Theatre

Pramkicker, produced by independent feminist company MO Theatre for Queensland Theatre, explores women’s anger – channelling it through humour. By Yen-Rong Wong.

MO Theatre’s Pramkicker

This year, Queensland Theatre kicked off Door 3, its program of works by independent Queensland-based theatre collectives, by welcoming the audience to a somewhat awkward anger management session, complete with free cordial and an invitation to mingle with fellow theatregoers.

It’s the beginning of Pramkicker, by British playwright and actor Sadie Hasler. Directed by Amy Ingram and Nerida Matthaei, it’s produced by MO Theatre, who make “contemporary theatre that elevates female perspectives and amplifies the work of female creatives”.

We learn that we’re all here because Jude (Sarah Ann McLeod) kicked over a woman’s (empty) pram in a coffee shop. Accompanied by her little sister Susie (Sarah Ogden) and presided over by Janet, a judgey, disembodied voice, we start to dig into the moments that led to this incident.

It’s a physical, visually compelling re-enactment, with Matthaei’s choreography complemented by Brady Watkins’ clever sound design. The transitions in and out of slow motion combined with incisive, rapid-fire dialogue – including a healthy dose of swearing and mentions of vaginas – provide both drama and hilarity. We all want to know what really made Jude boil over so badly: it turns out it wasn’t just because the woman’s pram was an obstacle between her and her morning coffee.

Ogden and McLeod play multiple minor characters in addition to Susie and Jude. Their transitions between characters are whip-smart and seamless, switching from Jude’s bogan ex-boyfriend, to Belinda, a posh British woman who is in denial about her suppressed rage towards her husband and who also attends Jude’s anger-management sessions.

Humour has always been an effective way to prompt conversations on difficult subjects. Pramkicker uses it to raise a dialogue around abortion and sexual assault. These topics are handled with care, albeit with a wry twist, and there are some truths that even humour can’t blunt. This juxtaposition between levity and brutal honesty parallels the whiplash women experience on a daily basis.

Susie, who is eight years younger than Jude, is calmer and more earnest than her big sister. These personality traits are reflected in their outfits – Ogden is dressed head to toe in shades of pink, while McLeod sports a white shirt and red trousers.

Ada Lukin’s set design expands on these sartorial choices. A bar is stage left, and the space is split down the middle by a diagonal swathe of pink – an area the audience isn’t allowed to step over during the “audience participation” phase of the play. A cloth poster with the words “Stay cool, man. Find your mantra”, alongside a baby wearing sunglasses, hangs from the right-hand side of the stage, foreshadowing the play’s main themes.

Christine Felmingham’s lighting bathes the stage in light pink with interludes for confessions, which are preceded by a ding and lit softly in green. These recollections, such as Susie recounting how Jude taught her to swim, are often made in earnest – a contrast with Jude’s feisty sarcasm – and cement the sisterly bond that lies at Pramkicker’s heart. While Susie idolised Jude when they were growing up, she’s now unafraid to talk back and put her in her place. Though they are adults, they still play-slap each other, and Susie twists Jude’s ear until she gives in to her baby sister’s demands. They are gentle and mean to each other in equal measure, a recognisable relationship for anyone with siblings or even friends who are treated like family.

Though Jude is Susie’s mother figure, thanks to some poor choices by their parents, she has also known since she was a teenager that she never wanted to be a mother. The show explores this tension between the pressure to be a mother, which is inflicted both socially and personally, and the active choice not to have children and what it means for the way we see and value women.

It often seems that things are going backwards. Over the past few years, social media – notably Instagram and TikTok – has seen the rise of the tradwife – women who (claim to) ascribe to a lifestyle where the man is the head of the household and the woman the keeper of all things domestic. Many of these women are proudly anti-feminist.

In such family models, to be a mother – and a woman – is to be soft, nurturing and polite. They’re a demonstration of how motherhood is weaponised by the patriarchy – and then by women themselves – to police unattainable ideals of womanhood and femininity. There is still an assumption that a woman isn’t truly fulfilled – and isn’t a real woman – if she doesn’t have or want to have children.

This programming starts young – Jude mentions her father’s horror at her penchant for ripping off her dolls’ heads, dismembering them and burying the pieces around the yard. This is only topped by Susie’s confession that she’d found them all when she was a child, dug them up and combined them with utensils and bits and pieces from the shed to make her own creepy yet adorable playmates. It makes for a corker of a last scene, where Susie and Jude are wheeled on stage, lazing on sunlounges in their garden, and Susie recovers this box of uncanny toys.

Social expectations are also visible in Pramkicker’s sly cultural references, many of which are specific to the dying years of the 20th century. Transitions between scenes are cut with jingles and slogans from Pantene and Olay, brands associated with trying to attain a certain beauty standard, and Chicken Tonight – an advertising campaign and jingle I can still remember from my childhood and that ties motherhood inextricably to domesticity.

Allusions to works such as Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, Enid Blyton’s The Magic Faraway Tree and the late ’80s pop hit “Heaven Is a Place on Earth” hint at a nostalgic world view that sees women only as dutiful wives and home and baby-makers.

It is sobering that Pramkicker feels more relevant than ever among increasing attempts around the world to erode women’s rights to their own bodies. In one horrifying example, the Dobbs decision in the United States, which overturned the right to legal abortions, has resulted in a brain-dead woman in Georgia being kept on life support since February until her baby can be delivered, which is planned for August.

In times like these we turn to art, both to escape the world and to make sense of it. Pramkicker is an ode to the paradoxical nature of femininity, a celebration and dark recognition of the complexities of existing as a woman now.

Pramkicker is playing at the Diane Cilento Studio, Brisbane, until June 7.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on June 7, 2025 as "All the rage".

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