A new production, set at a roller derby and performed on skates, tackles a range of issues including parenting and youth mental health, while offering a joyous, exhilarating experience. As Mama Does Derby prepares to premiere at the Sydney and Adelaide Festivals, Lenny Ann Low talks to its co-creators Virginia Gay and Clare Watson.
Several years ago, Clare Watson, the current Artistic Director of Windmill Production Company in Adelaide, went to watch a roller derby bout. Held on the outskirts of Melbourne, it was noisy, edgy and thrilling – unlike anything she had ever seen before.
Across two 30-minute halves, on a tight, flat, oval track, a spree of state team skaters in knee pads and helmets – some in fishnets or striped face paint – spun past her, jostling, swerving and speeding in an unremitting, strenuous display of full-contact, rough-and-tumble competitive mayhem. The sound was like a freight train, while the players were a mix of athleticism, chutzpah and intense, empowered fun. Watson absolutely loved it.
By the time the derby bout was over, she’d discovered a new sporting passion and envisioned a theatre work inspired by its scope, vivacity and hell-for-leather team members.
“I cannot tell you how theatrical roller derby is,” she says. “The players take on characters; they have character names, and they all play out extreme versions of self. There’s camaraderie and teamwork. On seeing it that first time, it felt like all of the best things about theatre-making.”
Over time, the trackside idea that Watson had for a theatre work has evolved into a Windmill production called Mama Does Derby, which has its world premiere at the 2026 Sydney Festival followed by a season at the Adelaide Festival.
Conceived and directed by Watson, and written by playwright, actor and artistic director Virginia Gay, it is the latest production to transform Sydney Town Hall for a festival event. This time, the ornate interior of the 147-year-old Victorian building will become a true-to-life roller derby venue complete with a full-scale, custom-built oval track and a central stage area featuring scenery on wheels.
The show’s cast is a mix of professional actors, real-life members of NSW roller derby teams and a live onstage punk-rock band. In Adelaide, the production will be staged at the Adelaide Entertainment Centre Theatre with athletes from the Adelaide Roller Derby League.
The story – a high-octane, heartfelt tale for all ages – follows a single mother Max (played by Amber McMahon) and her 16-year-old daughter Billie (Elvy-Lee Quici) who relocate to a regional town, where neither feels right in their new locale.
Max is unused to the sudden stillness of this settled life. Could the local roller derby offer some freedom? Billie, smack-bang in the middle of adolescence, is carrying too many worries and responsibilities. Why is she acting like a parent? After years of close-knit us-against-the-world togetherness, they’re faced with working out what they need, who they are together and apart, and the challenge of redefining their relationship as they find their individual paths.
It’s a story close to Watson’s heart. Inspired to participate in roller derby, she began learning to skate and compete. One day, with her then young daughter sitting on her knee, the pair witnessed a bad injury on the derby track. It was serious enough to make Watson, a single mother, consider how breaking her leg or spraining a knee mid-derby would effectively put the brakes on their lives.
“I couldn’t do that,” she says. “So, I pulled out [of competing]. For me, there’s always been a bit of a burning passion with derby, but maybe one that has been a bit unrealised.”
“I cannot tell you how theatrical roller derby is, the players take on characters; they have character names, and they all play out extreme versions of self. There’s camaraderie and teamwork. On seeing it that first time, it felt like all of the best things about theatre-making.”
Another connection was Watson’s passion to make a theatre work that reflects families who are not regularly seen in film, TV and stage stories.
“I wanted to show how a family can be just a mum and their kid and how that can be a really happy, complex, beautiful family system,” she says. “So, I talked to my daughter about it quite a bit as she was growing up – this idea for the show.”
“Then life does all sorts of wild and wonderful things. We moved a few times. We ended up in Perth and now she’s in Melbourne; she’s an adult studying theatre at the Victorian College of the Arts, and I’m in Adelaide working for Windmill. And I had a realisation about the idea for a show. This is the time. It’s now.”
The story of Billie and Max is not identical to Watson and her daughter’s, but it explores themes and issues they, and many parents and their teenage offspring, know well.
“For Billie, being 16 is when the process of individuation is really kicking off,” says Watson. “The mum is [finding being] stuck in the new town hard, and she’s feeling Billie kind of pushing away from her heart.”
“Billie is also experiencing some pretty extreme anxiety, and that comes out with sleep disorders. There’s an element of nightmare in the show which I think really appeals to teen audiences.”
Jump Scares
While Mama Does Derby began as a work that felt autobiographical, Watson says it has become its own story with two distinct characters.
“It’s about Max and Billie now, two beings in the world having their own adventures. And Virginia has written a script that is edgy, funny and just absolutely whip-smart.”
“I spoke to her first about writing it because she has known my daughter and I since my daughter was a wee little thing and I trusted her with all my heart with the work.”
Gay, winner of the 2024 Scotsman First Fringe Award for Outstanding New Writing for her play Cyrano, and fresh from reprising her acclaimed performance in the reimagined production of the musical Calamity Jane, says Mama Does Derby is about entertaining and connecting with all theatregoers, from teens and up.
