Game. Set. Match. is a love letter to truth-telling. It is nothing short of brilliant
- Written by Bianca Williams, PhD Candidate in the History Program, La Trobe University; The University of Melbourne
Colonisation in this country has always been carried on the bodies of Aboriginal women. Many of these women, our grandmothers and aunties, were forced into domestic service in the homes of wealthy white families.
They cleaned, cooked and cared for white children while being denied the right to raise their own. They received little or no pay and faced violence and abuse without accountability.
Their stories were often hidden, dismissed, silenced and excluded from official records. From Gamilaroi playwright and actor Megan Wilding, Game. Set. Match. pushes against this reality.
Directed by Jessica Arthur, the play is set in the aftermath of a celebrated tennis player’s funeral. Joshua (Rick Davies), the chief financial officer (CFO) of the player’s foundation, arrives late to the wake. He is immediately outmanoeuvred by the unexpected presence of Ray (Wilding), a cleaner whose arrival disrupts the carefully staged surface of grief.
An awkward interaction involving the radio, rubbish and sandwiches on a portrait of the deceased quickly develops into a rally of words. The night unfolds across shifting spaces, while beneath the banter and attraction lies a darker reckoning with abuse, control and the stories people attempt to suppress.
Game.
This is an unsettling drama, using the language and rhythm of tennis as a metaphor for escalation, exposure and truth-telling.
There is a particular kind of Australian summer embodied by the Australian Open. The blue hard courts of Melbourne Park, the late January heat, the long humid evenings.
Ray and Joshua face off like players in a singles match, locked in a verbal back-and-forth that is also a fight over whose story will be heard. Each conversation between the grounded Davies and the intense Wilding is a struggle for truth in a country that often refuses to listen.
Ray calls tennis a game for predators, focused on power, control and winning at any cost. Wilding uses tennis as a metaphor for colonisation.
It is nothing short of brilliant.
Set.
What begins as a will-they-won’t-they rom-com gradually turns to a psychological thriller.
Yet to approach this only through the lens of revenge is to miss its deeper purpose.
Ray is funny, sharp, furious, tender and exhausted. She is a Black woman unapologetic in her Indigeneity, her voice, her laughter, her grief and her rage. At its core, the play is a love letter from Ray to herself – an act of reclamation from a world that has demanded Aboriginal women fracture themselves in order to survive.
It is an unapologetically confronting work that moves between dark comedy and moments of extreme violence: explicit descriptions of sexual assault; graphic gun violence; discussion of racism and racial slurs. These elements are not shock tactics, but central to its interrogation of abuse, control and accountability.
The brutality in Wilding’s writing is continually disrupted by humour. The audience is forced to reckon with discomfort while still being pulled forward by wit and rhythm. A moment of bodily violence involving secateurs and a severed finger is immediately punctured by the deadpan clarification that “the safety was still on”, collapsing horror into absurdity without diminishing its impact.
The violence is not only physical.
It is the violence of the mind, the body and the land: the interconnected violence of colonisation. Wilding refuses to let any of them be looked away from.
Wilding places revenge on the table without flinching, but the work itself is moving toward something else entirely: toward sovereignty and selfhood.
Match.
In the play’s final moments, flirtation gives way to reckoning. Even here, the work resists becoming a simple narrative of vengeance.
Ray reclaims herself through an act of defiance and strength. The past and present collapse into one another.
While she speaks in the now, she also speaks alongside and for our ancestors whose voices were silenced, dismissed and denied. Ray stands in her power. She honours her pain. She forces Joshua to witness the heaviness she has carried alone.
It is an act of reclamation, a refusal to continue carrying the silence imposed upon Aboriginal women across generations.
As the play draws to a close, we come to a recording: Joshua’s confession, captured and held as testimony.
It is not triumph, but a final act of truth-telling. This recording was never really about Joshua. It was about accountability: for the voices that run through Ray, the voices archives have never held faithfully.
The creative team includes Amy Carter as intimacy coordinator and Lyndall Grant in fight choreography, reflecting broader industry shifts towards safer practice when handling difficult material. The detailed content warnings published alongside the show are equally telling. This is a work shaped from within Community.
Game. Set. Match. is a play nine years in the making, but clearly guided by song lines that reach into the past and pull ancestral voices into the future.
It is a powerful example of honest truth-telling. It is an act of care between Ray and all the women before her whose stories were left out of the record. The match is not about winning or losing. The score is settled. As always, Country remembers.
Game. Set. Match. is at Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne, until May 23.
Authors: Bianca Williams, PhD Candidate in the History Program, La Trobe University; The University of Melbourne
