Review of a very distinctive comedy duo

It’s rare to come across a comedy show that has entirely unique sensibilities, but the Sisters Fig is pretty much the closest you’ll find.

Blaise Wopperer and Lara Ciulli play two squabbling siblings,  Blair and Mary, deep in rural Australia. Isolated from the world, save for their abusive and distant father, they have developed an unhealthy co-dependency; a relationship with deep-seated rivalries, niggles, gaslighting and in-jokes at a remove from normality. 

Theirs is an Amish-style, god-fearing household, with the misfit pair clad in ultra-conservative frocks and bonnets. But the times are modern. One sketch has Mary smuggling in an illicit iPhone while scene changes are covered with glitchy home VHS tapes giving more disturbing insight into the weird family dynamics.

The characters are grotesques, but believable in their own distinctive universe. And while the backdrop is weird, the show is silly and light on its feet. Their bickering is witty, pointed and ludicrously offbeat, underpinned by a disconcerting incestuous lesbian tension that occasionally  rises to the surface. 

Skits fit together seamlessly, bound by the setting and just enough through-lines to drive their gloriously melodramatic narrative, involving harvest dances (I’m imagining something involving a Wicker Man) and the mystery of Mary’s absent mum,  all delivered with an anarchic, but just about restrained, energy.

The pair also show a flair for reckless physical comedy from the start, when they crashing around the set in a pantomime cow outfit, to the end.

Seamlessly integrating the silly and sweet, the dirty and the innocent, and all with an undertone of creepy, the pair take elements of rural isolation familiar from the likes of The League Of Gentleman and combine them with well-rounded oddball Australian characters represented by Chris Lilley at his best. But Sisters Fig have an outlook that is 100 per cent theirs alone.

It’s perhaps a failing of how overwhelming the Edinburgh Fringe is that such a excitingly distinctive take on the clown genre failed to make much of an impact at last year’s festival. But the show is quirky delight, and kudos to Soho Theatre to giving it a life beyond Edinburgh, for this duo have ‘next cult hit’ written all over them.

• The Sisters Fig are at Soho Theatre tonight and tomorrow.

Review date: 30 May 2025
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Soho Theatre