There’s a sight gag in Top Coat, Michelle Law’s new play, where a character raises a broadsheet conspicuously towards us. “FREAKY FRIDAY 3 FLOPS,” the headline reads, above an image of the beloved Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis film that has become synonymous with the body swap.
Since its release in 2003, Freaky Friday – itself based on an earlier film, and before that, a children’s novel – has spawned countless spin-offs and imitators. Amid the rabble, there are those which, miraculously, discover new ways into the tried-and-tested format: recent horror-comedy Freaky, for example, where a teenage girl trades places with a serial killer; or the acclaimed anime Your Name, which transfigures its narrative gimmick into a breathtaking tale of lost love. Top Coat doesn’t quite reach these heights, but it still proves itself a worthy addition to the canon.
Farcical and frenetic, Law’s spin on the body swap is one drawn on racial lines. Winnie (Kimie Tsukakoshi) is a hot-headed nail technician prone to outbursts over a never-ending deluge of demeaning, disrespectful – and white – clientele. Kate (Amber McMahon) is one of them: a high-flying TV exec at the absurdly named Multicultural Broadcasting Corporation, and one of the last people for whom the term “girlboss” is a badge of honour rather than a pejorative.
Their fate is sealed as soon as Kate barges into the salon, all but demanding that Winnie fix her broken nail. Before long, they begin sparring. “I wish people respected my authority,” Kate whines. “I wish I had authority,” Winnie fires back.
Of course, their dreams come true in fantastical fashion – both a homage to and a parody of the 2003 Freaky Friday’s switcheroo scene, which takes place in a Chinese restaurant, complete with devilishly grinning maître d’. Top Coat satirises the Orientalism of this scene: a mystical fan is brandished, smoke spills from a funnel, and a lucky cat’s eyes glow laser-red. Kate and Winnie exchange bodies and now, as is expected in this genre, each must learn the ways of the other – how difficult it must be in their shoes, how much they come to appreciate their original selves.
Except, wait: it’s only really hard for one party here.
While Kate struggles to buff nails and wash feet – much to the confusion of Winnie’s boss Asami (Arisa Yura) – her counterpart soars through business meetings and television sets, accidentally righting the wrongs of her predecessor with little more than common sense. (Read: a brain not yet wormed by the specific quirks of a media career.)
Where Kate has trampled over co-workers in her blinkered bid to head up a network which values diversity only in terms of dollar signs – an attitude all too familiar to anyone with even a cursory relationship to the Australian media – Winnie swoops in like a industrial relations Mary Poppins to grant long-deserved opportunities to junior employees Yuko (also Yura) and Indigenous business executive Marcus (Matty Mills).
Top Coat excels when it lets Law’s broader comedic strokes take centre stage. One standout scene plays like a romcom montage, with Winnie-as-Kate and Marcus’s new friendship blooming over a slew of moving set pieces, set to a Lizzo needle drop which – while incredibly naff – drew huge whoops from the crowd on opening night.
But there are times when the work struggles to reconcile its kitschier elements – James Lew’s Pinterest-board sets, each drenched in a single colour from canary yellow to Barbie pink, or Michael Toisuita’s sound design, which often resembles the anonymous electro beats of a Selling Sunset cut scene – with its earnest dissection of race politics.
Perhaps it’s because Top Coat is speaking to two very distinct audiences: the Winnies and the Kates. To the former, it offers – much like Law’s debut stage show Single Asian Female – the joys of being seen so specifically. It brims with references to east Asian experiences: jokes about double eyelids and lactose intolerance, as well as a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment where McMahon somehow masters the flat-heeled Asian squat.
For the latter, Top Coat provides a crash course in film and TV representation, which, it argues, wields power beyond the screen to affect the material existences of people of colour.
The problem is that to non-white viewers (or at least to this one), its lessons are so obvious as to verge on trite. A soliloquy that Marcus delivers on symbolic annihilation – the process by which minority groups are systematically excluded or stereotyped in the media – comes across as didactic rather than empowering. When Yuko utters lines like “stories are a salve”, it sounds like she’s delivering a cultural competency seminar instead of embodying a character.
To be fair, it’s a seminar that the Kates of the audience could probably use. If only they could relinquish their power as easily as Top Coat’s finale suggests, too: with a slapstick tussle and a teary admission.
• This article was amended on 6 July 2022. In an earlier version the actor Kimie Tsukakoshi was misidentified as the playwright Michelle Law in two image captions.
