IRL: Review

I often try to go into shows blind. I’ll read up on the cast, the director, see if there’s anyone I recognise from past shows so I can continue my vaguely parasocial relationship with them, but the meat and bones of the show, the narrative, I want to take me off guard.

Having seen Lewis Treston’s IRL at KXT, I can safely say that I could give you the entire script right here in this review and it would still catch you off-guard, you’d still be leaving the show feeling like you’ve had the most transformative 100 minutes of your life.

I’m not going to do that, though. That would be silly. 

What I will do, however, is tell you that this show is one of the most intense, vibrant, passionate works I’ve seen. 

It’s absurd and sort of feels like a dream, in the sense that all of its many moving parts and layers click together perfectly while you’re in the logic of it, this weird subconscious realm where reality means something else, and then you leave and as the cold air of reality hits you - you realise how truly (in the best way) bizarre that experience was.

Photo credit Justin Cueno

Four cast members bring this potently surreal show to life, with Andrew Fraser starring as Alexei, a more than slightly neurotic seventeen year old who loves cosplay tumblr. Leon Walsh and Bridget Haberecht each have ‘core’ characters they play incredibly well. 

Respectively, this is Thaddeus, Alexei’s friend (and maybe something more?!) from Tumblr, and Taylor, Alexei’s longtime bestie whose become the latest big thing in the Marvel cinema-product machine.

These two actors, alongside Dominic Lui, all have additional roles filling out just about everyone else in the play - all fleeting snippets of other people’s lives at Supanova, where the bulk of the show takes place. Lui doesn’t have a more concrete, returning character like the other players, but my god he fills out all the Supanova staples with ease - screaming fangirl whose lost something at the convention, half-stoned dudebro in a Pikachu onesie, hallucinogenic tropical fish, his range is staggering.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, a show named “IRL” asks a lot of questions about what is an isn’t real. It doesn’t do this in a very subtle way, kind of like a really bad trip-sitter asking distressing philosophical questions to wig everyone else out, but it doesn’t need to be subtle when it’s got such a brilliant story to tell. It’s a pop culture convention. Literally nothing is subtle.

Alexei and his longtime online crush, Thaddeus, have never met IRL (heh), and compounding this is the fact that they’ve never even seen photos of one another. What could take a turn into a fairly gruesome digital fable spins off into an incredibly emotional, incredibly compelling, and more than a little twisted love story.

Photo Credit Justin Cueno

Suffice to say that this show does about every interesting thing it can with the idea of what is and isn’t real in a place where everyone is pretending to be a video game or anime character, but what really ties this show together is the person who we know both in and out of cosplay - Alexei.

Alexei is downright unlikeable at times, but in a way that feels so ‘right’ for a 17 year old still trying to figure out what life is that it doesn’t come across as grating or really anything less than hilarious. 

This show is a tremendous effort from some truly talented people in the industry, you will finish the show having cackled to the point of nearly falling off your seat, and then at the end of the show you’ll get up, leave the theatre, and wonder if anything you just saw - or anything at all - was real.

5 Stars

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