From award-winning company Deus Ex Femina (Adelaide Fringe Award winners 2022 & 2024), ‘The Damage is Done is a taut, high-voltage solo about queerness, sisterhood and the fault lines running through an Italian-Australian home. Fiercely intimate, unsentimental and darkly funny, it lays bare loyalty, shame and love—what survives, how we transform, and what love lasts once The Damage is Done.’

A warning to potential show-goers, this show is not for the faint of heart. The content can be incredibly dark and heavy, and there are quite a few trigger/content warnings. But despite its distressing nature (or maybe because of it), it's an important piece of theatre, and I want to assure interested readers that it's something truly worth experiencing. 

Upon entering the stage at the Goodwood Studio Theatre, complete with iconic cornicello earring and Adidas track pants, it is immediately apparent to the audience that Katherine is a bona fide member of the Italian-Australian community. This is then further reinforced by her opening story of an Italian-style family birthday party, complete with observations on the numerous family members and their dynamics and dysfunction. As the story and the show continues, that exact family dynamic and each individual relationship in it is unravelled, pulled apart piece by piece, looked at under a microscope (and in a dictionary), and by the end, put on display in its gloriously messy beauty for all to see. 

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I'm sad the fringe, and therefore this wonderful production, is nearing its end - purely because I genuinely want to tell everyone I love, everyone I've ever known, every stranger I pass on the street and their dogs to see it. So if you have the chance, please, see this show while you still can.