This provocative show splits the audience into first class and economy

If you wangle front-row seats at writer and performer Mish Grigor’s show Class Act, high tea will be served.

You’ll enjoy glasses of sparkling wine. There will be printed menu cards and three-tiered porcelain trays of odd but edible hors d’oeuvres, presented on linen-draped tables.

Your view of the show – a deconstructed, closer-to-home retelling of My Fair Lady, exploring the myth of Australia as a classless society – will be unobscured.

But this is only for 12 lucky audience members.

Mish Grigor: ‘Being an artist is a privilege.’Credit: Simon Schluter

Everyone else gets a standard seat with no frills. They are a lower class. Grigor, who performs Class Act with dancer Alice Dixon, says the pre-show social hierarchy is deliberate.

“Turning a mass into two groups suddenly, having them considering each other in different ways, is one of the inroads to the piece,” she says. “It’s totally about that.”

Told from the point of view of a self-proclaimed bogan, Class Act uses Gregor’s working-class background growing up in western Sydney as inspiration for its hour-long tale of social mobility and becoming and surviving as an artist.

It also shines a spotlight on who gets to be an artist in contemporary Australia and why.

“Being an artist has so much privilege in a lot of ways,” Grigor says. “You get to travel, to absorb and read and see so many things. Everyone in the arts is so f---ing overeducated.

“But then there’s the material aspects of wealth and poverty. If you face any kind of adversity – if you get sick, if someone in your family gets sick; if you’re raising a young person or taking care of an old person – well, you can kind of run off a cliff. There’s nothing underneath you.

‘I believe in art so much … Art and culture is what makes life worth living.’

Mish Grigor

“I’m lucky. I had these structures that allowed me to be an artist. I got to make those choices. But I can’t stop because if I stop there’s no kind of safety net.”

Grigor, a member of theatre group Post and co-leader of Melbourne experimental art organisation Aphids, where Class Act premiered in 2022, says choosing to become an artist in Australia can compel other choices.

“I consciously hid a lot of my working-class past,” she says. “I didn’t talk about the rougher sides of my upbringing with my friends at drama school because I didn’t feel like it belonged in the world of art.

“But after years of making shows and making fun of those constructs around class I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if there was a version of My Fair Lady but it’s me, the bogan, who gets turned into a lady who’s a contemporary performance maker?’”

Class Act is not reenactment of My Fair Lady but it playfully links events in Grigor’s life with the story of Eliza Doolittle, the cockney flower-seller who receives etiquette lessons from phonetics professor Henry Higgins.

“It’s silly and ridiculous and it makes fun of art as well,” Grigor says

It also underlines its creator’s greatest passion despite its unstable nature.

“I believe in art so much,” Grigor says. “Sometimes it’s like a horrible addiction because sometimes I think, ‘I wish I could have a nice job that I go to where I get paid every week and I’d be happy’. But art and culture is what makes life worth living.

“That’s all I want to do. It’s the thing that makes me excited and angry and furious and sad and going to see shows, and see terrible shows. It’s what I want to dedicate my life to.”

Class Act is at the Sydney Opera House Studio, August 28-31.

Find out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday.