” Estelle Davis and Alex Kirwan are compelling as the titular Romeo
and Julie, but their achievement extends beyond performance.
They’ve assembled a smart, collaborative team.”
Veronica Hannon
5 stars
Venue: KXT on Broadway
Sydney
Dates: Until May 23rd 2026
The programming at our independent theatres is something else. KXT has again provided a platform for passionate theatre makers—reminding me why we leave the house.
I’m not aware of a Gary Owen play receiving a mainstream production in Sydney. Despite his standing in Wales and regular transfers to London, his work feels more at home in independent spaces here.
It’s easy to see why emerging theatre makers gravitate towards him: his writing does the heavy lifting. With the right raw talent, it thrives in the simplest of settings—even under a bare light bulb. On this traverse stage at KXT on Broadway, that talent is on full display.
Estelle Davis and Alex Kirwan met at WAAPA, where they were introduced to Owen’s work, and after graduating in 2023 set about bringing this play to the stage. They are compelling as the titular Romeo and Julie, but their achievement extends beyond performance. They’ve assembled a smart, collaborative team, many taking on multiple roles. Claudia Barrie is a standout, delivering a finely judged performance as Barb, Romeo’s mother, while also directing the production.
Given the title and its wink at a certain Elizabethan tragedy, you expect a love story. Here, Verona becomes a deprived corner of Cardiff. These are still hot-headed lovers, swept up and undone by passion, and there’s a real charge in watching the two leads spark against each other.
Owen’s retelling trades spectacle for circumstance. Romeo is discovered asleep in a library when Julie wakes him into her presence. He’s eighteen, unemployed and skint, already burdened as the sole carer of his infant daughter, Niamh. She is his life—but he is exhausted.
At home, his mother Barb provides shelter but little sympathy, framing his situation as a consequence of bad choices. Romeo feels stuck—until Julie arrives. Sharp, ambitious and scientifically gifted, she brings with her the possibility of another life. Cambridge is in her sights; she dreams of following in Stephen Hawking’s footsteps.
Of course, this ill-starred pair fall in love—or at least into lust—and must answer to Julie’s parents: her stepmother Kath (Linda Nicholls-Gidley), an aged-care worker, and her father Col (Christopher Stollery), a steelworker. They have sacrificed to give Julie a better future, even enrolling her in a Welsh-speaking comprehensive school in the hope she might realise it.
How will things resolve? It’s Owen—they’ll go through hell. Their resilience will shine, but not sentimentally; he’s too disciplined a writer for that. Instead, it emerges through a harder, more uncomfortable truth. Across Owen’s work, characters are tough, funny, and stubbornly alive, but resilience is never free. Survival comes at a cost. They are ground down by class and circumstance—precarious work, limited opportunity—alongside emotional brutality: betrayal, shame, fractured families. Even morality blurs; doing the “right” thing is rarely clean.
What gives the writing its force is Owen’s refusal to romanticise suffering. His “hell” is often mundane—bad decisions, stacked systems, cycles that feel impossible to break. When his characters endure, it feels earned, not inspirational.
Retaining Owen’s distinctly Welsh dialogue is a strength (with a nod to Nicholls-Gidley’s work as dialogue coach). It brings texture and releases well- timed moments of comedy.
Geita Goarin’s set is admirably economical, allowing shifts in time and place with minimal disruption and keeping the production moving cleanly. Best of all, the casting is spot on. These feel like prickly, working-class kids from Splott. The parents, too, are fully realised—the actors bringing out bitterness, disappointment and anger with clarity and restraint.
I could nitpick, but it feels beside the point. Seated on either side of the narrow stage, the audience is utterly absorbed, audibly responsive, almost in cahoots with the characters as authentic moments ripple across the divide.
This is an assured piece of theatre: I’m giving it 5 stars.
photos by Phil Erbacher
Veronica Hannon, Theatre Now
