Everyone has a mother. Yet motherhood remains one of the great under-explored subjects on our stages. Messy, wonderful, exhausting and occasionally horrifying, it is usually reduced to the saint, the villain or the prop. Jorjia Gillis’ Mum Club at Griffin Theatre has other ideas, putting motherhood front and centre and sending it into battle. Uncomfortable and unexpectedly tender, this is motherhood with its claws out.

Sadie (Stephanie Somerville) is a young Martu mum who has moved from Boorloo/Perth to Sydney’s Inner West, away from her mob, following her partner’s career opportunity. With him travelling constantly, Sadie is effectively parenting solo, exhausted, isolated and increasingly unsure where the woman she was has gone.

She needs friends. She needs her mum. Her Mob. What she finds is the Mum Club. The playground becomes a battlefield, the group chat a social war zone, and the supposedly supportive mothers’ group starts looking suspiciously like Mean Girls in designer activewear, with superhuman pelvic floors. This should be a place where women can admit they are exhausted, confused and out of their depth. Instead, Sadie desperately tries to become “one of us”, only to discover that sometimes the price of belonging is losing yourself.

Director Ian Michael knows exactly where to find the funny, then give it teeth, keeping the pace brisk. However, he allows the sharper moments to land, never losing sight of the women beneath the caricatures, allowing a real sense of heart and pathos to emerge. Cris Baldwin’s clever set makes inventive use of the Downstairs space, shifting fluidly between Sadie’s home, the park and the Aboriginal Medical Service.

Sadie is welcomed as the group’s token Blak mum, her presence practically a badge of “diversity”, while their casual othering exposes just how little they care, or care to understand beyond their own bubble. Gillis skewers the entitlement of people who mistake inclusivity for understanding. As essential oils, matching matchas and competitive birth stories swirl around them, this ensemble embraces the comic rhythm, keeping this unhinged world fizzing.

Alex Malone’s aptly named C*nt Mum is the alpha bitch of the pack, and she makes this woman utterly compelling in her awfulness, capturing her smug, ruthless competitiveness while letting us glimpse the insecurity and fear underneath. Ruby Teys is an absolute scream as Well-Meaning Mum, landing some of the show’s funniest one-liners. She’s got a PhD, money and every progressive opinion imaginable, yet is spectacularly oblivious to how little she actually understands.

Zarif brings a Hot Tired Fashion Gay Dad to the mix, ironically giving Sadie someone she can actually relate to, and a rare flash of the empathy she really needs. They almost upstage everyone as North Shore Mum complete with huge plastic knockers and injectable lips, a hilarious send-up of the hyper-groomed mum stereotype.

Stephanie Somerville makes Sadie’s exhaustion practically palpable. Grief, fear and dislocation sit beneath the comedy, giving her performance a lovely realism. We are told birth and motherhood are natural. So are kidney stones and haemorrhoids. But natural doesn’t mean easy, or that you should automatically know what you’re doing.Sadie is bored, lonely and bewildered, depleted by sleepless nights and desperate to be seen as more than a mum. Somerville captures it all with comic precision, her need to belong threaded through even her funniest moments.

Thank God, then, for the lifeline of Sista Mum (Megan Wilding), who offers Sadie something the Mum Club never can: recognition. Wilding brings warmth, humour and cultural connection, giving Sadie the Blak sisterhood she has been missing. Their shared obsession with romantasy is inspired, allowing Sadie space to reconnect with desire, silliness and herself. This is where the story expands beyond its vicious satire of Inner West parenting culture. Mum Club has a surreal streak, sometimes tipping into hyperbole, as Sadie confronts the trauma of birth and begins to rediscover friendship, her body and sexuality.

Funny, ferocious and gloriously off-kilter, beneath its wicked satire Mum Club finds a more generous idea about community: perhaps the women who help us survive are not the ones who have perfected motherhood, but the ones willing to admit they’re making it up too. Even C*nt Mum is struggling. And that may be Gillis’ sharpest joke: every woman, mother or not, is just bluffing their way through.

Mum Club is at the Downstairs Theatre, Belvoir, from 22 August to 20 September 2026. For details see : https://griffintheatre.com.au/whats-on/mum-club/

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