Review: Red Ticket at Blue Room Theatre

Red Ticket at Blue Room Theatre
Thursday, April 16, 2026

You can’t ask for much more from your directorial debut than a sold-out season at The Blue Room Theatre. With Red Ticket, that’s exactly what writer and director Josie Walsh achieved. Supported by a stellar creative team with strong performances from each of the trio of performers and brought to Bluey by All Bite No Bark Curation, it’s worth keeping tabs on these artists to see what they do next.

New mum Lily (Krysia Wiechecki) is starting a residency at the Fremantle Arts Centre, curated by Janice (Hannah-Mary Anderson). Lily is stuck. She’s tired, uninspired, uncertain if she even wanted to be a mother and struggling to connect with her new baby. She has (undiagnosed) postpartum depression. This is all made worse by the (we hope) well-meaning Janice coming at Lily with big-time influencer energy—fully equipped with all the unhelpful clichés (“You look tired,” “Has your hair started falling out yet?” and “Have you tried meditation?”) only the childless could offer.

Seeking inspiration, Lily starts reading about the building’s history and discovers that a century earlier, it was the site of the Fremantle Lunatic Asylum. Already struggling to straddle the reality of her new everyday as an artist who is now also a mother, she begins spiralling further into her postpartum depressed unreality as she learns about a woman who was confined to the asylum struggling with postpartum depression herself, Poppy Florence Grey (Kate Naunton-Morgan). Increasingly she feels more connected with the story of this woman from the past whose mental health issues she relates to than with the current moment she finds herself in within her own life today.

If you’re going to dive into subject matter as challenging as maternal mental health and how it has (or hasn’t) been treated in the past and today, it pays to have experienced performers to handle the subject matter with the grace and solemnity it, and the many people who suffer from it, deserve. Enter highly experienced and multi-award-winning Krysia Wiechecki, cast to perfection as Lily. Wiechecki delivers a sterling performance as the lead. Her characterisation of the challenges of new motherhood is embodied, sustained, and 100% believable. She often breaks the fourth wall and speaks to the audience, but it rather feels as though she’s really just speaking to herself as a form of processing what’s happening to her.

As an audience, we feel less like her confidants and more like flies on the wall. These moments of vulnerability where Lily opens up about her struggles and doubts as an artist / new mother are what set up the foundation for the power of this work, allowing the magical realism of what comes next to hit the mark in this gothic thriller.

Naunton-Morgan as Poppy is haunting and hauntingly beautiful. It’s a difficult role, requiring a huge stage presence and a good physical performance, which Naunton-Morgan manages perfectly. Closing out the trio of performers is Hannah-Mary Anderson as Janice, Lily’s connection to the Arts Centre. Another challenging role, requiring a heightened energy and lightness with just the right touch of comedic timing to provide a foil for the heaviness of Lily’s role. Anderson pulls this off in spades, managing to straddle the right balance between busy bossgirl and, later, kind fellow human while still maintaining an air of professionalism one would expect from an administrator such as herself.

The design team behind Red Ticket is as much to thank for the piece’s excellence as the fabulous performances and writing. Lighting designer Topaz Knodel’s work complements the set design by Setare Moqarabin beautifully. It’s a sparse set, the main feature being a huge canvas in the middle of the room behind which we first encounter Poppy as a backlit silhouette. Poppy’s movements here create gorgeous shapes that sometimes veer into an uncanny Tim Burton-esque territory. Once Poppy pierces the veil, we’re treated to striking moments with red light bathing her face, the use of red being heavily present as a symbol in other moments during her interactions with the set as well. Stunning, flickering transitions disrupt the world of the work during Lily and Poppy’s closer encounters. All of this does a great job of organising the action in Red Ticket between what’s real and what’s happening in Lily’s inner world for the audience. The sound design by Zoe Garciano is effective, providing a steady background thrum that unsettles and puts the audience squarely into Lily’s headspace as she descends into psychosis.

The denouement of the work leaves much to be pondered. Are we better off today than we were 100 years ago when it comes to maternal mental health? Yes, sure. But how much better? Regardless, Red Ticket certainly invites a discussion, and with such a heavy but widespread and common topic, this is exactly the promise of good live performance works: to open a space for people to talk about the challenges we face as human beings.

MELISSA KRUGER