Sydney Fringe Festival: Doomers by Matthew Gasda
Doomers, Sydney Fringe Festival 2025
“Sometimes… people just have tapes, you know?”
Doomers. A cloyingly American tale for our time. I love the sound of Australians doing American accents; the crisp rhoticity, vowels squished at the top of mouths. The feeling of something learned from TV and movies. It is the perfect kind of accent for this play. Artificial, unnatural, contrasting the few actors that keep their Aussie accent. Reminiscent of how Kate Winslet accidentally created something totally new for Titanic (1997), essentially switching accents throughout the movie, making the story feel lost in time, memory, and fantasy. The doomers are stilted in that strange tech bro way, unable to understand the implications of even their smallest actions. Their voices and accents clash in soulless conflict.
The play operates as an anthological fable. Two different casts pretend to try to deal with the same problem, but really they just want to be the most important person in the room, and desperately need to feel like they have an important, stressful job because otherwise they don’t know what their life is for. It's what I imagine Succession (2018) is like for the characters who actually work. Some actors falter (we can’t all be Jeremy Strong) but others shine, particularly Bryson Grenfell as the midlife crisis polyamorist and Ben Blackler as the sociopathic founder. These two illuminate the first half of the show, markedly the stronger act. A harsher critic may say Doomers has no ending, even no clear plot. I, however, don’t think a play necessarily needs these things, particularly one centring on AI and the people who control it. The circular, repetitive absurdity becomes a droning hum, and through this the audience is able to parse out the truth: these tech-nihilists only care about themselves. And even then, barely.
The men in Doomers wear jeans so tight you can see the bulge of their phones paired with crisp shirts, blazers or t-shirts that say Jedi Master. The young, Substack-famous Zoomer-adjacent douche wears a hoodie. The women look professional, drab, in taupe, cream, and beige. It looks like a shitty startup full of assholes. Which is perfect, that’s what the play is about. Kind of. At least, that’s where the play is set. The play is about avoidance of pain, existential pain, at all costs. It is about all the modern ways we rationalise and invent ourselves away from thinking about death. It’s about quasi-religious devotion to businesses, AI, tech, founders, co-founders, investors, private equity. Because what else is there now, except screens and the worship of the people who put them in our hands?
To be fully transparent, this is kind of a gonzo review. I know the producer and the sound guy (please read that with the tone of someone trying to get into a club after being denied). I work the event; I scan everyone’s tickets as they walk in, including a man unironically wearing Cloudflare merch. I make eye contact with the hoi polloi of Cleveland Street. Not all of the eye contact is friendly. I sit next to a girl who smokes both cigarettes and vapes, which is interesting, but we don’t talk about it. I ink Xs on people’s hands like it’s a gig and they’re under eighteen. I say enjoy, but I don’t really know what I’m telling them to enjoy. Not yet.
Outside in the springtime air, five minutes to curtain, the cast begins singing ‘A Whole New World’ (1992). The producer, Aubrey Wang, wears all black. He is named Aubrey in the boy way, like Drake. Aubrey asks us for a lighter. The lighter is blue, from the girl who smokes cigarettes and vapes. I vape Chupa Chup Strawberry while Aubrey goes on my phone. The play starts late in deference to everyone in the audience being late. In theatre, everything is the fault of the audience. This is a known fact of the trade.
The mics glow blue on the collars of the actors in the murky pre-show light. A man plays with a pop-it fidget toy talking about his divorce and how much he loves his work, hates his work, lives for his work, dies by the sword. Another man asserts he will not join a polycule and gets called manipulative. A CEO texts the department of defence and has to be restrained from tweeting “Chaos mode”. Yes, this is the state of the world now. Doomers provides an astute, at times infuriating, often uncomfortable look at the circlejerks that decide our collective fate.
“We are creating the greatest company in the world.”
“You signed off on being a nonprofit.”
“Yes! And I regret that decision, famously!”
Characters circle back, loop each other in, liaise, proactivate, connect in the AM, descending into corpospeak to disguise their true nature. Their AI startup will not regulate their product. They all know this; it is predetermined. They just all want to have conversations about it. Or, more accurately, to tell themselves they had conversations about it to make themselves feel better. This is the shitty sci-fi future we live in. One of circular conversations held between idiots, assholes, and megalomaniacs. They UberEats bubble tea to sustain their circular conversations, and charge it to the company account. People raise issues and analogies, words pile on top of them, and then they spiral so far away from where they began, that everyone just gives up. We go from plane crashes to death to cavemen with fire to religion to — well it’s all just bullshit. Constant Biblical and historical references are thrown around, bastardised, simplified, gerrymandered, cherrypicked. Those within the company fantasise of sieges and crucifixions, and pretend that fantasy is fear. Maybe they all want to be topped by AI, to feel subordinate to the only thing they respect: the tech that they have created. A narcissistic exercise that spreads to the lonely, the disenfranchised, those using pornbots or making ChatGPT their boyfriend. Those dependent on AI in a way that causes them brain damage, those replaced workers, and those living in countries that reversed their climate promises because of the servers’ demands.
When the uppers-addicted Zoomer almost chokes to death, nobody is able to pay attention. Reality is not real, artifice is the only thing that is real.
“It’s capitalism. Just enjoy it.”
Doomers will be performed as part of Sydney Fringe Festival from the 1tst-30th of September, 2025.