Since Gilgamesh and Heracles, when humanity is most in trouble: we need our superheroes. And with everyone’s head fried from doomscrolling about the current global binfire of reality, it feels like Super‘s fierce superheroes (heroines?) are what we all need.
But Super – a new play by Melbourne playwright Emilie Collyer – is not a story about “any of that Marvel s**t”, as one of the characters eloquently puts it.
The play opens on a superhero support group meeting. Nell, an energetic, bespectacled, orange-cardigan-wearing super-administrator is planning their upcoming ‘group retreat’ for her and the one other group member, Phoenix.
Phoenix oozes cool underneath her cornrows. Velvet-voiced and leather-clad, she’s an athlete, with the ability to suck the sting of anger from people around her. She spends her days going to footy matches to use her powers to prevent outbreaks of street violence and protect women from becoming victims of domestic abuse.
Nell prefers to use her powers – the ability to turn the people around her into the most efficient versions of themselves – at the service of the many community clubs to which she belongs.
In comes Rae, in dark specs, black boots and oversized blue and suede coat. She’s a celebrity chef whose star is dimming, and she has seen a flyer for the support group – for people who possess special abilities that can change those around them. Her latest commercial idea for a range of chutneys has been panned by the business overlords, and only her powers of cry-contagion (the ability to cause everyone around her to burst into tears and, through empathy, change their mind) have saved her from becoming yesterday’s news, career-wise.
To socialist-leaning Phoenix’s chagrin and spreadsheet-loving Nell’s fangirling enthusiasm, Rae joins the Super support group – with its motto of ‘always use your powers for good’ – and begins to use her celebrity connections to commercialise their talents.
They start their own television show, a ‘So You Think You’ve Got Superpowers’ talent competition, judging whether contestants’ declared superpowers – such as the ability to choose the perfect gift for a teen – are, indeed, super.
Conflict arises between differing ideologies. There are a number of twists and turns and much to be drawn from the very smart, very funny writing. Super can at various times be read as a critique of the devaluing of feminine qualities – emotional intelligence, administrative skills, cooperation and creating social cohesion and harmony – in superhero pop culture, and also as an updated Orwellian-style allegorical warning against capitalism, of the impossibility of endless growth in a finite world, and a reminder that absolute power, corrupts absolutely
If that all sounds a bit heavy-handed – it’s really not. Super is fresh, funny and entertaining – with the dazzling emotional smarts of Pixar’s Inside Out and the searing simplicity of Orwell’s Animal Farm. All the performances are outstanding – Lucy Ansell is loveably laconic as the red-clad rebel-with-a-heart-of-gold, Phoenix. Laila Thaker, in orange as Nell, exudes the overzealous, slightly manic pep of every overachiever you’ve met. The always-brilliant Caroline Lee, as the hyper-emotive Rae, swings from deadpan droll to impish, extracting physical comedy gold from every scene.
Despite a challenging (tiny) stage area at Red Stitch, the set is brilliantly realised. White walls with large circular holes in the floor, walls and ceiling, combine with detailed multicoloured lighting states to create a retro-futuristic utopia-cum-dystopia, while also providing novel spaces for the characters to exit and enter the stage and for props to appear or disappear from.
As the play develops, the costumes the characters wear reflect their changing fortunes and restrictions (always connected by their character’s signature colour), before they eventually emerge fully transformed, bedecked in their full superhero costumes.
But this is no Iron Man exoskeleton or Spidey suit – the superheroes in Super are also victims of the voraciously consumeristic society that created them, and these suits drain, measure and exploit rather than protect and enhance their powers.
The ending provides another twist that forces one to think about the nature of humanity itself – our powers, both ordinary and extraordinary and the role society plays in deciding which human qualities are rewarded or pathologised.
Super is outstanding theatre. While allegories are by their nature didactic and can feel moralistic (and tedious), Super slithers out of easy categorisation, while delivering a super entertaining, whip-smart and funny Trojan horse full of possible meta and existential readings.
Read: Theatre review: The Lady Vanishes, Genesian Theatre
Whether you read it as a modern allegory, a cautionary tale, an existential farce or an entertaining superhero-story-with-a-twist, it will perhaps provide an antidote to all the doomscrolling.
Super by Emilie Collyer
Red Stitch Actors’ Theatre
Director/Dramaturg: Emma Valente
Associate Director: Cassandra Fumi
Set/Costume Design: Romanie Harper
Lighting Design: Natalia Velasco Moreno
Sound Design: Beau Esposito
Stage Manager: Ellen Perriment
Assistant Stage Manager: Kara Floyd
Assistant Set/Costume Design: Dylan Lumsden
Cast: Lucy Ansell, Caroline Lee, Laila Thaker
Super will be performed until 6 July 2025.
