From breakout trans playwright Gabrielle Fallen and acclaimed queer indie theatre director Justin Nott, Mature Skin premieres at Northcote Town Hall Arts Centre as part of Darebin Arts Speakeasy, an unflinching new comedy that’s as dark as it is seductive.
Presented by Darebin Arts Speakeasy, Mature Skin takes a razor to the glossy promise of “all-natural” beauty culture, then pushes past the surface into mess, desire, power, and queer embodiment. The play begins in the charged intimacy of a nightclub bathroom, where two strangers collide. They both work for Australia’s leading all-natural skincare brand, but they’re divided by two decades, workplace status, and a dangerous pull neither of them wants to name out loud. One of them harbours an obsessive appetite for infected skin, and what starts as a flirtation spirals into something far stranger: intimate, funny, confronting, and impossible to rinse clean.
With “romance” that curdles into compulsion, Mature Skin slices into the beauty and brutality of queer bodies, and the forces that try to dominate them: corporate polish, age and pay-grade hierarchy, taboo desire, and the ways we perform ourselves to survive.
Mature Skin is a character-driven play that uses humour to address taboo subjects and to create space for conversations that are often avoided in public. The work is grounded in the belief that trans stories should meet audiences where they are, using humour as a way to connect. Within the queer community, laughter is a fundamental form of connection, and Mature Skin places both humour and human mess at the centre of its storytelling.
The play offers psychological depth and scrutiny of a complex relationship between its two characters. Paul, a forty-something gay man and successful fragrance designer who may not be entirely honest about what he wants, is brought to life by Peter Paltos, an acclaimed actor familiar to Melbourne’s theatre audiences. Compelling emerging talent Bailey Ackling Beecham portrays Jasmine, a young trans woman and sales assistant who knows exactly what she wants, however taboo others may consider it.
The relationship at the heart of the play resists simple interpretation. It’s often unclear who holds power, who is vulnerable, and how those roles shift over time. As the play progresses, Paul and Jasmine appear to age in different directions, complicating ideas of control, desire, and maturity. Mature Skin explores the tension between interior and exterior lives, focusing on skincare as both a literal and symbolic language. Skincare culture is often coded with sexualised and fetishistic meanings, and the play examines where desire ends and fetishisation begins.
March 11 – 22
Arts.darebin.vic.gov.au
