Indigenous Playwright Stars in Her Own Rom-Com Revenge Play

Megan Wilding knew exactly why she had to write her own play. Big Blak women with opinions don't usually get cast as romantic leads.

The Gamilaroi actor and playwright spent nearly a decade perfecting Game. Set. Match., a theatrical conversation about colonization and sexual violence disguised as a rom-com. The play follows Ray and Joshua, who meet after his mother's funeral and engage in flirtatious banter that slowly reveals a much darker shared history.

Wilding first drafted the script in 2017, two years out of drama school. She won a fellowship with Sydney's Belvoir St Theatre, then put the work aside because the timing didn't feel right.

"I don't know if I was in a place to fully go where the piece needed me to," she explains. The conversations Australia was having about race needed to catch up.

Four years later, the play won the Griffin Award for new Australian playwriting. Still, Wilding tucked it back in a drawer.

Then Australia's 2023 referendum on Indigenous Voice to Parliament failed. The heartbreak transformed Wilding's approach to the script and to her own voice as an artist.

"There was a great heartbreak with the Voice to Parliament, but then the rebuild of going 'I don't need anyone to tell me whether I have a voice or not'," she says. She made the script "punchier, gutsier," removing moments where characters shied away from difficult truths.

Why This Inspires

Wilding joins a wave of Indigenous Australian women creating unapologetically bold work on their own terms. She recalls sitting in the audience watching Ursula Yovich and Leah Purcell perform their own plays at Belvoir Theatre, "getting chills, seeing a Blak woman own her words."

Her friend Dalara Williams inspired her with Big Girls Don't Cry, a play that centered Redfern voices without apology. Wilding saw how Williams "found a voice that she didn't shy away from."

Now it's Wilding's turn at Melbourne's Malthouse Theatre. The play uses tennis as its structure, with dialogue volleying back and forth like a match.

"One of the first things you get told in drama school is to play to win," she says. That competitive spirit drives both tennis and theater.

Wilding also recognizes she's been underestimating herself. Known primarily as a comedy actor, she's finally claiming her range as a dramatic performer too.

"I'm an excellent comedy actor, but also I'm an excellent dramatic actor," she says. Writing the role meant she didn't have to wait for casting directors to see what she already knew about herself.

After nearly a decade of waiting, Wilding feels ready to share the braver, bloodier version of her story with audiences who are finally ready to hear it.