Currently playing at the La Mama Courthouse, Gag Reflex explores the confusing terrain of adolescent desire, friendship and online culture with sharp humour and surprising emotional intelligence.
Written by Flick and directed by Tansy Gorman, the production balances broad comedy with a more serious reflection on the way young people are exposed to fragmented and often misleading ideas about sex, intimacy and identity.
The premise is deceptively simple. Best friends Anna, Immi and Rheya are desperate to fund one final summer together before university threatens to scatter them in different directions. Their solution is to enter a manuscript competition with what they believe will guarantee success: a work of lesbian vampire erotica inspired by the strange logic of internet algorithms and fandom culture.
Beneath the absurdity of the setup, Gag Reflex is ultimately concerned with the pressures facing young people as they attempt to understand desire in a world saturated with graphic content but lacking meaningful emotional education. The play suggests that without honest conversations around sex and intimacy, desire can become a process of improvisation shaped more by misinformation and performance than genuine understanding.
Gorman directs the work with confidence, allowing the comedy to land without losing sight of the emotional stakes beneath it. The production captures the volatility of late adolescence particularly well, where friendships, identities and imagined futures can shift dramatically overnight. At times, however, the pace becomes so rapid-fire that some lines are lost beneath audience laughter, with exchanges occasionally arriving faster than the room can absorb them.
The performances are consistently engaging. Louisa Cusumano gives Anna an anxious intensity that grounds much of the production’s emotional tension, while Mia Tuco brings an energetic comic sensibility to Immi that keeps the dialogue lively and unpredictable.
Miela Anich’s Rheya offers a quieter counterbalance, delivering some of the production’s strongest observations with understated precision. Together, the trio create a believable portrait of friendship shaped by affection, insecurity and the fear of growing apart.
The script’s humour is often explicit, but it rarely feels gratuitous. Instead, the comedy emerges naturally from the characters’ attempts to navigate subjects they only partially understand. Flick writes adolescent dialogue with a strong ear for rhythm and awkwardness, capturing both the performative confidence and underlying vulnerability of young people trying to make sense of themselves through the language of the internet.
The production’s design elements work cohesively to support both its heightened comedy and more grounded emotional moments. Karli-Rose Laredo’s design creates an intimate and flexible playing space, with swathes of pink fabric and a strikingly detailed carpet lending the stage a sense of adolescent fantasy and emotional chaos. Georgie Wolfe’s lighting shifts fluidly between the exaggerated theatricality of the comic sequences and the more naturalistic scenes.
Jodi Hope’s costumes move effectively from recognisable school uniforms to the deliberately outrageous attire of the role-play and fantasy sequences, while Justin Gardam’s AV design and Ethan Hunter’s sound design further embed the audience in the hyper-online world the characters inhabit, where fantasy, fandom and digital culture continually bleed into everyday life.
What ultimately makes Gag Reflex a success is its refusal to shame its characters for their confusion. The play recognises that many young people are attempting to negotiate sexuality, identity and intimacy through contradictory online influences, often without the guidance or language to process those experiences clearly. Rather than treating this as a moral panic, Flick approaches the material with empathy and humour.
With its serious underlying themes, Gag Reflex is one of the funniest things currently on a Melbourne stage – a gloriously unhinged celebration of teenage confusion, desire and the deeply human urge to pretend you know what you’re doing.
GAG REFLEX
La Mama Courthouse, 349 Drummond Street, Carlton
Performance: Saturday 9 May 2026 (6.00pm)
Season continues to 23 May 2026
Information and Bookings: www.lamama.com.au
Images: Mia Tuco, Louisa Cusumano and Miela Anich – photo by Darren Gill | Louisa Cusumano, Miela Anich and Mia Tuco – photo by Darren Gill
Review: Rohan Shearn