The result of a single test tears this friendship apart

THEATRE
Fair Play
Old Fitz Theatre, March 8
Until March 21
Reviewed by CASSIE TONGUE
★★★★½

There’s nothing quite like the moment you realise you have found where you belong: your talents, interests and personality align; you suddenly know who you are.

For the two young women of Fair Play, written by British playwright Ella Road, now in its Australian premiere season at the Old Fitz Theatre, that place is the track. They are middle-distance runners who come alive in the 800 metres; to them, it feels like flying.

Ann (Rachel Crossan) and Sophie (Elodie Westhoff) first meet as teenagers, wary and competitive as they train together. At first glance, they don’t have a lot in common: they’re from different cultures, families and classes. But their hunger for the race is the same, and as the play progresses – it’s a sparking live wire, all moments of warm-ups, cool-downs and racing jitters – they grow close.

They push, encourage and confide in each other as they hit new personal bests. Their sweetly cocky young dreams about world-class medals are becoming a reality, and it seems like nothing is going to stand between the pair – or between them and their Olympic dreams. Until a pre-race hormone test shatters it all.

Road’s play, directed here in a beautifully assured production by Emma Whitehead, is a close and appealingly deep look at the intimacies and inner worlds of young women – studying unique bonds formed under intense circumstances, ambition and connection – but when it reaches its catastrophic climax, it explodes into a vital, white-hot examination of inequity in women’s sports.

Crossan and Westhoff are excellent. There’s a real sense of a shared dream – that they are in the same race – at the same time as they have distinct movement and emotional languages (Cassidy McDermott Smith choreographs their workouts). On Kate Beere’s curved track of a set, they build a multitude of moments that make, and break, each other. EJ Zielinski’s lighting urges new ideas into the light.

Whitehead’s production is a high-intensity interval workout: it bursts from scene to scene, snatching the air from your lungs before giving you a moment to rest. It’s sharp, clarifying and remarkably vulnerable. Whitehead keeps it all focused, fast and moving – in both senses of the word.

When the script verges into the didactic, Whitehead stays focused on the human stakes, creating nuance out of how Ann and Sophie lean into or away from each other.

Narrow eligibility limits based on even narrower sample sizes of what makes a woman have made for hot-button headlines and incited mass scrutiny on women’s bodies, most frequently the bodies of athletes who aren’t white. As the sporting world begins to grapple with the often-ignored fact that sex characteristics and hormones don’t have consistent or binary presentations, Fair Play grounds the high-profile panic in a deeply human story.

What does this ruling mean for Ann, Sophie and their friendship? This is one of the gifts of theatre: it connects ideas, problems and challenges with our emotional realities, reminding us that they are not abstract.

THEATRE

AS YOU LIKE IT
Flight Path Theatre, March 5
Until March 14
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★★½

A golden moment comes in the first scene of Act IV, when Jade Fuda’s Rosalind (disguised as the youth Ganymede) asks Pat Mandziy’s Orlando what he would say to her, were she his Rosalind. “I would kiss before I spoke,” he replies, and Fuda gives an uncontainable giggle that perfectly encapsulates the multifaceted Rosalind’s girlish ecstasy.

In the same scene, Larissa Turton’s Celia, Rosalind’s best friend, mock-marries the pair, and on Rosalind’s instruction Orlando says, “I take thee, Rosalind, for wife.” Again Fuda fizzes with elation, and again we’re drawn into the wonder Rosalind feels that Orlando should love her as much as she loves him. The cynical Jaques would probably decry it as puppy love, but it’s real to them, and, for the play to work, it must be real to us.

Without such moments of utter enchantment, there’s too much danger that we’re busily wondering why on earth Orlando can’t see that Ganymede is Rosalind, simply wearing a cap, trousers and waistcoat in director Alex Kendall Robson’s production (for Fingerless Theatre).

But when Fuda locates the epicentre of Rosalind’s innocence like this, she lights up both stage and production. She also catches Rosalind’s humour, albeit it in a slightly goofy guise, and something of this magical character’s self-doubt and vulnerability. The aspect of Rosalind that is undercooked is her startling intelligence. Perhaps it is harder to put that across in such a madcap, even frantic production.

Robson presents As You Like It as if he’s just directed Twelfth Night, and can’t quite shake off the zaniness. He plays Jaques himself, and is the merriest incarnation of that melancholic observer of humanity I’ve seen. The odd thing is, it almost works, though it is at odds with too many lines.

Turton is endless fun as Celia, a character who starts out being the dominant party in the friendship with Rosalind, before, over the play’s course (nearly three hours in a very hot theatre), she becomes as subservient to Rosalind as everyone else. In this regard, Fuda and Robson have got much right about Rosalind, one of Shakespeare’s ultimate creations: as the play proceeds, the more she grows into being its polestar.

Robson’s company of 13 includes Zachary Aleksander as a particularly pert version of Touchstone, Sonya Kerr as the two dukes, now gender-swapped to duchesses, and amusing performances from Meg Bennetts (playing both Audrey and Phebe) and Jack Elliot Mitchell (Adam, Charles and William.)

