Mirror Mirror | MICF 2026

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https://www.comedyfestival.com.au/browse-shows/mirror-mirror/

Date Reviewed: 01/04/2026

Spending an evening with Roisin McAlinden feels less like watching a comedy show and more like catching up with a brutally honest, very funny friend. She greets you at the door, takes your name, and shows you to your seat. “Your usher is also the show. Cost cuts,” she jokes, instantly collapsing the distance between performer and audience.

The setting helps. The upstairs theatre at Motley Bauhaus is cosy and intimate. the perfect match for her confessional, conversational style. It doesn’t feel like a performance so much as being let in on something.

Her debut, Mirror Mirror, leans fully into that intimacy. The premise is deceptively simple: a fairytale gone wrong. What begins as a Disney-style “Prince Charming” story gradually unravels into something darker, with references from Disney to the Brothers Grimm providing a clever structural spine.

“Fairy tales are basically a recruitment strategy,” she quips, skewering the myth of happily ever after as a lifetime of emotional labour. Later, she lands the show’s thesis cleanly: “He’s not a misunderstood prince under a mysterious curse… you’re just a girl. And he’s just a frog.”

McAlinden dissects love, dating apps, and therapy-speak with sharp, self-aware humour. “I thought dating someone who’d been to therapy would be a green flag… turns out some people just go to get a doctor’s note for their red flags,” she says, drawing knowing laughs. There’s a looseness to her performance that gives it spark, particularly in her crowd work, where she’s quick, playful, and completely at ease. 

"How do you think you and your partner will end?" she asks one member of the audience. 

"One of us will probably die and the other will be very angry," is the response.

Some lines linger long after: “I don’t fuck with people who don’t fuck with croutons,” she deadpans, in a bit about niche dating apps, specifically one for salad eaters. Moments like this make you wonder how she isn’t already better known, there’s real presence here.

As the show deepens, drawing on a painful breakup and her navigation of dating and queer identity, it becomes most compelling. “Have you ever been with someone who’s done something so bad you know you’ll never tell the girlies?” she asks, a line that lands with uncomfortable recognition. Her willingness to sit in the awkward, the painful, the not-quite-funny-yet is where the show finds its edge.

There are moments where the performance could breathe more. At times, McAlinden rushes, moving quickly from one story to the next, and the delivery can sit at a single intensity that occasionally flattens otherwise strong material.

Still, the promise is undeniable. McAlinden has a clear voice and a willingness to go to uncomfortable places: or, as she puts it, the kind where you’re “sobbing in the street… wasting a perfectly good kebab.” That honesty gives the show its bite.

By the end, the message lands with quiet clarity: “The person that little girl needed to save her all along was actually me.” It’s a slightly bittersweet conclusion, but it feels earned. There’s no prince coming, just the messy, ongoing work of figuring yourself out. And as you leave, you find yourself wanting exactly what the show invites: to grab a drink with a friend and debrief the chaos in between. 

Highlights

• The intimate, atmospheric room at Motley Bauhaus
• The Disney prince audience game
• Sharp, quotable one-liners
• The rate the Disney princes challenge from gruff ones like Shrek and the Beast to the generic ones of Snow White, Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella
• If you're a Gen X, you'll learn new things, such as the meaning of 'cheugy'
• McAlinden’s natural crowd work
• McAlinden's ability to put her entire fist in her mouth (we wish she wouldn't, but wow!)

Who’s it for?

• Fans of confessional, storytelling comedy
• Feminists and supporters of gender diversity
• Anyone who enjoys relationship humour with bite
• Audiences who like their comedy a little dark and a little self-aware
• Fairytale fans.

Reviewed by Mary Sinanidis