Midsumma Festival - Whats The Show

The Butcher, The Baker’ Serves Up Role-Shifting Revelry

12 February 2025 Megan Davis

The Butcher The Baker Rating

★★★★★

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From the opening notes, The Butcher, The Baker immediately transports you into a world reminiscent of 1930s European cabaret—glamorous, provocative, and deeply steeped in the tradition of Weimar-style performance. Written, composed, and musically directed by Ella Filar, this production is both a showcase of exuberant musicality and a shocking exploration of sexuality, identity, and the fluidity of roles that people inhabit.

Directed by Kevin Hopkins—who first encountered the script while in the Czech Republic—The Butcher, The Baker carries a distinctly European flavour. Hopkins’s stated fascination with the piece’s “grotesquery and absurdism” is evident in his staging. The narrative follows three focal characters: Honey Valik (portrayed by Natasha Broadstock), an artist deeply invested in her craft; Alex Summers (played by Claire Nicholls), a brain surgeon; and Johnny Agostino (Fletcher Dyson), a butcher who captures both character’s imaginations. Threading the story together are two captivating narrators, Myf Powell and Bruce Langdon, who serve as muses and as the voices of subconscious (and sometimes very conscious) desires.

What makes The Butcher, The Baker especially compelling is how it shifts seamlessly between riotous humour and unexpected shocks. In one moment, it revels in playful innuendo and high-spirited wordplay; in the next, it confronts the audience with overt sexuality or sudden shifts in character roles—often leaving you unsure whom you’re meant to be rooting for. This is intentional: the show’s dada-esque edge delights in keeping viewers off-balance, forcing us to question the “meaning” behind both words and actions on stage.

Throughout, Filar’s score is vibrantly eclectic. One moment, you might hear a quick staccato reminiscent of German dance halls; the next, soaring operatic passages or lively jazz. The band—**Martin Khromchenko and Lucke Schreiber on saxophones, Lyuba Khromchenko on violin, Ella Filar on keyboard, and Christos Linou and Bradon Payne on percussion—**heightens the sense of off-kilter fun, playing behind a curtain in costumes that evoke both a bustling kitchen and a risqué soirée. It’s a deliberate collision of worlds, perfectly reflecting the script’s thematic juxtapositions.

The production is a tight 75 minutes, ensuring audiences never have the chance to lose focus. At times, you might catch yourself marvelling at the sheer cheekiness of the dialogue and lyrics, only to be hurled into the next song or scene before you can fully process what just transpired. As you watch these characters grapple with their obsessions, desires, and identities, you may feel that you’re taken on a ride rather than asked to pick sides. This experience becomes more explicit when reading through the printed lyrics and programme after the show.

Chris Molyneux, the technical manager, deserves commendation for crafting a production that feels seamless yet offbeat. Lights and sound create an immersive environment, supporting the transitions between the boisterously funny and the unabashedly sensual.

If you’re seeking a conventional storyline, The Butcher, The Baker may throw you off-guard. But for anyone who revels in cabaret’s capacity to shock, surprise, and delight, this show is a feast. It’s a testament to a distinctly European tradition of theatre—a kaleidoscope of humour, sexuality, and absurdity that leaves you both entertained and intriguingly disoriented.

As Director Kevin Hopkins notes, this play’s “unpredictable plot” and “strange characters” offer a fresh, modern slant on old-world cabaret. With gender identities and roles under the spotlight, it feels very much of this moment, even as it channels the spirit of another era. Ultimately, The Butcher, The Baker is fun, fast-paced, and a tantalising entry in the Midsumma Festival line-up—and a wild ride well worth taking.

To book tickets to The Butcher The Baker, please visit https://www.theatreworks.org.au/2025/the-butcher-the-baker

This review also appears on It’s On The House. Check out more reviews at Whats The Show to see what else is on in your town.

Megan Davis

Barking Up the Right Tree

7 February 20257 February 2025 Kat Skarbek

My Queer Spiritual Entropy Rating

★★★★★

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The Motley Bauhaus is a tiny theatre at the back of a large pub in Carlton. Its intimate nature lends itself to powerful storytelling and heartfelt performances, and that’s exactly what ‘My Queer Spiritual Entropy’ (a play by Holly Rowan & The Wilderbeans) amply provides.

We are welcomed into our seats by an accompaniment of whimsical folk music played live by three child-like nature creatures. The creatures reveal themselves to be ancient trees and through music and story they begin to share with us the delights of the natural world and their places within it. We are educated about the hermaphroditic nature of some trees which possess both male and female parts within themselves and is something which makes that tree truly special, giving it the ability to self-fertilise and reproduce without external pollinators, ensuring its species survives.

However, this same natural and special ability in trees becomes something of deep concern when it happens in humans. Indeed, it becomes not just concerning but deeply antagonistic when anything happens outside of the binary of male and female in humans.

To help us understand that differences are natural and not something to be feared, the tree shares the tale of a little girl called “Holly’ who was once happy, wild and free, revelling in her unique nature but who slowly, little by little, squashes herself into the tiny gender box assigned and deemed appropriate by society, even as it slowly suffocates her. Holly is berated for being ugly, unnatural and ‘wrong’, rejected for not being a ‘proper’ female. Holly is told that their true nature is unnatural and offensive to the family, society and world in which they live. So they try to be ‘good’ and ‘fit in’, but it slowly erodes their sense of self and their connection to their true selves and makes them desperate, self-destructive and terribly lonely.

