Kimberly (Michelle Braiser) is a young woman with no inhibitions who barrels through life doing exactly what she wants, when she wants. She shoves cake into a woman’s face because she wants her to shut up. She dares a sales assistant to expose himself in the make-up section of a department store. She traumatises her court-appointed psychiatrist. She is possibly mentally ill, certainly eccentric, and struggling deeply with the madness of reality. When she meets Miles (‘I’m in Brand Development … I’m in charge of running ideation seminars where we focus on customer delight levels’), she falls instantly in love. But Miles (George Lingard) is engaged and doesn’t love her back. Instead, he makes her a deal: if she becomes his fiancée Lily’s best friend, he’ll give her a kiss.

Emily Milledge and Michelle Brasier in The Feather in the Web (photograph by Pier Carthew)

It is a story of unrequited love – that most tragic of fodder – but Coyle queers the lens, holding up the heterosexual relationship as a sort of deranged centrepiece of a society sick with self-obsession. As Kimberly befriends Lily (Emily Milledge), she descends into a world of corporate karaoke retreats (complete with Shania Twain), gym classes (‘BodyPunish, have you done it?’), and goal-setting (asked where she sees herself in five years, Kimberly replies, ‘in love or dead’).

The Feather in the Web takes a tragic heroine and plants her in a comic world. But this subversion of form doesn’t quite work. For all her bizarre intrigue, we never really care about Kimberly. She has no past, no future, and never shows true love or even infatuation with Miles, but rather a sort of crazed, inexplicable obsession. When Kimberly accompanies Lily to an insufferable improv class, the teacher tells her:

‘You’re just a girl standing alone in a void, got it?’

‘Way ahead of you,’ she replies blankly. 

This is what it feels like to watch both Kimberly and the play itself: there is nothing to  grab hold of, no character to connect with, and no reason to care.  

Coyle attempts to fill this void with otherworldly interludes that show the world through Kimberly’s looking glass. In one scene, blue light floods the stage and people speak to her in a slow-motion, made-up language. In another, the aura preceding a migraine is embodied by a middle-aged woman in a fairy costume. These bizarre glimpses into Kimberly’s mind have the potential to provide moments of genuine connection and empathy, an unlikely anchor in the anarchy. Instead, they feel detached and pretentious.

Kimberly has a lot in common with Villanelle, the queer, psychopathic anti-hero of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s television series Killing Eve. While they share the same detached bafflement at the world around them, Kimberly lacks Villanelle’s complexity, and Braiser, while delivering a solid performance, lacks the charm and magnetism required to elevate Kimberly beyond the sort of Manic-Pixie-Nightmare-Girl depicted in Coyle’s script.

The other actors do their best with what they are given, and occasionally manage to provide glimpses of humanity that help balance out the chaos. Emily Milledge imbues Lily with a complexity that elevates a vacuous character to a tragicomic portrayal of loneliness. Belinda McClory takes a few scenes to warm up, but her portrayal of Miles’s drunk, cynical mother is a pitch-perfect rendering of a yoga-pants-wearing, McMansion-dwelling WASP whose life didn’t turn out how she imagined.

Michelle Brasier, Emily Milledge, Patrick Durnan Silva, Belinda McClory, George Lingard, and Georgina Naidu in The Feather and the Web (photograph by Pier Carthew)

Brynna Lowen’s set design slices the already-tiny Red Stitch stage in half, leaving little room for the actors to move. In a play as convulsive as this, it’s a strange choice and strips the play of much of its potential physicality. Declan Greene’s direction feels uncertain and sometimes barely evident, which is baffling since he has proven his brilliant tragicomic abilities as both writer (The Homosexuals, or ‘Faggots’, Griffin Theatre Company and Malthouse Theatre, 2017) and director (Blackie Blackie Brown, Sydney Theatre Company and Malthouse Theatre, 2018).

The problem with this social satire is that, while scathing, it is soulless. Filled with grotesque upper-middle-class caricatures, it lacks genuine emotion or truth, leaving the whole production unhinged and searching for meaning.

The Feather in the Web is being performed at Red Stitch Actors’ Theatre from 2 February to 1 March 2020. Performance attended: February 2.