WORK, BUT THIS TIME
LIKE YOU MEAN IT
by HONOR WEBSTER-MANNISON
Canberra Youth Theatre
The Rebel Theatre 2025
Director Luke Rogers
Designer Kathleen Kershaw
Lighting & Video Designer Ethan Hamill
Sound Designer & Composer Patrick Haesler
Stage Manager Rhiley Winnett
Cast
Georgie Bianchini
Hannah Cornelia
Kathleen Dunkerley
Quinn Goodwin
Matthew Hogan
Blue Hyslop
Sterling Notley
Emma Piva
Photography David Hooley
Sydney Season
Neon lighting has dried out your eyeballs. The grease has permeated your sneakers. You think you can hear salt. A group of fast food workers are just trying to get through another shift. They’re underpaid and overworked and the customers keep coming and time is moving backwards and they need to stop working.
Work, But This Time Like You Mean It is a darkly surreal comedy about young people’s first experiences in the workplace. It’s about having a good work ethic on less-than-minimum wage. It’s about perseverance when you just want to curl up under the counter and cry. It’s an unhinged, deep-fryer-dive into deeply human relationships, forged within the most alienating of circumstances. It’s fricken tasty.
Work, But This Time Like You Mean It was commissioned and first produced by Canberra Youth Theatre at The Courtyard Studio, Canberra Theatre Centre, on 20 September 2024.
This return season was generously supported by the Australian Theatre for Young People, and the ACT Government.
Nominated for Best Production for Young People at the 2025 Sydney Theatre Awards
“This is the kind of theatre young people should be seeing and making. Smart, subversive, and unafraid to go deep into the fryer, Work, But This Time Like You Mean It doesn’t just entertain; it challenges, it mourns, and it demands better. Canberra Youth Theatre has a strong history of producing exceptional new work created by young people for young people. With any luck, this production will tour to more capital cities, reaching the wider audiences it deserves.”
– Theatre Now ★ ★ ★ ★ ½
“Directed by Luke Rogers, the production delivers amusement in spades, impressing with its relentless energy and visual exuberance. Set within the bleak confines of a takeout joint, Rogers’ staging transforms the banal into the spectacular, revealing the latent drama of labour and exhaustion... [The design] elements generate a rhythm that feels breathless yet purposeful, a choreography of survival rendered with theatrical bravado... A cast of eight delivers the show’s discombobulating heart with infectious precision and energy. Their performances are tightly honed, radiating a cohesion and verve that keep the audience engaged from start to finish.”
– Suzy Goes See
“This is theatre made by and for young people who refuse to stay quiet about the world they inherit… A discombobulating rollercoaster that will have you walking out saying, ‘What in the world did I just watch?’ with the biggest smile plastered onto your face.”
– The Scoop