The production generates considerable mirth by having cast members (notably Max Fernandez and Brea Macey, I think) dressed in white hoodies as sheep, and munching on a square of synthetic grass. Music abounds, as it should, and is done well, with many cast members playing instruments under Aleksander’s direction, assisted by violinist Hannah Buckley.

It’s a joyous, funny production, and would be even better were the direction and acting handled with a slightly lighter touch.

MUSIC
Basement Jaxx
★★★★½
Opera House Forecourt, March 5
Reviewed by KATE PRENDERGAST

Experience an electronic music show nowadays – live or otherwise – and what you’re in for is usually an uninspired redux of DJ worship. One or two artists behind the decks, usually poker-faced white dudes, getting their glory.

It’s such an incongruous disconnect from the genre’s origins. To their absolute credit, in their first live show in Australia in 15 years, pioneering British duo Basement Jaxx put the communal trip ahead of their ego trip, while honouring the black, shining provenance of the kind of music they love. Over 70-odd minutes of a blessedly warm night, with an almost full moon winking down, they orchestrate a cosmically euphoric, Afrofuturist-inspired carnival on the Opera House steps.

Felix Buxton (manning gear tucked inside a centre hole on the sloped stage) and Simon Ratcliffe (on guitar) may be the drivers of the experience but for the most part they’re not even the main act. Kicking off with the imperiously self-affirming anthem Good Luck, guests Phebe Edwards, Vula Malinga and Jai Amore dominate with their vocals, energy and otherworldly disco-royal attire. Picture a chic silver Lycra dress with an inflatable hem, another with fierce metal spikes, floating radium-green visors, pearlescent tunics, and an astro-tulle skirt under a hip-as-hell varsity jacket.

Flanked by two massive drum kits, with a trumpeter in the mix, we’re sent on an explosively creative journey through a cross-cultural miscellany of boisterous sonic textures. Alongside fusion house-y hip-swingers and bodacious hits like Red Alert and Do Your Thing, there are moments given over to baroque grandiosity via 17th-century composer Handel, a smattering of hard techno, and even a little opera, with a Bjork and Yves Tumor cover of Rosalia’s Berghain our penultimate track.

This is music for unabashed expression, where unity is found in shared, propulsively joyous movement. Contemporary dancers, acrobats and ballet dancers lead the way, soaring with ferocious grace across that tilted stage. There’s also a woman inside an enormous diaphanous flower that languidly blossoms to the beat, and a gorilla gang ambush (naturally) for the Where’s Your Head At closer, which rampages into a drum’n’bass remix. Screen visuals throughout simulate a ‘surfing the rainbow’ acid wave, and include grey aliens and pyramids on turbojets. (Notable: Buxton’s encounter with a UFO partly inspired their most recent album Junto, released in 2014. A new Jaxx album is cooking for a 2026 release.)

It’s wildly eclectic, bonkers even. But it sure makes for an unforgettable night.

MUSIC
Pulp
★★★★
Opera House Forecourt, March 6
Reviewed by SHAMIM RAZAVI

Jarvis Cocker was always something of an anachronism. Amid the swagger of Britpop, his awkward self-awareness and wry croonerisms seemed to belong to another time and place. Three decades later you could hardly imagine a setting much further from the ’90s bedsits of northern England than a balmy summer night on our Opera House steps – and yet, somehow, Pulp find and reoccupy that same unlikely cultural nook they once carved out for themselves.

Their characteristic artfulness has not deserted them. Some of the night’s best songs come from their 2025 More album, an evolution of their sound, and themes appropriate to the passage of time: the smooth waltz-time tune of finding love amid the organic kale of Farmers Market is now more relevant to both band and much of the audience than their earlier angular tales of penury and perversion.

Age has also brought out a charming sincerity in Pulp. There is no subtext or wry undercut to Got to Have Love – just a late middle-ager reflecting on what really matters. That sincerity was always there, as this night’s gorgeous, heart-warming and pared-back Something Changed reminds us, but perhaps maturity has allowed them to shed some of the layers of artifice and irony.

It has also enriched their sound with new influences: echoes of chansons and cabaret now sit comfortably alongside the sly sleaze of their earlier hits.

And yet for all the graceful ageing, it is those old songs that best demonstrate Pulp’s brilliance – and the audience’s true loyalties. Britpop produced its share of anthems but few were so wry, so literate or so strange. From Sorted for E’s & Wizz via Disco 2000 through to Mis-Shapes, it is on this night stranger still that these arch tales of alienation – once so precisely of their moment – should now feel timeless.

Most timeless of all, of course, is Common People, which soars highest, allowing Jarvis’ showmanship to run gloriously unchecked. As he draws out the song’s famous crescendo to almost unbearable heights the audience roars back his lines with the sort of communal fervour only the very best pop songs – and bands – command. To pull this off with such odd subject matter and so late in life? So Pulp.

