‘BABYFLEAREINDEERBAG’: A Biting Pitch That Puts Performance Under Pressure

Hannah Maxwell’s BABYFLEAREINDEERBAG arrives in Sydney as part focus-group, part artistic spiral and one of the more singular nights of theatre.

Created, written by and performed by Hannah Maxwell, a nonchalantly queer storyteller, who has built her career on autobiographical work—I,AmDram and Nan, Me & Barbara Privi among her credits—modest successes, and an extensive resume (heterochromia included).

BABYFLEAREINDEERBAG continues that run, but this time Maxwell cracks her process wide open and pulls the audience right into it.

Upon entering the minimal space—circle of chairs, name badges, a waiting PowerPoint—it’s apt this is not a normal night at the theatre.

In fact, it feels like you’ve been accidentally recruited into a workshop you most definitely didn’t RSVP to.

Armed with a clicker and a starkly self-aware PowerPoint laying out the harsh financial reality of fringe theatre that doesn’t exactly pay the bills, Maxwell pitches herself off the bat in a way that feels proud and apologetic all at once.

Maxwell needs her next show to hit, something with enough emotional currency to survive in an era where oversharing is practically a genre, and who better to turn to as a focus group than her audience?

The format is strange, a little pressure-inducing, and very deliberate—less a straightforward show than a live development process that happens to have feelings in it.

The concept is simple, Maxwell reveals her range and lays out fragments of three possible future works inspired by her own life’s not-so-deep traumas. First is a warm, funny and slightly too earnest ode to her father—a man whose fringe history stretches back to telemarketing bears. Next comes an effusive romance with a detour about falling for a woman who’s never been in a queer relationship before, aptly named ‘My First Pancake’.

And finally, the show’s topped off with a wired, jarring provocation about phones, which ends in a full-throated karaoke rendition of Cher‘s If I Could Turn Back Time that is completely absurd yet earnestly fitting.

It’s far from a traditional setup. The audience is pulled into something closer to a live development process, participating in 1 minute group pitch style that feels like a marketing survey. It’s strange, a bit pressure inducing and very deliberate.

What holds it all together is Maxwell’s control of tone. A confident, effusive and wry storyteller who rarely overplays a moment or tips into sentiment, she shifts gears without signalling it and lets the room catch up on its own time.

It keeps everything slightly off centre, feeling unsure how serious to take any of it, or if that uncertainty is the point.

And in a circle this small, eye contact is unavoidable, which Maxwell wields like punctuation.

The 60-minute production is otherwise deliberately lean, lighting is simple but deployed with precision and shifting to support Maxwell’s engaging stories. The PowerPoint sits somewhere between corporate polish and conscious scrappiness, never quite one or the other, which is exactly right for a show operating in the same register.

The group discussions occasionally spin without landing — the prompts calibrated to get bleaker with each concept, a structural choice that slowly shifts the room from willing participants to reluctant verdicts. By the end nobody’s quite sure if they’re still doing a bit or not. The format is inherently strange, and depending on the crowd, some of the group discussions can drift. But that discomfort is also where the show lives.

The most effective thing about BABYFLEAREINDEERBAG is how thoroughly it blurs performance and reality. You’re never entirely sure where Maxwell ends and the show begins. By the end, when things taper off—less a conclusion than a quiet collapse—it’s hard to tell whether you’ve watched a character burn out or someone admit they can’t keep doing this.

BABYFLEAREINDEERBAG is tittering, a little surreal, and uncomfortably honest—especially for those trying to make something personal and put it into the world.

BABYFLEAREINDEERBAG ran till 28 March at QTopia.