There’s something disarmingly domestic about the opening of Little Boxes. Joann Condon (a British actor perhaps best known for her role as “Pat” in Little Britain) steps onto a stage ringed with cardboard boxes and carrying a thermos of tea. She’s about to begin what she calls a “clear out of me.” It’s an apt description for a show that is part memoir, part monologue, and part reckoning with the labels that accumulate and constrict over the course of a life.

Condon’s premise is simple: we are all placed in boxes – by family, by institutions, by our work, by ourselves. She begins with her family. As the last of four daughters, many of the available boxes had already been filled – the ‘beautiful one’, the ‘clever one’, the ‘quiet one’.  She was dubbed the ‘fat one’. From there, Condon traces a life shaped by categories and the effort required to prise them open.

There’s a simple clarity to the structure. The boxes – literal and metaphorical – form the spine of the piece, each opened to reveal a category into which she’s been placed. She takes us through the periods of her life: childhood, drama school, the precariousness of an acting career and the boxes in which she’s found herself: motherhood, daughterhood, fatness and grief. It’s a device that risks feeling overly familiar, but Condon and co-writer Leonie Simmons – an Adelaide-born comedy writer and producer – acknowledge the trope from the outset, leaning into it rather than pretending originality. What follows is less about the novelty of the metaphor than the individuality of the life revealed inside it.

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That life is offered to the audience with warmth and a self-aware humour. Condon is a natural raconteur. Her anecdotes are wry, yet grounded: awkward encounters at school events, the indignities of costume fittings, the wearying repetition of questions about her career. In a moment of audience participation, Condon is fed a list of those questions, exposing the tiresome assumptions that dog certain bodies and backgrounds.

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The hour-long performance is dotted with the odd theatrical flourish that lifts the piece beyond stand-up. The Rocky theme swells as Condon recounts the minor triumph of completing the school run. Late in the piece, she allows herself the pleasure of dancing simply because she can. These moments of low-stakes victory build into something close to triumph by the resolution. This feels particularly resonant for women entering the strange, often invisible territory of midlife, where confidence and rage coexist and the pressure to shrink – socially, professionally and physically – intensifies.

If the show occasionally edges close to comedy, this is tempered by the undercurrent of vulnerability. Condon’s reflections on grief – her father’s death when she was young, her mother’s passing just as she was about to become one herself – are handled with restraint. When she cries, we’re reminded that this is more than a theatrical monologue – it is her life.

What Little Boxes offers is not a radical rethinking of identity or a feminist call to arms. Its insights are as familiar as its central metaphor. But to dismiss it on those grounds would be to miss its strength: the articulation of the invisible constraints that surround us and the continual small acts of resistance required to live beyond them. Condon doesn’t rip the boxes apart so much as demand more space to move – and to dance. 

Little Boxes is playing at the Tandanya Theatre at Gluttony at Tandanya (253 Grenfell St, Adelaide) until March 22