Feast Festival review: The Damage is Done
A family birthday party sparks a reckoning in Katherine Sortini’s darkly funny solo show about sisterhood, queerness and the precarious business of coming out.
It begins with a familiar suburban nightmare. A family birthday party. Isadora’s mother is turning 50, and the celebration is set to change the lives of both her daughters. Written and performed by Katherine Sortini, Deus Ex Femina’s production of The Damage Is Done takes this Italian Australian family gathering from social comedy into the realm of something far more devastating.
The show opens with the stage empty but for a single leather wingback chair that has seen better days. Dora steps into the light, examining herself as if in a mirror. Before a single word is spoken, we can tell this is someone struggling to accept the person reflected back at her.
As Dora prepares for the party, we get to know this highly intelligent and bitingly funny character and the eccentric family in which she struggles to belong. Sortini’s writing is sharp and clever. A sparkly dress prods memories of a first crush on a school friend. A few lines about a TikTok influencer and a birthday speech sketch Dora’s mother with hilarious clarity: a thoroughly modern exterior over a traditional Italian-Catholic core. Before the party erupts with the lights and sirens of a police raid, we know this family, its internal hierarchy and their place in the broader Italian-Australian community. We also know Dora is queer and keeping her identity hidden.
When police arrive to arrest Dora’s brother-in-law Mark for child sexual abuse offences, the family hierarchy is abruptly upended. Her sister Kris, previously the golden child, falls from grace. Dora, whose academic achievements have barely registered beside her sister’s more conventional success in getting married, finds herself unexpectedly elevated in status.
The first in her family to go to university, Dora has won scholarships and coveted positions at the museum. Now, about to graduate with a master’s degree, she’s finally basking in the light of her mother’s approval. When her mother wants to celebrate Dora’s achievements with a lunch, Dora sees an opportunity and invites her partner.
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Told from Dora’s perspective, this is, at heart, a story of two sisters struggling to be seen as the people they are and not the women their family expects them to be. Their shifting positions in the family expose how precarious approval can be when it depends on playing an assigned role.
Sortini sustains the intensity without ever sacrificing Dora’s caustic wit. Even in the darkest moments, the humour keeps sparking. Sortini capture then holds the audience’s focus for the full hour, beginning with that silent scrutiny of her reflection. The awkwardness and shame of keeping her true self hidden is felt before Dora speaks a single word and Sortini carries this perfectly, Dora’s humour making the moments of vulnerability all the more potent.
The lighting deserves special mention. On a stage furnished with a single chair, it carries us from birthday festivities to the fluorescent hell of the police station, establishing the shifts in mood and setting with incredible economy.
Confronting and darkly comedic, The Damage Is Done examines the harm families can inflict when love is contingent on conformity and the possibilities for repair when that approval is withdrawn.
The Damage Is Done was performed at The Goodwood Theatre and Studios on November 8 as part of Feast Festival 2026
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