If it sounds heavy in parts, that’s because My Queer Spiritual Entropy calls attention to the lived experience of many gender-diverse people and is at times confronting, forcing us to look at our own behaviour, beliefs and binary-centric attitudes to the lives and gender, non-conforming ‘choices’ of our queer folk. At other times, the show is amusing, poking pointed but good-natured fun at the accepted roles of men and women in our society and challenging our unconscious compliance with those ideologies. Plus, nothing is funnier than a little nip at the narcissistic dark side of the personal development world, which was a highlight for me.

As a theatre-goer who was, at first, a little worried the show might disappear too much into ‘experimental’ with a side of ‘end of year school play’, I was both surprised at the complexity of the non-binary narrative and genuinely moved in several places – in particular when Holly begins to find acceptance both inside of and outside of themselves. My theatre-mate, for whom this is a lived experience, found himself reflected very clearly in the material and also shed a tear or two – such was the power of the music, the silliness, the playfulness and the raw beating heart of this eccentric, edgy but very poignant play.

I believe we, as a society, have to do better in many ways, and right now, one way in which we can do better is by learning to shake off the chains of the ‘two gender’ binary because beyond ‘man’ and ‘woman’, in the complex and often challenging landscape of queer identities, there is a vast community of people whose voices deserve to be heard. I urge you to listen.

To book tickets to My Queer Spiritual Entropy, please visit https://www.midsumma.org.au/whats-on/events/my-queer-spiritual-entropy/

Photography: by Anais Stewart

This year’s Midsumma Festival runs from 19th Jan to 9th Feb. For more information, please visit https://www.midsumma.org.au/.

This review also appears on It’s On The House. Check out more reviews at Whats The Show to see what else is on in your town.

Kat Skarbek

Tongue in Cheeks

31 January 2025 Kat Skarbek

A Body At Work Rating

★★★★★

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Whatever I thought I was expecting from the show, ‘A Body At Work, the tale of a queer woman’s 17 years, and counting, in the sex industry,’ I was not expecting the undiluted eloquence of the artist in both body and mind.

Frankie van Kan sidles onto the stage quietly, adding the finishing touches to her makeup while the audience continues to file in, tousling their art student hair-do’s and taking their seats. Whilst I, possibly the only straight woman in the audience, and certainly the only one on a date night with her husband, quietly placed my pearls within easy clutching distance. (Yes, I willingly took my man to see another woman up close and very, very personal.)

The moment the lights go down, Frankie slides quickly into action and is almost entirely naked within the first few minutes of her opening monologue. It’s an act that is both deliberate (get the nudity out of the way early and the audience can get comfortable with it) and excitingly ‘naughty’ and we are all immediately seduced by both her candour and her unabashed delight and confidence in herself.

Throughout the 80 minute show, which is an account of her 17 years of work in the sex industry, she shares raunchy stories that induce laughter and whoops of approval. She snakes and writhes her way across the stage, undeniably intoxicating, sharing genuine moments of compassion and tenderness towards her motley assortment of clients. She pokes fun at the ‘bro’ culture power dynamic that pervades her world, juxtaposing her absolute and embodied agency over her body, her pleasure and her boundaries, alongside the recognition that her body and her work are created for the male gaze, on which it relies. Throughout it all she offers us the most tantalising peek through the forbidden window of strippers and sex work.

One of the most memorable parts of the whole performance is when she answers the question of, ‘what do strippers think about when they are giving a dance?’ in a way that manages to be both shockingly candid and deeply poetic. What is truly extraordinary though is that she can flip from Aussie good humour to sex kitten stripper magic with just a playful toss of her long hair. And as easily as she pulls us nervously into that neon glittering world, she also has us pulling at the threads of our own judgemental narratives around this work and the people who do it, all with the practised ease of a remarkable woman and performer.

Despite this show being marketed to the wonderful queer folk of our beautiful city as part of ‘Midsumma,’ I truly believe that this is a show for everyone (over the age of 18). It is beautifully acted, exceptionally well-written with real cheek, genuine warmth and admirable honesty. Frankie herself is intelligent, seductive, insightful, funny and incredibly perceptive. An artist revealing to us the soft underbelly of this curious, discomfiting, often taboo industry and the surprisingly resilient people who work within it, all while offering humorous, sharp-eyed social commentary. I also want to give a shout-out to her chameleonic and energetic supporting actor/stage hand, who, though uncredited, does not go unnoticed or unappreciated and whose ‘male gaze’ was both humorous and touching.

As much as I have waxed lyrical about this show because it truly was a pleasure to watch and participate in its playful intimacy, I do have one small criticism, and that was that it ended too abruptly. The finale came unexpectedly while everyone was still deliciously absorbed in the story and seemed strangely at odds with the energy of the rest of the show, which was far more deliberate. Perhaps I just wasn’t ready for it to end.

To book tickets to A Body At Work, please visit https://www.theatreworks.org.au/2025/abodyatwork

This review also appears on It’s On The House. Check out more reviews at Whats The Show to see what else is on in your town.

Kat Skarbek

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