Theatre Works. Until Saturday 29 August.
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In 1972, when my mother was eight years old, it became law in the United States that if a school didn’t offer an equivalent sport for girls, then female students could try out for the boys’ team. When she was ten years old, she told her dad that she planned to do exactly that.
He didn’t approve.
She did it anyway.
It’s no wonder, then, that watching the wilful women of The Deplorables challenge the assumption that sport belonged to men – a century before she stepped onto a boys’ sporting field – was a five-star watch for my similarly spirited and spunky mother.
This award-winning Australian musical, presented by female-led regional theatre company Skin of our Teeth Productions, steps up to the crease for its final over at Theatre Works, having toured Victoria since its world premiere in Bendigo in 2025 (the same city where the historic match took place in 1874). A semi-biographical tale of the first all-female cricket team, The Deplorables, written and directed by Christine Davey, uses the scant information available about these history-making women to imagine – with verve and vivacity – the lives, friendships, and ambitions we’ve lost to the past.
Davey’s script and direction take a premise that could easily be rendered a dull excavation of a forgotten history and injects it with life and personality, using physical comedy and colourful musical numbers (courtesy of composer/choreographer Tess Parker) to endow the past with a theatrical pulse. From beginning to end, The Deplorables animates history with infectious energy. It can take a little time to ease into the high-octane pacing, but the show undoubtedly benefits from maintaining its momentum.
Putting the “team” in “team sport,” one of the show’s most defining strengths is its ability to spotlight each individual performer while preserving their strength as a collective. And a collective they are, indeed: The Deplorables, despite finding its hero in Marie-Claire Tchernomoroff’s Barbara Rae, is an ensemble piece through and through.
Tchernomoroff brings both innocence and tenacity to her portrayal of the cricket team’s captain, desperate to escape the cage of 19th-century convention, while her older sister, Mary Steuton’s Nellie, walks the path alongside her. Danae Reid’s Miss Gerber and Aeonie Ostik-Smith’s Katie Petrie share a beautiful, memorable duet as the two stand on the cusp of love and friendship, while Marita Williams Seaton brings both maternal warmth and youthful enthusiasm to Emily. Chanda Anderson Prior’s Miss Murdoch lights up the stage with a number about refusing to quiet down or fade into the background, and at each turn, the ensemble embodies the collective spirit on which the piece is built.
A testament to Davey’s direction, the performers engage brilliantly with the set, which is itself highly symbolic and impactful even in its simplicity. A chair sits idly centre-stage, and behind it, a trunk labelled “Hope” lies open, cricket bats spilling out of it, waiting to take the field. Sewing bodices wear red and blue blazers until the women don them themselves, and these bodices cleverly stand in for the absent women on the team, transforming them from objects of social expectation into active participants. Most striking are the four columns of cascading chain on which various props – birds in or around cages, hats, umbrellas, notebooks, veils – are hooked or draped, many of which the women incorporate into the action throughout the show.
The most important of these is a hand-held moustache which the women use to transform into the vicious media men hurling vitriol at them from all around the world, giving them their “deplorable” title, condemning their venture into a male-dominated field (pun very much intended), and insisting upon the likelihood of their wombs exploding. (Seriously, as the show reinforces, this was a major concern.)
A 70-minute romp through a forgotten corner of Australian history, The Deplorables is not only a vibrant celebration of the larrikin women that came before us, but a potent reminder of “what a beautiful thing it is to be free.”
Cha cha cha.
