Two Cents: The Edit
Image: Robert Catto
What wild dreamings take place in Belvoir downstairs. Going through that dark vestibule feels like entering into some secret cave crawling with questions, or being put to boil in a simmering cauldron, or materialising in a hollow space in which a fantastic ganglion of this city’s creative mind convulses.
It’s been a particularly wild 2025 season, and closing show The Edit not only takes the cake, but eats it up too – and then plunges the cake knife into the bleeding heart of anyone’s naively optimistic ideas about the state of progressive feminism. The playwrighting debut of Gabrielle Scawthorn, who also directs, the story muscles up as it descends down into shuddering circles of hell in three acts: before, during and after a new season of the long-running reality TV dating show, Catch or Snatch.
Legit Theatre Co. and Unlikely Productions did themselves a solid by casting its two-hander from two other of the best new plays this year. The undeniable, incandescent (actual goddess?) Iolanthe from SISTREN plays Nia, a fresh yet canny contestant headed to the mansion to find true love (i.e. followers and fame). Matilda Ridgway returns to 25a to play another woman of unsound mind following March’s unforgettable Furious Mattress. Here though, as Nia’s ‘minder’ Jess, she’s far less sympathetic. In fact, her character may be one of the most odious, unscrupulous, pathetic, calculating, cowardly, morally repulsive, compulsively lying snivelling bitches you will encounter in fiction. I hope to never in real life turn over a stone and find such a grub.
At first, the two appear to find a cool mutual recognition in each other’s ambitions and wiles. Each are expert players of the mirror world game, eyes conspiratorially trained on the prize of getting Nia to be the first globally adored black reality show star. But they’ve both failed to get an accurate read on the other. The costs of underestimation are irreversible. For Nia in particular, they’re incalculable.
After ‘the event’ (no spoilers), through Jess’s sickening machinations, trauma becomes weaponised as blackmail, and repackaged as self-actualisation. Reality is a thing which can be finessed. Gaslighting yourself and others become a noble means of survival; a clever hack to beat an unfair system. ‘The truth is what you put into it,’ she explains to Nia. Doesn’t she want to control her own image? Her own narrative? Why throw the dream away just to claim the disempowering identity of victim?
The writing is terrific – bold, rage-fuelled and biting – but what makes The Edit such a triumph is Iolanthe’s Nia. Even as she blunders into Jess’s web, even at her most vulnerable, she never reneges on her dignity or her deeply held truths. The vitality of Iolanthe’s performance, also witnessed in SISTREN (which was voted ‘best play’ by Time Out Sydney’s critics), will bowl audiences over, and undoubtedly bring them to whatever she’s appearing in next.
In the meantime, there’s The Edit. I don’t do stars, but giving this one five.
The Edit
By Gabrielle Scawthorn
25a x Legit Theatre Co. x Unlikely Productions
Belvoir Downstairs Theatre
Until 26 October 2025
