photo by Phil Erbacher
"Mum Club" looks at a recent indigenous mother who's moved to Sydney from Perth for her partner's career, and is suddenly raising a child without any of her family connections. Her attempts to join a local mothers club find her in the middle of what might technically be called "white women's nonsense", while the Redfern Medical Centre may just offer her the friendship she needs, together with some bonding over the power of Romantasy fiction.
Jorjia Gillis' play wanders a bit in tone between broad satire and more emotional drama - protagonist Sadie faces threats both comic and more serious - but it captures the isolation that new motherhood can create and the desire to create connections that aren't necessarily the best for you. Stephane Somerville carries the weight of much of the dramatic side of the equation while also being the straight-women to some of the broader comic roles of the rest of the cast - Alex Malone and Ruby Teys are mostly playing broad caricatures, while Megan Wilding brings a warmth to her supportive role as someone slightly more trustworthy. Ian Michael's production tends to attempt to surf the tone shifts but in the tiny Belvoir Downstairs space feels slightly clunky as the shifts in location and mood aren't always achieved smoothly.
It does feel slightly like a more pointed political comedy has been a little defanged in the rewrites and the production into something a bit more crowd-pleaser, and while it certainly gets the laughs, the truths underneath tend to go wanting a little. It's not unpolished but there does seem to be a gutsier version of this that would have hit harder on the genuine dillemmas of indigenous women traversing spaces that claim to value diversity but only seem to value diversity as a nice flashy token, not as a way to understand others' experiences.
In short, this feels like this lands more in the "pleasant night out" than "essential theatre" - it is certainly still pleasant and, again, the ideas underneath seem interesting but they're not really brought out in the open to get full exploration.
