Hamlington Hall (Ensemble) ★★★1/2
Midnight Murder at Hamlington Hall isn’t the first play to derive comedy from a night at the theatre going wrong before your eyes, but it may be the first to do so with such a tender heart.
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Darwin’s Reptilia (Belvoir 25a) ★★1/2
Darwin’s Reptilia, closing out 2023’s Belvoir 25a season, is bonkers. Whether you think it’s “good bonkers” or “bad bonkers” is going to be entirely up to you, but at $25 a ticket it’s hardly a huge investment.
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The Memory of Water (Ensemble) ★★★★
The premise of Shelagh Stephenson’s The Memory of Water sounds like the set up to a farce. After the death of their mother Violet (Nicole Da Silva), three sisters converge on the family home for the funeral. They each deal with their grief in different ways. It’s a comedy that’ll make you cry.
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Blaque Showgirls (Griffin) ★★★
Blaque Showgirls is both a daft comedy and a commentary on the status of indigenous Australian lives. Terrible and terrific at the same time, it has the energy of a Christmas panto fueled with bags of cocaine – to be honest, I loved and hated it in equal measure.
Cultural Binge 