REVIEW: Soup Friends

Experimental works always have a fine line to walk, straying between the two pits of “beating the audience over the head with subtext” and “so vague you’re left wondering if the scriptwriter wasn’t just a cat walking across a keyboard.”

Soup Friends is experimental - a play on plays, some theatre on theatre, an incredibly meta production full of self-deprecation and absurdity - but the results of this experiment in theatre couldn’t be more hilarious and incisive.  

A macabre, fatalistic sense of humour pervades this show, it’s not interested in putting on a “good show” so much as it is subverting every aspect of what makes a show good. But for a production that tries its best to be bad, it really is filled with laughs. 

Photo Credit: Tom Noble

The entire show focuses on two self-involved and more than a little manic playwrights, Luey and Harry, going through the rigours of putting on a show, from conceptualisation through to opening night. A bizarre “Crooner” named Cooper Donald McDonald is also there, who seems to want nothing to do with the production of the play, and yet is a crux of the entire show. 

Soup Friends is a 50 minute thought experiment, hypothetical, and peer into the minds of some truly talented - and truly twisted - theatrical creators. It’s hilarious, bite-sized, and will stick around in your brain for a disproportionate amount of time compared to its runtime. 

Bonus points for being finished by 7pm so people who live far from the city don’t have to traipse through Sydney after 10 o’clock, when the walls come to life and the streetlights begin talking. 

4 out of 5 Stars

Soup Friends closes tonight 20th September for tickets click here