What's Yours
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https://www.redstitch.net/whats-yours-2025
Date Reviewed: 03/08/2025
We all got what we wanted
Red Stitch Actors Theatre has a history of reliably solid and intimate work—the kind of theatre where actors stare meaningfully at the audience. I love the crowd at any Red Stitch production. They're the well-dressed, plump, must we drink our Shiraz in a plastic glass? kind of gentlefolk, always keen to embrace some independent culture. I sat next to John and Lorraine. They were lovely.
What's Yours is an original play written by Keziah Warner, centred on the long and difficult relationship between Jo, Lia, and Simon. The play explores, in the playwright's own words, the ...politicisation of women's choices as well as lives lived on their own terms.
It opens with a drunken 21st birthday party that sets the wrong tone almost immediately. It puts the audience in a mindset that works against the rest of the piece. The transition to the next scene is especially clumsy. Simon, putting on a sweater and glasse,s felt more high-school production than independent theatre. The whole opening was rushed and staccato, rather than matching the much more languid pace of the rest of the show.
What's Yours has an interesting narrative and intriguing characters. But it feels more like a bourgeois drama of intrigue than an honest exploration of modern gender politics. Doctors, writers, and advertising executives sipping wine and squabbling about parenthood. Madame Bovary in Melbourne's affluent suburbs.
Adoption is briefly mentioned, then quickly cast aside with the line we look bad on paper—as it so often is in stories about IVF. I felt the absence of a child in Simon and Lia's relationship. They seemed happy together, but you could feel the child-shaped void before they even spoke about it.
Christina O.'Neill shone as a major asset to the show. Her ability to control her character's authority and presence in every scene impressed me. That alone is worth the ticket price.
In terms of writing, I enjoyed Jo's Sartre-and-Camus-inspired Every Day Is a Saturday monologue about living life for life's sake. In this case, the lighting did a disservice to what should have been an intense moment of character-driven dialogue.
What's Yours is a thoughtful piece of theatre that plays with powerful, contemporary ideas. I just would have liked more. More character moments, more depth, more risk, and more humour. As it stands, I left the theatre with my chin in my hand, not my heart in my throat.