Cover Image: The cast of The Play That Goes Wrong mid-chaos at the Regal Theatre, Perth. Photo by Jordan Munns.

The Play That Goes Wrong
Perth Regal Theatre
Sunday November 8, 2025

Bad acting, set fails, and onstage meltdowns have been elevated to a higher art form in this Australian and New Zealand tour of The Play That Goes Wrong.

Full disclosure, this writer has been a long-time fan of performance excerpts and The Goes Wrong Show TV series. So, seeing the full production for the first time was either going to be a dream come true, or break my heart, annnnnnd… it exceeded all expectations. 

I left the theatre with sore sides from laughing so hard and I wasn’t the only one. It seemed everyone at the sold-out matinee felt exactly the same way.

The premise isn’t a new one. It’s a play about a play being performed by ‘amateurs’ where everything – and I mean everything – that can go wrong, does, with comedic consequences. But nothing this arts enthusiast has seen before even comes close to this script and production’s sheer genius and hilarity. It never misses a trick or opportunity to pile on the humour, often in unexpected and sometimes shocking ways, that leave the audience barely able to take a breath between laughs.

The sheer physicality of this play for many of the actors is awe-inspiring and left me wondering how they didn’t get hurt and how many bruises were accumulated during rehearsals. Most of the characters are either traumatised or comatose (or in some cases both) throughout the play, and a special mention to Brodie Masini, who plays Jonathon/Charles Haversham, being cast as a (mostly) dead body has never required doing so much before. 

Before the show even starts, the audience is treated to the stage crew and manager manically resolving last-minute set issues with varying—and often limited—success. Eds Eramiha, who plays lighting and sound operator Trevor Watson, was an audience favourite, interacting with us and staying in character during intermission. Other character highlights were Johnathon Martin’s Chris Bean/Inspector Carter delivering a delicious meltdown and rant at the audience, leaving everyone reeling with laughter and offering zero empathy for his disastrous plight, and Olivia Charalambous’s stage manager, Annie Twilloil, glorious shift from being reluctantly co-opted into playing the femme fatale, Florence, to an aggressively territorial diva.

There are no weak links in this cast, with everyone expressing some of the worst – or should I say best – bad acting tropes and common faux pas with delightful finesse and passion. Bad acting has never been so nuanced and appreciated, whilst the panic and terror of the characters seems so believable, including a script infinity loop of death, that in real life, actors would have needed therapy to recover from.

For an audience member with their own beloved history of community involvement, these scenes hit almost viscerally, as well as hilariously. I was also continuously forgetting that the ‘stagehands’ and ‘backstage team’ were also part of the cast, they were so convincing in their roles. 

The set design was another masterpiece, seemingly ordinary and stereotypical for your standard Agatha Christie-style murder mystery, but it was almost another cast member in its own right. While the set is a nightmare for the characters trying to put on the play, in actuality, the design of the set and its many contributions to the performance is at genius level, constantly confounding the characters, while surprising, shocking, and delighting the audience. 

The programme also gets a special mention, its first half, also ‘in character’ as the Cornley University Drama Society’s Murder at Haversham Manor programme with character bios, advertisements, additional theatre company ‘mistakes’, and an incredible commitment to authenticity.  

The only (slight) negative was I found the actors a little difficult to hear at times, but that may have been due to the entire audience laughing so loud and almost continuously. 

Simply put, I found this show to be phenomenal. The laughter never stops, nor did the surprises. And I believe you would have to see the production multiple times to catch all the extra comedic nods and touches included in costumes, dialogue, and props. The Play That Goes Wrong is going to remain one of my all-time favourite performances for a very long time.