Don't Quit Your Day Job Review by Will Winter

The post-work doomscroll is an activity I usually skip when I’m dashing from a shift to see some theatre, so imagine my surprise when DON’T QUIT YOUR DAY JOB’s preshow was Ruby (Ruby Ballantyne) sending reels to her friends while her phone was hooked up to a bluetooth speaker. Housed in The Living Room at Erskineville Town Hall from the 8th to 12th of September, the comedy written and performed by Ballantyne and Grace Lewis was a domestic pas de deux between two sharehouse roomies scrambling to perfect their talent show act.

Lewis and Ballantyne play versions of themselves in a single real-time performance, with Grace coming home from her last day at work to a scattered and eager Ruby. They spend the show recentering themselves, catching up on their days, and excitedly preparing for their sharehouse talent show in the hopes this is the year they finally win.

The most exciting part of the show was the physicality on display by Ballantyne and Lewis, two self-proclaimed ‘trauma-bonded full-time dance school graduates’. Both actors gracefully moved through the incredibly realistic set, tiptoeing between empty chip packets and piles of clothes deliberately and smoothly. Ballantyne especially took full use of her flexibility, from a perfectly timed fall off the bed to the spiky and full-bodied dance routine she first pitched for the talent number.

Both actors play their parts well, Lewis the more responsible friend and Ballantyne the ball of energy that keeps their dynamic spinning. It was obvious the story came from a real and deep connection between the two, and parts of the show felt directly transplanted from real texts and conversations between them.

While parts of DON’T QUIT YOUR DAY JOB were incredibly relatable to a chronically online audience, the dialogue was at points slightly too contrived to be truly naturalistic. Artificial gaps in the dialogue were clearly meant to evoke the spaceyness of neurodivergent conversations with people you live with, but occasionally felt like an unfinished script. This gap between reality and performance also came through in some of the larger ideas around finding the purpose of life in a digital age, which was treated by the characters as if they were learning of these concepts and not actively living them.

The beauty of a Fringe show is how incredibly insular and specific its narrative can afford to be at such a scale. With two terminally on-their-phone gen z at the helm, DON’T QUIT YOUR DAY JOB would’ve deeply benefitted from trusting the audience’s ability to process their behavioural subtext. Ruby at one point started dancing like a bird to cheer Grace up, peacocking around the room while speaking affirmations out into the world. Grace then asked Ruby if she could film her doing this, in a moment that conveyed not only the trust between the two housemates, but a broader conversation around consent when everything posted online can either disappear instantly or live forever. More of these moments would have captured the breadth of the young sharehouse experience, and also reflected the sort of telepathic language friends naturally develop over time.

Still, the show was touching, and I was smitten with the final talent show number which used a song I hold as sacred with one of my dear friends. Sometimes, much like how Grace and Ruby have each other, all you need is one other person who gets you, to dance with you and to share a brain cell with, who can look you in the eye for a single moment and see you. Screw everything else, rental markets and day jobs and all.

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Will Winter attended Don;t Quit Your Day Job at Erskineville Town Hall on Friday 11 September.