It is becoming a trend: when Sydney Festival announces a new season, all eyes are on Sydney Town Hall. The ornate Victorian Second Empire building, with its grand pipe organ, meeting-place front steps, and elaborate design, has become the go-to spot for innovative and, increasingly, environmental theatre (that is, theatre that uses its surroundings as an active and occasionally transformed participant in the drama, often with immersive elements). 

The venue has hosted local works that have become instant classics, like Belvoir St Theatre’s Counting and Cracking (2019); Sun & Sea (2023), by Lithuanian artists Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė, and Lina Lapelytė, which turned the Hall into a beach day, the heritage floors invisible under truckloads of sand; and fix & foxy’s Dark Noon (2019), which constructed a frontier town in the space. This year, it continues the trend: Mama Does Derby installs a roller derby track stacked with athletes from Sydney Roller Derby Leagues putting it to good use. 

With a script by writer and performer Virginia Gay, an artist whose work combines silliness-tinged humour with enormous heart, the work is based on a story from the real life of the endlessly creative director Clare Watson (Windmill Theatre Company) and her experiences with motherhood and roller derby. The pair, collaborating again after the international hit Cyrano (2021), have created something bold, creative, fearless, and a little bit rebellious – just like the joyous sport it has smuggled into the city’s civic home. 

Mama Does Derby at the Sydney Festival (photograph by Claudio Raschella)

After a delightful pre-show in which derby players run through skating drills as we the audience takes its seats, music pumping and easy camaraderie on display, Gay’s script – flavoured with youthful and online references – kicks in. It is immediately and endearingly funny. Maxine (Amber McMahon) and Billie (Elvy-Lee Quici), a well-practiced double act (Billie’s the responsible one, Maxine is the spontaneous one), introduce the play with direct address and front-load some necessary exposition. It is an irresistible beginning. 

The pair – used to travel, seat-of-your-pants adventures, and a dash of cash-strapped bohemia – have suddenly found themselves in a small town. An unexpected inheritance has handed them a house, stability, and routine. They are not quite sure what to make of the change, especially when it brings issues to the surface that they would rather forget. Billie struggles at school and Maxine tries to outrun herself by strapping on old skates.

But then Billie meets Hux (Aud Mason-Hyde), an effortlessly charming student at her new school who knows a thing or two about navigating anxiety and difference – and who is just as densely, referentially funny as she is. Maxine crosses paths with a local roller derby team led by the offbeat and lovely Wombat (Annabel Matheson), whose sense of collective community and care pulls the lone wolf into her orbit and onto the roster. 

Mama Does Derby is a big-hearted and generous show that loves its characters and its world enough to want to heal them. It loves its audience enough to laugh them into the story and build gently towards harder topics. It is a love letter to community, derby, and growth that refuses to sacrifice fun for depth.

Nowhere is this clearer than in its handling of Billie’s anxiety. An anxious and artistic kid (her heroes are Frida Kahlo and Greta Thunberg) with creeping worries about safety in an unstable and burning world, she is especially afraid of what might be lurking in the dark. Her fears manifest into a gloriously black-sequinned demon (Benjamin Hancock) with long, searching fingers and impossible contortions. He lives under her bed. Can she really make friends with said demon to ease her racing mind? 

The school-appointed therapist (also played by Matheson) shrewdly picks up on signs of trauma in Max and Billie’s history, and though it takes a while to stop the defensive, deflective comedy routines to which the pair default instead of processing their feelings, there is an unfurling. And if it all culminates at the regional roller derby finals? Well, of course it does. There is a track on stage, after all. 

The play is raucous and heart-thumpingly alive. Live music – the band, clad in derby referee outfits, is led by Musical Director Joe Lui – accompanies key scenes and scores transitions with the rock and pop music that is the soundtrack to Maxine and Billie’s lives. Modular set pieces (designed by Jonathan Oxlade) are skated on and off the track by our derby athletes. They also fly in props, take the pair to therapy appointments, pilot couches around the track, and pull the car as Billie takes driving lessons with her neighbour Weird Neil, played by onstage musician Antoine Jelk. This adds playfulness to the business of playmaking, willing the audience to lean in closer, spot the visual gags, and let them lighten heavier topics so they are easier to sit with.  

There is one issue that slows down the play: its inconsistent direction of pacing and momentum. Sometimes the production feels too slow for its own fast-talking characters and swift skaters. While this will likely settle and resolve as the Sydney Festival season continues, making for a smoother landing at the upcoming Adelaide season, the cracks are there now.  All that skating, and all those set reconfigurations, slow down scene transitions and makes them clunky, disrupting the inbuilt comic and dramatic rhythms that Gay and Watson use to structure the work. The derby-bout climax (choreographed by Assistant Director Larissa McGowan) feels stilted and too slow, and it could be more smoothly integrated into the narrative beats that are happening inside and around it. 

This drag is highly fixable. With the megawatt charisma of the cast – as well as Gay’s joyful, tuned-in dialogue, which welcomes teens and young adults into the festival’s buzziest venue to tell a story primarily about and for them – the end result is delight, warmth, and a reminder that there is so much to be gained by opening up our lives, even just a little bit, to engage with the world around us.

Mama Does Derby continues at the Sydney Town Hall until 22 January 2026. Performance attended: 16 January 2026.