‘It is a pressure cooker’: a new play taps into the idealism and adrenaline of Canberra politics
State Theatre Company South Australia’s first new play of 2025 draws on the anonymous accounts of real-life staffers and MPs to reveal the complex workplace politics of federal parliament.
Emily Steel hadn’t set foot in Canberra prior to November 2022. The Welsh-born playwright had arrived in Australia against the backdrop of Kevin Rudd’s 2010 knifing, but for years the coup-filled corridors of federal parliament were a foreign world.
As she embarked on a new State Theatre Company commission, Steel resolved to make her first pilgrimage to the house on the hill.
“I was quite cynical,” Steel tells InReview. “I was going in asking about experiences of women in politics — Bruce Lehrmann had been in the news a lot, Brittany Higgins has been in the news a lot. The reports on harassment and bullying in both federal parliament and the state parliaments had come out.”
It was an uncomfortable zeitgeist that Steel hoped to tap into. In Housework, which will premiere this week, Steel brings audiences inside that Canberra bubble via the fictional trio of a freshman MP (Susie Youssef), a workhorse chief of staff (Mad As Hell’s Emily Taheny) and a bright-eyed junior staffer (Franca Lafosse) who looks up to them both.
To bring those characters to life, Steel interviewed a range of real-life MPs, political staffers, and parliamentary workers from across the political spectrum. Steel might have been new to Canberra, but when her subjects started talking, many of the workplace dynamics they described weren’t so unfamiliar after all.
“What seems particular about Canberra is that you have the geographic isolation where most people are traveling quite a long way to come in, and they’re there Sunday to Thursday, all the sitting weeks. So you’re isolated from your family, you’re isolated from normal life, and you’re under this intense pressure the whole time — they are so busy they barely have time to stop and eat.”
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Playwright Emily Steel. Photo: Jamois / Supplied
It reminded Steel of the theatre world, where touring breeds a cycle of insularity, repetition, and constant nerves that can seem like an alternate reality.
“You’re with the same group of people, you’re all away from home. You often do go out and have a drink because you’ve got nothing else to do in the evenings. You go out afterwards, and everybody is a little bit looser, maybe, than they would be in their real life. Maybe you have a slightly different persona.”
Perhaps it’s little surprise that the world of theatre, like parliament, has faced its own complex reckonings in the #MeToo era.
Despite the high-profile scandals and court cases dominating the headlines, Steel was also struck by the fact that many of her interviewees maintained a dogged idealism — and a show-must-go-on mentality.
“They really believed in democracy,” she says. “[They] talked about it as a kind of a sense of duty to the public.”
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“A number of people talked about the addictive nature of it. There’s adrenaline, you feel like your work means something, that what you’re doing is potentially affecting change and affecting the lives of millions of people. So it feels important, and there’s an adrenaline rush.”
One interviewee, when asked why she pushed through the ‘hard’ parts of the job, replied simply, ‘If not me, then who?’
“Even though it is a pressure cooker kind of a world, and there’s a lot that could be better about that environment, if you step away and go, ‘I’ll leave it to the people who enjoy that’, then you have no influence in that sphere,” Steel says.
“And I guess that’s what the play is about — who is getting into those positions of power? What does it cost them? How much should you sacrifice to get things done?”
Over the course of Steel’s research, another uneasy tension revealed itself. The issues of inequality and toxic cultural norms are often structural, and entrenched over decades, but the parliamentary players trying to survive them are hooked into a relentless cycle of living from moment to moment, press conference to party room, late night parliament session to knockoff drinks.
Youssef and Taheny play a first-term MP and her over-worked chief of staff. Photo: Matt Byrne / Supplied
“I thought it was less about individuals and attitudes and behaviours, and more about the structure of how it all works. There were a lot of things I heard about in terms of motherhood and how hard it is to be the mother of a young child and work in Canberra, because you are away 20 weeks of the year.
“And you can’t, kind of point a finger at someone and say, ‘That’s all your fault, and we can fix it now tomorrow’. It’s a structural thing, and I don’t know the answers to how you make that work.”
Like the players of Armando Iannucci’s White House satire Veep, Steel took care to keep party allegiances vague in an environment where personal allegiances and the moral high ground doesn’t always run on party lines. The resulting play is less interested in the monsters and Machiavellian masterminds like House of Cards’ Francis Urquhart, but what happens when real people are thrust into an at-times unreal environment.
“What I kind of hope people will take from it, is that you don’t have to be that bad to do things that are questionable. Sometimes, it’s like the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”
Housework by Emily Steel runs from 7 – 22 February at the Dunstan Playhouse