IRL review: Looking for love at a fan convention, dressed as a Disney Princess

IRL ★★★½
Roundhouse Theatre, until November 25

All the world’s a pop culture convention, and all the men and women and non-binaries, merely cosplayers.

Thus wrote Shakespeare – unless I’m misremembering – in As You Like It, one of the inspirations for Brisbane playwright Lewis Treston’s new piece.

A queer teen romcom set in Brisbane in 2018, IRL also has echoes of Oscar Wilde’s maxim about the truth of masks. I suspect, in addition, he’s been watching Everything Everywhere All At Once.

Will Bartolo stars in La Boite’s IRL as a gay teen with a Disney Princess fixation.Credit: Morgan Roberts

Treston is a bright light on the playwriting scene, and there’s an element of literary cosplay to his two big successes to date. An Ideal Husband, which debuted at La Boite last year, relocated Oscar Wilde’s 1895 drawing-room comedy to Canberra in the dying days of the Keating government. Hubris & Humiliation, a contemporary queer take on Jane Austen’s comedies of manners and money, was the hit of WorldPride when it opened at the Sydney Theatre Company in January.

IRL is set at a fan convention – one of those overpriced events where actors and comic-book artists meet the fans, who often come in costume. It’s ostensibly a love story, but asks some serious questions about the kind of people we’re becoming: namely, digital slaves to a rapidly shrinking pool of globalised electric dreams.

Alexei (Will Bartolo) is 17, comfortable with his sexuality, but desperately lonely. His dress-up of choice is Disney Princess, and he feels the best way to meet the boy he’s been flirting with on Messenger in real life would be in the fantasy playground of the Supanova Comic-Con & Gaming Expo.

Alexei’s best friend, Taylor (Rachel Nutchey), is attending the expo as an honoured guest, as she’s an upcoming Hollywood starlet about to appear in a superhero flick. Taylor’s teen crisis is of another order entirely: she’s struggling with the dual pressures of managing her exploding career and the fear of not appearing sufficiently woke in the eyes of social media.

When Alexei finally meets his crush, Thaddeus (Byron Lankester Howells), he panics and opts to keep his identity secret. Hijinks, as always, ensue. Thaddeus is still in the closet and also unsure of himself away from online spaces. A fan of old movies, which in the gay world would once have given him cultural cachet, Thaddeus has to recalibrate in order to relate to Alexei, who has never heard of Tab Hunter or Sunset Boulevard.

Rachel Nutchey (foreground) and Byron Lankester Howells in IRL.Credit: Morgan Roberts

And this, arguably, is the play’s real subject: the shrinking of attention spans, cultural references and imaginations. Despite some sparkling romcom dialogue, the boy-meets-boy plot line starts to disappear under a series of delirious pop culture gestures (amusingly kitted out by designer Anthony Spinaze): a Mario Brothers gaming scene; a Scooby-Doo-style chase; a superhero boss battle.

The result is an oddly terrifying glimpse into the digital world we’ve created for our imaginative lives: a place of endless channel surfing, swiping left, going down rabbit holes and doom-scrolling.

Fan conventions are denounced as “a noxious miasma of pop culture’s complicity with capitalism” – which is a darker verdict than many audience members would expect, and you have to admire Treston for going there, even if his play has the same exhausting-yet-not-quite-satisfying quality of an Avengers epic.

Director Sanja Simic has worked with Treston for three years to get IRL to the Roundhouse. Her cast, all making their La Boite debuts, manage multiple costume changes deftly, and Bartolo makes for an especially charming and likeable lead.

It would have been nice just to sit back and enjoy more of his banter.