Love Thy Hater: PULP Reviews
My greatest misfortune of 2025 was missing the sold out run of Michael Krizan’s original play Love Thy Hater in the Cellar Theatre. Sexy Jesus answered my prayers, however, when a second run of the show was unveiled for this year’s Sydney Fringe Festival.
The play follows best friends Ash and Theo as they grapple with the social politics of being gay at an all-boys Catholic school, Immaculate Conception Boys’ College (cum laude). From Theo’s hallucinations of Sexy Jesus (William Shakesass) and the Twelve Apostles, to an optimistic Gay-Straight alliance set up by Ash at school, this religious satire is bursting with witty/playful/erotic/heartfelt interrogations of Catholic guilt and queerness.
The Flight Path Theatre was packed with university gays, homo-curious Gen Xs and unsuspecting Fringe-goers there for a good time. The stage was bare except for three crudely graffitied school desks and a lonesome picture of the Virgin Mary hung on an eerily accurate school-blue wall. The genuine camaraderie between the cast emulated the unrestrained fraternity of juvenile school boys – it was clear that the performers were having just as much fun as the audience were.
Love Thy Hater is an intensely physical show, and the quality of the chorus work is outstanding. It was evident that during the rehearsal process particular attention was given to fine-tuning the actors' physicality to better heighten the humour and the heartbreak of the story being told. The ensemble (Isabella Bendeich, Zoe Gelagin, Antigone Marchbank, Astra Milne and Mya Pockran) seamlessly switched between inhabiting the stage as a collective body, bolstering whomever is the focus of the scene, to swelling the stage as a swarm of private school boys. The campy dance numbers interspersed within these chorus sequences brought a playfulness to what is otherwise a serious story at times.
That said, what surprised me the most about the show is how funny it was! The opening scene – stage dimly lit, two naked male figures entangled in vines succumbing together to the temptation of the apple only to be interrupted by Eve herself, “Adam? Steve!”, she shouts in horror – sets the precedent for the cheeky and intelligent comedy to come. In both the script and the staging, the humour was a well balanced combination of horny and witty.
Few tickets remain for the closing night of Love Thy Hater. Get in while you still can, and let this wonderful work of sex and adolescence dazzle you.