MUSIC
ATEEZ
★★★★
Qudos Bank Arena, March 6
Reviewed by MICHAEL RUFFLES

Who needs subtitles when the sex appeal is this obvious?

K-pop sensation ATEEZ were back in Sydney for the first time in seven years and declared they had grown from “boys to men” in the meantime, unleashing a marathon of music, dance, pyrotechnics and smouldering stares that threatened to melt the stadium.

For those unfamiliar, the all-caps ATEEZ are an eight-member boy band of eight years’ standing who are gathering the kind of global success BTS and Blackpink have long enjoyed. Their songs take the “every genre in a blender” approach to pop, rock and hip-hop, with added Latin influences to spice up the mix, via the occasional detour towards EDM.

Adding to the sound are the fans: the all-caps ATINY, who en masse create the kind of shrieks cicadas would complain about.

All eight together are a lot of fun: Bouncy and Fireworks (I’m the One) proved an explosive start as a one-two punch but the seduction started in earnest a few tracks in with the innuendo-laden Man on Fire.

The lust was not lost in translation.

Each also had a solo. In brief: Yunho slid to a Jackson-esque funk; Seonghwa shed his jacket as a serpent might its skin; Hongjoong took us clubbing; Wooyoung had a starry finish to a bit of a dud; bad boy San’s Creep really only kicked off when he showed his abs; charismatic rapper Mingi growled through Roar and left the crowd howling.

As a point of difference, Jongho proved ATEEZ’s answer to Gary Barlow with To Be Your Light, which you could imagine being on the soundtrack to a Korean Dawson’s Creek. Best was Yeosang as a ragged urchin raising hell at the castle gates for Legacy: by the time the band was back together for Guerrilla the crowd was chanting “break the walls”.

The solos accounted for a third of a 24-track set further padded out with music videos to cover costume changes, chit-chat and lingering cringey “I love yous”. They are at their best together, from the sweet Lemon Drop to outright bangers like Work and In Your Fantasy.

Are ATEEZ a pop machine precision-engineered for a mass market and designed to capitalise and cash in on their stars’ sex appeal? Absolutely. But, boy, they are a lot of fun.

THEATRE
Afterglow
★★½
Eternity Playhouse, March 3
Until March 22
Reviewed by JOYCE MORGAN

There’s no place to hide in this gay ménage à trois. Its three characters are exposed emotionally and, for much of the piece, literally.

Clothes are shed along with defences in this exploration of intimacy, desire, jealousy and betrayal.

Three naked, athletic, entangled figures – backlit behind a screen – writhe in ecstasy as the play opens.

Alex (Julian Curtis) and Josh (Olympic diver Matthew Mitcham) are an affluent 30-something married couple in Manhattan, who have taken a handsome young masseur, Darius (Matthew Predny), into their bed.

Alex and Josh have an open relationship, which has worked fine during their nine-year marriage and they’re now poised to become parents to a surrogate child.

What begins as a light-hearted three-way frolic with a piece of eye candy soon tests the boundaries of the couple’s relationship. Josh falls for Darius and Alex feels threatened. The eternal triangle.

Polyamory and open marriage – queer or straight – are not subjects I’ve seen explored on stage. So a work that promises to consider such taboos is intriguing.

Yet having established this unconventional relationship, the trajectory of S. Asher Gelman’s 2017 play is conventional, indeed.

Much of the play, which Gelman also directs and choreographs, unfolds through movement. Scene changes are tightly choreographed, as the actors remain in character while shifting elements of the set around.

The dialogue is staccato and largely superficial. A rare exception is Alex recalling his childhood excitement when his mother drove him from their rural home to gaze at glittering New York City, even if they could only afford to stay in Jersey City.

Workaholic Alex and emotionally demanding Josh are so self- absorbed it’s difficult to care about them. Darius is clear-eyed and a more sympathetic character. He yearns for a committed relationship and knows his entanglement with the pair works against that.

Several elements of the play feel undercooked, especially the class difference. Josh has come from money, Alex has not. Nor has Darius, who struggles to pay the rent. Yet, the impact of Josh’s entitlement is not explored.

Also underdeveloped is the couple’s impending parenthood. The unborn child feels little more than an opportunity to invent amusing baby names. As Josh and Alex’s relationship unravels, the imminent arrival is effectively forgotten. There’s no sense of who will be left holding this baby.

Ann Beyersdorfer’s sleek black set is often flooded with gold and purple tones (lighting Jamie Roderick). Mirrors and a central shower create a voyeuristic feel. Lauren Peters’ costumes – when the characters actually wear any – are mostly casual, contemporary streetwear.

As Alex, Curtis is cool and restrained, the mirror opposite of Mitcham’s needy Josh. Predny brings vulnerability and honesty to Darius and a self-awareness that the other two characters lack.

All three work hard, dare I say, to put flesh on their characters, but there’s no hiding the banality of the script.

“The heart wants what the heart wants,” says Josh. It feels a glib platitude.

Afterglow burns with physicality, but its promising premise fizzles to a predictable end.