Sydney Reviews

WTF? OMG! A LGBTQIA+ play, IRL at KXT. LOL.

Show opens with Alexei, teenage gay cosplayer, pretty in pink princess frock and tiara, in a tizz regarding her first In Real Life date with long term online crush.

Alexei seeks advice and support from TV celebrity and best friend, Taylor, who is going through her own mid career crisis. 

Written by Lewis Treston, IRL very loosely borrows from AYLI (As You Like It), the play predominately concerns the particular way some young people first begin to come to terms with their identity, often by curating the media they consume then emulating their favourite characters and inhabiting these fictional worlds. It’s not a new phenomenon, it just has a larger, more sophisticated platform and reach in this era of the internet on our planet of the apps.

The script is stuffed with pop culture references, some as old as Shakespeare, some so newly minted, TBH, there were some allusions that alluded me.

NTL, IRL runs on a dramatic dynamic and attention demanding pace with Star Wars and superhero stunts, costume changes from frocks and frills to capes and cowls. Masks are major, physically and metaphorically.

Directed by Eugene Lynch, the cast of four present a chaotic construction drawn from the debris of ideas that litter the piece.

BTW, Andrew Fraser as Alexei is superb, a high anxiety processor who deals with doubt like a devout, an oscillation of identity crisis brilliantly and charmingly evoked.

Bridget Haberecht as Taylor as well as assorted aliases is equally sensational, juggling characters with kaleidoscopic conjuring.

Leon Walsh as Thaddeus, among others, bringing dinosaur cultural references to dandy aspects in amber and Dominic Lui as Mullet and others, brings a brutalist chorus of sorts.

Lewis Treston does a Lewis Carroll with IRL, a through the looking glass adventure into a weird Wonderland. It’s a dress up mess up where all’s well that ends well.

Five emojis.