REVIEW: Zoë Sitas’ “With Two Dots”

By Esther Shim

As part of the 2019 Sydney Comedy Festival, With Two Dots invites you into the life and times of Zoë Sitas.

Nestled in the cosy Matchbox of Marrickville’s Factory Theatre, Sitas shares with her audience the experience of straddling multiple identities as a South-African-Cypriot, a queer woman, an asthmatic, a nursing student by day and comedian by night.

Much of her set centres around her experience as a growing up as a migrant in Australia, plucking out memories from her primary school years, reminding us of the truly absurd country that we live in. We’re reminded of the idiosyncrasies of the Australian schooling system; The Pen License, Jazz Ballet and Our Curriculum’s Obsession with Trench Foot and Simpson and His Donkey.

The show is dynamic, bolstered by her brilliant character-work. Sitas breathes life into the characters of the people in her life, including her yia-yia, your rich white husband at the farmers markets and Yolandi, a South African netball coach, only made more believable with the nuggets of Greek and Afrikaans that she sprinkles throughout the show.

She is a versatile comedian, bringing a confidence onto the stage that allows her to laugh off and work with the feedback from her microphone that ran through the entirety of her set (let’s hope her audio-obsessed family wasn’t in the crowd that night!).

She channels this same confidence as she shares with a gut-wrenching candour about her experiences as a queer woman. It is her comedic talent that allows her to temper these stories with hilarious metaphor that likened her experience of coming out of the closet to learning how to merge on a highway.

The room erupted with belly-laughs as she dances to Flashdance, Freddy Mercury and the Spice Girls on stage but at other moments, Sitas uses her platform to acknowledge her privilege and elevate a progressive political message that extends beyond herself.

This is a show that is unabashedly Zoë; it is thoughtful, introspective and is just, really, really funny.

In a notoriously male-dominated industry, With Two Dots is a refreshing departure from comedy as we know it and boy, does Zoë Sitas leave me excited for the future of comedy.