It’s time: the Wharf Revue is exiting the stage after 25 years of political piss-takes and satirical skewerings, from songs about the unceasing weaponisation of refugees since the Tampa affair to shadow puppetry spotlighting the misogyny of the “ditch the witch” rally. Now, just like Joe Hockey celebrating a budget of health and welfare cuts with cigars, the revue’s final satirical show will ignite memories of our lowest political nadirs.
Beginning in the Sydney Theatre Company’s Wharf theatre in 2000, the Wharf Revue quickly became known for its annual touring show mashing Broadway belters and political assassinations. And every year its players always had an abundance of material, given that neither major party ever learned from the other’s machiavellian machinations.
After Julia Gillard toppled Kevin Rudd as prime minister in 2010, their doppelgangers took to the Revue stage: he (Phil Scott) in cape and half mask, she (Mandy Bishop) in pearls and cream top. “Cop this,” Gillard sang, abruptly cancelling their Phantom of the Opera duet by stabbing Rudd in the back, leaving him slumped over a piano.
Perhaps the Revue’s deepest dig came in 2007, in the sketch The Last Days of the Howard Bunker – inspired by the Hitler biopic Downfall – which was set in a secret complex beneath Parliament House: a fey Alexander Downer (Drew Forsythe) calls John Howard (Scott again) “mein führer” and the beleaguered PM turns to his doting wife (Bishop): “As my dream of aspirational nationalism lies in smoking ruins, you were there.” Then, after a brief pause, he adds: “Janette, you’re a fuckin’ jinx.”
Yet there was no blowback from the Liberal party. “Probably now you wouldn’t be allowed to do that, would you?” muses Jonathan Biggins during a rehearsal break from the show he co-writes each year with Scott and Forsythe. “This is the problem when you start to make laws that prohibit the use of Nazi salutes or emblems: where do you draw the line when it’s obviously a satirical framework?”
Somehow, conservatives always seemed easier to send up. When Malcolm Turnbull rolled Tony Abbott for top office in 2015, the Revue unleashed Les Libérales: a blue-ribbon Les Misérables featuring a tongue-darting Biggins as Abbott singing Master of the House: “Never in the wrong / pander to the right / I made the Duke of Edinburgh a knight one night.” This was followed by Turnbull (Forsythe) in a leather jacket crooning Who Am I, “the sole remaining voice of sanity, totally devoid of vanity”.
Now, the Wharf Revue has decided to “retire to do other things”, resting assured that little about Australian politics has been off-limits over the quarter century; they even sacrificed laughs to include a poignant sketch on the royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse. But one part of the globe proved particularly resistant to satire: in 2009 they did a sketch about settlers in East Jerusalem.
“We did what we thought was a very even-handed song about the issues facing that part of the Middle East,” Biggins recalls. “Well, the bloody brouhaha that stirred up, and the condemnation and the letters to the STC general manager and to the board. We realised people will only hear what they want to hear – once they hear a trigger word, they stop hearing the rest of it.”
Politicians have proved more game. Tanya Plibersek has rarely missed a revue show in 25 years, once seeing herself dressed as “a Blinky Bill Shorten koala”.
“It’s remarkable they make satire without being mean,” the environment minister says. “They draw out people’s foibles, failings or mistakes but at the bottom of it you’ve got [writers and performers] who care about politics, who have this hope democracy works well, that we all do better.”
Jacqui Lambie, who was in the Canberra audience in 2022 when Bishop performed a boot-scootin’ version of her, calls the Revue a “great night out”. “God knows we all need to have a laugh at ourselves, especially politicians,” she says.
Anthony Albanese also attended the 2022 show, which was subtitled Looking for Albanese and featured Albo impersonators dressed as a Hobbit and Alice in Wonderland. He met the cast afterward and was “very gracious about the show”, Bishop says.
The arts minister, Tony Burke, who was portrayed as a Jet in a sketch re-enacting West Side Story in 2022, says: “Every year I attend the Revue and every year, as I take my seat, someone spots me and says, ‘You’re brave coming to this.’ They’re sharp, irreverent, and often disturbingly accurate.”
In 2015 Bob Hawke cheerily invited two Revue performers to an oyster meal with his wife, Blanche, at the Wharf bar after seeing a matinee in which he and Paul Keating were portrayed as fellow nursing home residents in dressing gowns.
Keating himself had also attended before then: Biggins says the former PM told him after one show: “I would’ve been wearing a better suit.” (Keating did not respond to Guardian Australia’s requests for comment.) Yet to be spotted in a Wharf Revue audience, however, are some other former PMs: Gillard, Rudd, Howard, Abbott, Turnbull or Scott Morrison.
Bishop, whose impression of Gillard spawned ABC TV’s 2011 sitcom At Home With Julia – of which Gillard was critical – says: “We play and write her with great warmth; we do look after her, and rightly so, she’s the first [federal] female leader, may there be many more.”
Biggins begs to differ, saying Gillard was “not without mistakes, not without failings. It’s our job to point those out and we don’t treat anyone too kindly.” Portraying Gillard as stabbing Rudd on stage was justified, he says, because she was “a scrapper from the leftwing faction who fought to get where she got”.
In 2020, the year Morrison took off for Hawaii during a bushfire crisis and tried to get the former Hillsong pastor Brian Houston into the White House, he was seen on Revue stages in a grass skirt, strumming a ukulele. Did Morrison get off lightly? “Probably,” admits Biggins, “because none of us could do him. If we can’t do them, we kind of shy away a bit from them.” Bishop adds that now they have David Whitney handling the Morrison and Peter Dutton impressions.
Thus far, no politician has threatened to sue the Wharf Revue. Echoing Plibersek’s evaluation, Biggins suggests the show’s absence of malice is key: “Over the years, we’ve found the more useful aspect of satire is to find things that unite people.”
Bishop concurs: “We’re not out to crucify anyone. There are no laughs in damnation.”
The Wharf Revue: The End of the Wharf As We Know It plays Canberra Theatre Centre, 25 October-2 November; Sutherland Pavilion, 5-6 November; Sydney’s Seymour Centre, 11 November-23 December. It will tour NSW, Queensland and Victoria in 2025, see here for dates
