Canberra Youth Theatre
The Rebel Theatre, Walsh Bay
Honor Webster-Mannison's Work, But This Time Like You Mean It arrives at The Rebel Theatre with the manic energy of a Saturday dinner dash that never ends. And that's precisely the point. This award-winning production, originally staged in Canberra in September 2024, transforms the universal trauma of fast-food employment into comedic yet surreal, politically sharp theatre that understands its subject from the inside out.
The premise is deceptively simple: teenage workers trapped in a perpetual shift at a nondescript fried chicken outlet, caught in a loop of endless orders where the work never stops, customers keep coming, and escape feels impossible. But Webster-Mannison uses this absurdist framework to excavate something profoundly real about youth labour exploitation, junior wages, and the particular indignities of being told your time and effort are worth less simply because of your age.
The eight-strong ensemble (Blue Hyslop, Quinn Goodwin, Sterling Notley, Matthew Hogan, Kathleen Dunkerley, Emma Piva, Georgie Bianchini, and Hannah Cornelia), hit the stage with players already in position, joined by surprise entrances that establish the production's deliberately chaotic energy. The dialogue delivery is breathlessly rapid, mirroring the frenetic pace of actual fast-food service where multiple conversations overlap, orders pile up, and coherent thought becomes a luxury you can't afford on minimum wage.
What makes the writing remarkable is its authenticity to how young people actually speak and think. Conversations veer off in seemingly unrelated directions, capturing the fragmented attention spans of a generation raised on doom-scrolling and multitasking. During breaks, phones come out for the inevitable social media and Tik Tok check. The small talk while taking out the garbage suddenly becomes a philosophical inquiry. It's precisely observed without feeling condescending. These aren't adults writing "how young people talk," but rather a work developed collaboratively with young artists drawing from genuine experience.
Director Luke Rogers orchestrates this controlled chaos with remarkable precision. Kathleen Kershaw's set design ingeniously represents the kitchen area as a ball pit, a brilliant visual metaphor for being overwhelmed by work, literally drowning in tasks that multiply faster than you can complete them. Ethan Hamill's projection design on the backdrop works extensively throughout, adding layers of visual information that reflect the overstimulated environment of contemporary service work.
The production tackles multiple dimensions of the first-job experience with surprising maturity. There's the formulaic training manual and corporate speak, the emerging relationships between coworkers who become your entire social universe, the navigation of sexuality and identity in brief "crew breaks," the young shift manager dreaming of a "real" job with office people and office equipment, as if what they're doing now isn't real work deserving real wages.
One particularly effective character thread follows the regular "crew member" whose entire social life revolves around their co-workers, who shows up just to hang out because this frantic fast-food outlet has become their only community. It's both funny and quietly devastating, a recognition that these non-places designed for transaction sometimes become the only third spaces available.
The cast handles Webster-Mannison's rapid-fire dialogue with impressive facility. Hyslop brings weary and paranoid authority to the Shift Manager role, while Goodwin, Notley, Hogan, Dunkerley, Piva, Bianchini, and Cornelia create distinct characters within the ensemble framework. Several received ACT Ovations Award nominations for the original Canberra season, and their comfort with the material shows in performances that never sacrifice specificity for speed.
Patrick Haesler's sound design and composition is a nice touch, maintaining the production's relentless momentum while allowing space for quieter moments of connection between characters. The technical elements work in concert to create an aesthetic that feels both very real and dreamlike, or perhaps nightmarish is more accurate when describing labour conditions that ask teenagers to work longer, harder, and cheaper, only to have shifts diminish when reaching the "age of 23."
This is a play that knows exactly what it wants to say and says it efficiently, respecting both its young performers' stamina and its audience's attention. The strong language warning (plus other 'awakening' comments) and 15+ recommendation reflects a commitment to represent youth experience authentically rather than sanitising it for adult comfort.
Webster-Mannison's playwright notes reveal research into youth labour conditions, including the chilling detail about "The Mosquito," a sonic anti-loitering device designed to cause pain only to people under 25, installed in shopping centres to keep teenagers away. This detail illuminates the production's central concern: young people are simultaneously exploited as cheap labour while treated as threats to be managed, controlled, and kept moving.
What emerges is theatre that refuses to choose between political critique and entertainment. Work, But This Time Like You Mean It is genuinely funny, often hilariously so, while maintaining its exposé about systemic exploitation. The surreal time-loop structure allows for theatrical excess that makes visible what workplace normalisation obscures. When being perpetually exposed to vapourised cooking oils becomes just part of the job, surreal theatre that amplifies these conditions reveals their essential absurdity.
For the touring Canberra Youth Theatre artists and crew, many experiencing their first professional tour, the Sydney season represents a significant career milestone supported by philanthropic investment from CYT alumna Liv Hewson. That institutional commitment to emerging artists shows in this work that treats young people's concerns as worthy of serious artistic attention.
Work, But This Time Like You Mean It proves that youth theatre at its best doesn't mean diminished ambition or softened politics. This is sharp, sophisticated playmaking that happens to be created by and about young people, and the audience is richer for it.
Work, But This Time Like You Mean It plays October 15-18 at The Rebel Theatre, Walsh Bay.
Tickets and more info: https://canberrayouththeatre.com.au/production/work-but-2025/
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