QFWFQ Review by Will Winter

To discuss QWFWQ, Gregory Nussen’s phenomenally crafted solo show playing at Qtopia’s Substation from the 22nd to 26th of September, I need to first tell you a bit about the plot. The play is… oh, oh dear, well, you can’t seem to find where you left your script, and I kind of need you to find your script so I can watch the play and review it, so can you please just call whoever it is you need to call to find a script so we can get on with it?

While we’re waiting, toilet break, anyone?

Ah, enough with the charade! Attempting to emulate Nussen’s labyrinthine writing is like watching a pigeon attempt telekinesis, and it’s a much less sophisticated way to immerse an audience than Nussen’s own words. They are QFWFQ, pronounced phonetically (think coiffe-wick), a representative from ‘The Institute for the Posterity of All Things’ working here at Sydney Fringe to perform preserved texts.

Inspired by the surreal work of author Italo Calvino, the script Nussen has developed is hulking but nimble. There’s an extraordinary amount of time spent welcoming and chit-chatting with the audience at the top of the show, but it quickly and discreetly wraps us into the fabric of this perspective-bending world. QFWFQ then starts performing what they believe to be the show we’re watching.

Except they stop-start a few times, eventually calling a representative at the institute to report unfinished scripts on their desk. The phone line is a fun tangent, with Nussen’s American accent helping sell the operator-style delivery, one of the joys of transplanting a seminal show from an international festival (in this case, winner of best show at Hollywood Fringe 2025) to a different cultural context. The representative, growing snippy, ships them new scripts, each only going as far as needed to get the gist across before lying there unfinished.

The stories travel to small towns and sparkly European destinations, QFWFQ encountering the reverse solipsism of travelling solo and realising in every moment of touristy observation there are everyday people living everyday lives. Eventually, though, they find the script planted under a seat in the Substation holding the story they don’t want to tell but must.

Here is when the flesh of the narrative is exposed, and the lines blur between soliloquy and autofiction. QFWFQ pivots, calling storytelling an act of violence against recollection, the imposing of new emotions on the truth, and this becomes a show about realising all the ways memory can be warped by ourselves and by others.

Growing up as a Jewish American in an entrenched zionist community, QFWFQ (aka Nussen) never realised how intimately the built-in nostalgia of their emotional (and horny) teen years was woven into their reverence for the state of Israel. Through community building and international spiritual trips, the language of the genocidal zionist project became words of perseverance, and without knowing it Nussen (aka QFWFQ) attached the same care for their childhood self to the development of a violent ethnostate.

Nussen astutely calls this equation ‘horny seeds nostalgia’, and suddenly the calm unravels. QFWFQ loses themself as they tell the story, that earlier memory violence enacting itself on their sense of stability. Even though Nussen/QFWFQ eventually escapes the cycle of zionism, becoming a recognised face in the Pro-Palestinian Jewish movement, that hot and heavy feeling of complicity lingers. How do you recover from tearing back all the fantasies of a clean narrative and being left with the cold hard sludge of reality? Perhaps you don’t.

A non-ending is the only ending which makes sense for QFWFQ, whose name itself is an unintelligible palindrome. Finding a closing note would wrap all of these ribbons into a beautiful bow, and not leave the unfinished scripts splayed out like the tendrils of an exposed root waiting to be reborn. Nussen hands the responsibility of finishing the script to an audience member, and there is no real resolution except to say that QFWFQ’s story is Nussen’s, and Nussen’s story is ours, and our story is QFWFQ’s.

In their final truth/non-truth divulsion, they (singular and plural) admit that this show has involved over a decade of development, and it is so evident in the script. QFWFQ is a deeply intentional and politically prescient piece of experimental theatre. Nothing is more vital right now than memorialising works like this, which transcend the personal and become the surreal, the absurd, and the truth.

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Will Winter attended QFWFQ at Qtopia Sydney Tuesday 22 September. QFWFQ plays until Saturday 26 September.