How My Light Is Spent

Anna Sokolova

8 minutes ago

3 min read

KXT on Broadway 11-26 September 2026, Sydney

Secret House in association with the Bake House @kxt_bakehouse

A very short season overlapping with a full-on Sydney Fringe of a play very much worth seeing.

The review

Newport, Wales, modern-day. Jimmy, 34, is an employee of the only drive-through shop selling donuts. Kitty, possibly around the same age, works a sex-phone line and rents a granny flat in a house of solid, calm, quite boring, not much saying, but decent Stevo, saving for a uni degree. One day Jimmy decided to call the number, and got Kitty on the line. Since then, for months, every Wednesday, at 19.30, there was a precisely nine-minute-long call. Enough time even to squeeze in several minutes of a human conversation. And then, Jimmy got fired and started to disappear.

Braiden Toko, a young director who obviously - and fortunately - cannot drive off their own decades of life experience and wisdom. Instead, Braiden Toko directs the play, which is seemingly weightless, tastefully balancing lightness, feel of language and subtle intonations, enriched with the gentleness of the music score and encapsulating lighting. And there are also rich layers of voices - a bit on the higher side Jane Angharad and James Smithers, shadowed by the deeply modulated speaking by Renée Billing and deep, soft tones by Pita Lolohea, and perfectly bitter, rejecting-but-thinking-how-to-accept intonations by a lonely teenager made by Kira McLennan.

James Smithers' set design, using signature use of geometric shapes, creates an excellent visual metaphor on a metaphor - loneliness, invisibility, disappearing in front of a crowd, looking at own reflections repeated a milliard of times. There are two long boxes lit with bright blue-ish/white, one for Jimmy, one for Kitty. Three narrators move in between, telling the story, letting Jimmy and Kitty tell their parts in the first person. Several floor-to-ceiling large mirror panels are mounted on the walls at both ends of the space, infinitely reflecting everyone, audience and actors.

It is a sad play packed with funny lines; its humor is built on mismatches between tone and meaning of the words. It is so comical when Kitty answers Jimmy’s questions about what she is wearing; what was meant to be a hot talk could not be said in a more everyone manner. When Jimmy says a quick “sorry about that” to his daughter’s half-upset, half-curious comment about 171 donuts he brought to her to celebrate all missed birthdays, but mixed up her 17th and 18th (1+2…+18 will be 171). Charismatic Jimmy’s mother, Rita, comments to him, with her constant “luv” said in a caring tone, but with no welcome to any further evolvement.

The talk is light; there is hardly any expression of overwhelming emotions by both Jane Angharad and James Smithers, whose amazingly steady hold of the tone is a backbone of the play, a grounded foundation of the entire work, the heart of it, which makes it deeply bittersweet, realistic mixed with magical. The language of the play is casual. The bitterness comes from what they all say and what they are refusing to disclose, and how direct they are in their commentary.

The realism of the story is slowly invaded by something surreal. Jimmy starts to disappear, part by part; it is vanishing, though he still can carry and use things. Covering what is missing with nonsense-looking pieces of clothes, like an Invisible man, he is becoming a caricatured mummy.

Jimmy and Kitty's ending is beyond “they lived happily ever after” or even “everything will be fine”; instead, it is a poetic, beautiful, fairy-tale metamorphosis. It left a sensation which the same as when one is looking into the deep, dark starry sky in silence, feeling nearly dissipated but existentially happy, even if nothing promises to hold it true.