The One Fringe Show I Saw Last Year

Whoa! So present me (May 2026) was looking through my blog post drafts and I found this half written post that I penned in November last year (2025) that I had completely forgotten about. So I thought I would polish it up and send it out. Seeing this show was a really wonderful evening for me, so I hope you enjoy reading about my experience seeing it! Okay, handing over the reigns to past Freya...

I Left the House!!

In a truly wild turn of events, on Oct 12th 2025 I went out to a Public Event for the first time in about 4 months. It was the relaxed performance of play I Promise This Isn't About You (Even If It Feels Like It Is) in the Trades Hall carpark as a part of Melbourne Fringe.

The play was written by my lovely friend Sarah and created by many other good people I know; I am a massive fan of carpark and traverse-seating theatre; and it was going to be a relaxed performance, meaning it was theoretically more accessible to me with my wild levels of sensory hypersensitivity. I really wanted to go!! So I rested up a bunch beforehand, and managed to make it.

There was a spare chair next to me at the venue, so I decided to take full advantage of the "relaxed" aspect of the performance and made myself as horizontal as possible during it lmao. I started with my legs resting on the seat of the chair next to me, but as the performance went on I had them draped completely over the top of the backrest so that they were actually elevated - which was massive wins for my Illness™.

I also got to stand up and shuffle around and swap which chair I was on throughout the performance, which was pretty fab for my joints and bloodflow and such!

It didn't seem outwardly like anyone else at the performance was taking advantage of the "you can move around and stim and make sound" parts of the relaxed performance like I was, but luckily I am a keen student of the art of not giving a fuck about how I am perceived in public, so was able to thoroughly make the most of it.

I really enjoyed the show. It was an entirely character-based drama, which is my favouriteeeeeee type of story. Just an hour of people talking to other people about being people, trying to be people whilst other people are also trying to be people in ways that clash and mesh and confuse and explode with each other and UGH its so good. This story was set entirely in a sharehouse bathroom during an end-of-lease house party, so you can imagine the dramatically full spectrum of human emotion that the characters were able to experience in there over the course of their evening!

The narrative of the show hit particularly hard for me as, completely coincidentally, I saw it less than 12 hours after I had made the decision to move out of my own sharehouse. To come to a show about a group of friends navigating their own sharehouse break up and what that meant for them and their relationships was truly wild.^[2]

The cast did a really excellent job, they bounced off each other so well and had me on the edge of my seat the whole time^[1].

I also really appreciated the script structure that meant each of the 5 characters had a solo moment in the bathroom, a duo moment with each of the other characters - maybe even going through all the combinations of 3 and 4 as well? I cannot recall exactly, but it was so fun to see all these different relationships play out.

It reminded me a lot of the times in my life when I've been in a really close friendship group or polycule, and you've got to keep track not only of the overall group dynamics but also all the subgroup dynamics and each one-on-one relationship within the group too. Things get complicated QUICKLY, and a shift in one sub-relationship can have flow on effects to the rest of the group. The way the shifts in these character's queer relationships reverberated between them all in this play felt so beautifully true to life.

There was a spectacular moment in the show that demonstrated such a shift, where one character almost spontaneously kissed another and the whole audience gasped together in shock and amazement. Being seated on opposite sides of the stage, we could all make eye contact with each other like "holy shit ?!??! can you believe this ?!?!? oh my god !!". It's those moments of connection with complete strangers that make me love theatre so much - and why any non-traditional audience seating arrangement where you can make eye contact easily with other viewers is so sexy to me. Truly a 10/10 moment.

There's something so special about experiencing a story in such a viscerally live way with the ephemeral community that forms with your fellow audience members when you're watching a theatre show. I was so pleased that this show played into that live element in such a fun and resonant way, given that I get to experience that audience connection so rarely these days.

Overall, I had a lovely time seeing this show! My one criticism of it accessibility wise as a relaxed performance was that, whilst the volume of the sound design and music of the show had been reduced, the volume the actors were performing at had NOT. Which makes sense - its wayyyy easier to put a master volume fader down to 70% for one show than it is to train actors to modify the ways they perform different scenes such that they can express the same emotional and narrative beats but at a different volume.

But the sudden raised voices were still painful and took me by surprise, which I think was the part that was hardest about it? If I was prepared for it (ie. I had seen a disclaimer that actors will still raise their voices during the performance, even though SX and LX design will be at reduced intensity), it would have been easier to manage.

Upon reflection, I realised the reason I hadn't come across this issue before is that the other relaxed shows I've attended since developing extreme sensory sensitivity were designed to have all their performances be relaxed. There was no need for actors to change the way they performed in order to facilitate a lower sensory performance, because being low sensory was the default for all show sessions. I imagine it being hard to "turn down" the actors is a consistent challenge for most one-off relaxed performances within an otherwise higher sensory show season - but this was my first time going to such a show! So I was unprepared.

Apart from that, I had an excellent time, and would be keen to see the show again if someone else put it on, or if Sarah and the team developed the script any further. If you'd like to read more about the specifics of what the show was about in a more official review-y style, you can peruse the lovely reviews at the bottom of this webpage. I, like many of the reviewers, think it was a great show :)

(I'm definitely biased since I'm friends with the folk who made it, but then again literally everything in the world is subjective! so let's embrace it, hey.)

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