Two Cents: JOY (Sydney Fringe)
It’s the older Paul we meet first. We see him sitting on a hospital bed. Its sheets are so brutally bleached and ruthlessly sanitised, they seem to mock the grizzled, broken man clutching at its frame. In an exteriorised inner monologue, punctuated by yelps and grunts of pain, Paul wonders how he got there. In that ward, specifically, because he can’t for the life of him remember, even though his battered body has been there countless times before. But also how all the decisions and indecisions, all the critical emotional moments in his tender adolescence, have led him to this wretched recursion, fifty years on. Self-exiled in shadows, he seeks pain for its safety, its familiarity, and the transcendent power of submitting to it willingly.
The younger Paul then erupts from the audience. First to play out his present-past. Then to reach across time.
At Qtopia for Fringe, this tightly choreographed two-hander is a bruising examination of a gay man reflecting on the traumatic origin story of how he came into his sexuality, and its long shadow through a life. Charlie Dashford and John Michael Narres are our two Pauls, and each vibrates with an emotional intensity, the pulp that’s left of their heart thudding restlessly.
Written and Directed by Sudip Limbu, much of JOY deals with our sole character’s homophobic mother and her rejection of her son; and of Paul’s sexual kink for degradation, humiliation, and blinding pain. In suggesting a correlation between them, it broaches that mysterious, contested and unresolved terrain of how kinks and fetishes get made. It also makes JOY a dark and exceptionally bleak counterstory to the beautiful, wholesome gatherings celebrating such proclivities on the very same hallowed LGBT strip every week. Without love, without community, Paul got lost. How many others have in Sydney’s history?
JOY propels its provocations in a unique sculpture, with the speech and movements of Dashford and Narres in a clever temporal and thematic weave. Are we seeing two timelines running parallel, uncannily converging? Or is the older man – who’s just got his head bludgeoned in, medicated by doctors and himself – being haunted by his younger self, whom he cannot escape?
Just 40 minutes long, JOY doesn’t go in much for its titular emotion. But it does pack a punch.
JOY
By Sudip Limbu
Sydney Fringe
The Loading Dock, Qtopia
Until 27 September 2025
