By Geethika Aranhiyullathil
There is a particular kind of terror reserved for new mothers who move to a city where they know no one, and Jorjia Gillis's Mum Club wastes no time plunging us into it. Newly arrived in Sydney’s Inner West, young Yuin mum Sadie (Stephanie Somerville) is thrust into the absurd world of modern “mum culture”, where social media advice is endless, mum guilt is unavoidable, and the people most eager to tell her how to parent are nowhere to be found when she actually needs help. It’s a performative sisterhood, happy to pay lip service to your culture and pretend to care, until and unless you reveal yourself as the worst thing you could possibly be as a mum: dun dun dun… a cow milk drinker.
Director Ian Michael, working from Gillis's script, understands that the sharpest satire lives in specificity, and Mum Club is relentlessly, gloriously specific about its targets.
We have our Eastern Suburbs princess, who’s moved from Bondi to the Inner West “for love” - if not for the (self-proclaimed) huge house - brilliantly brought to life by Alex Malone. She’s the living embodiment of those women you see on social media and hate yourself for envying: the perfect house, the perfect pram, the perfect body, and, of course, the newborn who somehow sleeps eight hours a night. Her condescending, backhanded comments are always disguised as concern, understanding and kindness. She’s the supposedly effortless, aspirational version of motherhood, at least from the outside. As the play unravels, so do the characters’ carefully constructed lives, revealing the cracks beneath the curated perfection.
Then there’s Malone’s sidekick played by Ruby Teys - an insufferable woman who seems to tolerate Sadie less out of genuine friendship than for the social optics of having an Indigenous woman in the group. It’s a performative allyship she struggles to disguise, repeatedly singling Sadie out and drawing attention to her identity under the guise of inclusion.
The only person who seems to be in Sadie’s corner is the group’s gay dad, played by Zarif - one of the few characters who appears genuinely normal. That is, until he is transformed into a blonde bombshell who’s just moved from Sydney’s North Shore, complete with a long blonde wig and enormous prosthetic breasts. The commitment to the bit is so complete that the audience’s laughter nearly drowns out his next line.
These aren't caricatures so much as composite sightings, anyone who has spent five minutes in Enmore or Newtown will recognise every single one of them, wincing all the way.
Where the play earns its stripes, though, is in refusing to let the comedy be the whole story. Beneath the sage-burning and the group-chat politics is a genuinely tender study of Blak motherhood, community and sisterhood - the kind that doesn't get written about nearly enough on mainstage Sydney theatre. Sadie's isolation isn't just the isolation of new motherhood; it's the specific ache of building a life and raising a child far from Country and family, surrounded by people who mistake performative solidarity for actual support. The play doesn't spell this out in a monologue and pat itself on the back for it but rather lets the notorious and satirised white women of the mum club do the talking.
There’s something particularly endearing about Sadie disappearing into trashy romance novels whenever motherhood becomes too much. It’s through them that she meets and bonds with her greatest ally and source of support: the receptionist at the Aboriginal Medical Service and fellow Indigenous mother, played by Megan Wilding. Together, they use fiction as an escape when the real world becomes too loud. I found myself unexpectedly moved by it, mostly because it’s rare to see a play this honest about the fact that sometimes the only self-care available to an exhausted, hormonal new mother is a dog-eared paperback with a shirtless man on the cover.
Mum Club is crude in the best way - dirty jokes, bodily fluids and all - and it never once feels gratuitous, because the crudeness is always in service of something true about how undignified and strange early motherhood actually is. Verity Hampson's lighting and the production's overall design deserve real credit here too: the transitions between scenes are slick, the set does a lot of heavy lifting in, particularly in establishing the claustrophobia and isolation of Sadie's rental.
If there's a wrinkle in an otherwise confident production, it's the pace of Sadie's own resolution. Her acceptance of herself as a mother arrives a little too quickly on the heels of scenes where she's still visibly in anguish over it, and the immersion slips in that gap. Part of this seems to be because so much of her emotional development happens through jokes and through the parallel arc of the receptionist character, who moves quickly through her own journey largely to nudge Sadie toward her realisation. Albeit an efficient device, it does make Sadie’s own realisations seem mildly abrupt. It's a minor ask of a tight comedy running at this length, but it's the one place the timing and journey of the play slips.
Mum Club is a sharp, filthy, and unexpectedly tender play that clocks exactly how ridiculous modern-day parenting culture can be while never losing sight of the woman standing in the middle of it, just trying to find someone to call at 3am. Griffin has found something special in Gillis's voice, and I suspect this Mum Club will have a very long membership list.
Mum Club is playing at Belvoir St Theatre's Downstairs Theatre until 20 September.