DEMO Review

Kate Gaul reviews DEMO, Melody Rachel's deceptively playful interactive show at Qtopia Sydney's Queer Hub — The Substation, where a cheerful game of binary choices gradually tightens into something far more uncomfortable. Sydney Fringe 2026, 23–25 September.

Reviewed by Kate Gaul.

I knew absolutely nothing about DEMO before walking in, other than that it was interactive. And it is — in the nicest possible way.

This is not an audience-participation show where you spend the evening worrying that you might be hauled onto the stage or made to look foolish. Creator/performer Melody Rachel invites us to participate, and it's done playfully, generously and almost deceptively gently. We are simply asked to choose.

Melody Rachel is a charismatic performer, and DEMO is elegant and considerably more slippery than it first appears.

What does DEMO mean? Demonstration? Demolition? Demo as in a demonstration of an idea? A demonstration of a product? A prototype, a sample, a rehearsal? Or perhaps “demo” as in a political demonstration? The cleverness of the title is that it holds all these meanings at once just as the performance itself is shifting underneath us.

The central theatrical device is deceptively simple. The audience is presented with a series of binary choices:

CATS / DOGS.
MARMITE / VEGEMITE.
COKE / PEPSI.
CRUNCHY / SMOOTH.
PINEAPPLE ON PIZZA / PIZZA THE WAY GOD INTENDED.

And at first, it is gloriously inconsequential. We choose. We laugh. We discover that strangers in the room have made different choices from us.

But then the stakes start to rise.

LEFT / RIGHT.
WHITE / BLACK.
TAX THE RICH / CAPITALISM.
LABOUR / THE OTHER ONE.
PROGRESSIVE / PROGRESS.
ACTIVISM / SOCIAL JUSTICE.
OBJECTIVE TRUTH / THE EARTH IS FLAT.
WHITE PRIVILEGE / FEMALE PRIVILEGE.
MEN / FEMINISM.
RELIGION / JESUS.
SEX / GENDER.
LESBIAN / QUEER.
SINNER.

The trajectory is the thing

Cats and dogs are harmless. Marmite and Vegemite are ridiculous. By the time we arrive at politics, identity, religion, gender and morality, the mechanism has become much harder to laugh off. The audience is still being asked to choose between two things, but the possibility that either option might adequately contain a person, a belief or an experience has become increasingly absurd.

“What begins as a game of personal preference gradually becomes something much more uncomfortable: a demonstration of how quickly the binary can become a trap.”

That is where DEMO is at its most effective. It exposes our appetite for categorisation, our willingness to reduce complicated questions to opposing positions and then locate ourselves somewhere on the line.

The movement sequences punctuating the text and audience interaction are strong and satisfying. They give DEMO a physical rhythm and prevent the conceptual material from becoming only an intellectual exercise.

I did, however, want the movement to become more physically demanding as the ideas became more strenuous. There is a fascinating opportunity for the body to register the increasing pressure of the choices being presented to us. As the conceptual territory becomes darker and more provocative, I wanted the physical language to travel further with it, to become messier, more exhausting, perhaps even a little dangerous.

And then there is the ending

The show spends considerable time escalating the provocation. It moves from Coke versus Pepsi to questions of politics, privilege, gender, sexuality, religion, morality and truth. By the end, the audience has been taken a very long way from choosing between cats and dogs.

So, what happens now?

What has been demonstrated? What has been demolished? Have we changed? Have our choices changed? Has anything shifted between the people sitting in the room?

This is where I wanted DEMO to push harder. The ideas have accumulated enormous potential, but the ending feels less like a final confrontation than a gradual dribble away. After such a carefully constructed escalation, I wanted a sharper theatrical payoff, something that made us feel the consequences of having participated in the game.

Because the great strength of DEMO is that it gets us to participate before we quite realise what we are participating in. And perhaps that is the most interesting demonstration of all.

DEMO — written and performed by Melody Rachel. Qtopia Sydney — Queer Hub — The Substation, 23–25 September 2026.

Performer: Melody Rachel
Images: Amy Bagley

Qtopia Sydney — Queer Hub — The Substation, 301 Forbes Street, Darlinghurst NSW 2010 (Gadigal Country).

Instagram: @melodyrachelk · melodyrachel.com

Reviewed by Kate Gaul.