Sydney Reviews

Liability. As delivered by Iolanthe as Reality TV celebrity Nia to her producer, Jess, the word sounds like liar-bility. Apt and onomatopoeic considering Jess’ unalloyed ability to lie.

The fluid state between fact and fiction, fabrication and selective truth snakes through The Edit, Gabrielle Scawthorn’s scathing look at Reality TV, the reality behind the manufactured manipulation masquerading as verisimilitude.

Seeking celebrity fame and fortune, Nia is a contestant on Match or Snatch, a sort of Big Brother/Married at First Sight type programme on which Jess is focused on forging her own fame and fortune as a high-profile content maker. Seemingly sisters in arms with their eyes on the collective prize, a traumatic event fractures and frays their trust.

Control and consent come into question and contention in this blisteringly fierce tour de force about the fake and frippery of Reality TV and its pernicious, vicious underbelly.

This is thrilling theatre, thoughtful, insightful, incendiary with two knockout performances, Iolanthe as Nia and Matilda Ridgway as Jess, a dynamic duo of duplicity and competitiveness, both redactive and revisionist in pursuit of reward.

Written and directed by Gabrielle Scawthorn, The Edit boasts an excellent, evocative and flexible set design by Ruby Jenkins, brilliantly augmented by Phoebe Pilcher’s lighting and Alyx Dennison and Madeleine Picard’s propulsive sound design.

The Edit is a first class play, the bedrock foundation of a first class production, a serious but simultaneously very funny drama that analyses personal problems in tandem with the social problems that encircle and partly create them. High pressure writing with the fullest kind of insight performed and produced with persuasive and pervasive power.