“It touches on some big issues,” she says. “It also has some fabulous jump scares because we wanted to meet teenagers where they’re at. Billie is literally weighed down by a sleep paralysis demon, who is the manifestation of all her fears. Because teenagers are really psychologically advanced these days, to be able to say, ‘This is your fear manifest, this is what it does to you, felt really important to us.”
“It’s a super theatrical way to engage with – at the risk of sounding reductive – the mental health of teenagers.”
As the work was developed, the creative team spoke to lots of teenagers about how they felt in the world.
“And, essentially, they felt weighed down by the sense they had to solve the problems with the planet,” Gay says. “The feeling that they had to be the people who fixed everything that we, the older generation, had fucked up. Because what can they do? They’re teenagers. They don’t have the agency and the autonomy to actually do that, yet they’re expected to be the saviours of the [world].”
Mama Does Derby also explores the notion of a child taking on a parental role as the parent hits new challenges.
“Max has discovered a new adolescence in this moment in her life,” says Gay. “As somebody who’s also in their mid-40s and heading towards their 50s, those shifts that happen in your body [start] now and you’re suddenly going, ‘Wait a minute, sorry, no!’”
“Max is stuck. So, we’ve got these two dynamics in the piece. Mum, who was always moving, always outrunning her problems, always on the go, and the kid who is weighed down by this pressure and responsibility for her parent.”
As Max fights against the world, Billie is being hounded by it. It’s an interplay heightened and realised by the real-life whirl of feisty, fast-paced roller derby players spinning and clashing on the track around them. That hoopla and action is magnified again by the show’s live band thrashing out tunes and demanding a dance, if not a mosh pit.
“You know, when I was writing this work, I had a playlist for the mum and I had a playlist for the daughter,” says Gay. “I would walk to work every day, and I’d be like, ‘Who do I want to write for today?’ And I would just listen to the playlist.”
“The daughter’s one was very Billie Eilish – very internal, introverted, little sounds, intimate and true. Mum’s was all riot-girl, punk rock, Courtney Love and Amanda Palmer.”
Sport Meets Theatre
Watson and Gay are both keenly excited about the role and nature of setting Mama Does Derby within a live, pumping roller derby. Audiences will be seated on two sides of the track, and at times, it’s expected the cacophony of players competing and skating, plus the band’s live music, will emanate from the Sydney Town Hall’s interior to the streets outside.
“I’m a Sydneysider and I have seen the Town Hall transformations over the last couple of years for the Sydney Festival – turning it into a beach [for the Lithuanian opera Sun & Sea] and [a frontier town set for] Dark Noon,” says Gay.
“And so I was like, ‘Oh my god, we’re going to be the Town Hall transformation in 2026!’ I could not believe it. It’s so exciting. And those roller derby teams, they’re going to be whizzing about at a great speed. That’s what we really wanted to capture as well – the feeling of when you go and see a live derby game. It is exhilarating. The players have such showpersonship. There are so many bodies of so many types, and it’s all about the triumph of these bodies.”
“Truly, it is the closest that I have come to watching sport and feeling this is really a theatrical sport. There are villains and heroes and people wearing capes and outfits and their alter egos. We wanted to capture the feeling that everybody had, but especially little girls, when the Matildas were in the 2023 World Cup; that feeling where suddenly we were all, ‘I know everything about soccer now and I am in.’”
Mama Does Derby is also an epic-scale work that brings a sport Watson experienced on the edges of the city into one of its core spaces.
“It is exhilarating. The players have such showpersonship. There are so many bodies of so many types, and it’s all about the triumph of these bodies.”
“It’s centralising something that’s been marginalised, both as a sport and something that’s going to feel like a really electric theatrical experience,” she says.
Without giving anything away, Mama Does Derby does bring joy and new discoveries for Max and Billie. Max finds friendship and maybe a new way to keep moving. Billie also makes a new friend, helping to define themselves as separate from Mum. The work also features a mental health professional character whom they talk to.
Seeing characters grappling with and then receiving support for their mental health was crucial for Gay and Watson.
“I think it’s helpful from a parent’s perspective that we’re seeing that Max is fallible,” Watson says. “That’s a really important thing for parents to see. We’re all humans and we’re all just trying to love and do our best, and sometimes we make mistakes.”
“For younger audiences, we see the mum and the daughter Billie do therapy. And while the therapist [in the show] is not necessarily the best therapist that you would ever meet, Billie manages to take out of that some really important skills around managing her anxiety.”
“I do think that by watching somebody learn to manage their anxiety and build a toolkit towards that, we’re hopefully going to be helping young audience members who might be having similar experiences.”
The production team also worked with Australian youth mental health foundation Headspace, which means anyone seeing the show will be able to get more information about young people and mental health.
At its core, the work is an inclusive and immersive spectacle of heart.
“With this show, we wanted to stuff it with as much joy and abundance in live performance as possible,” says Gay. “We wanted to say to people that these are the exhilarating qualities of live performance. This is what happens when you’re not behind a screen, when you’re not in the safety of your own home.”
“You are out with other people. You are having a huge en masse experience. And it’s filled with joy and exhilaration and every sort of theatrical quality that we could put in – live music, performance, movement, conceptual ideas, jokes, love stories, everything to say, ‘Let’s get out and see the world!’”
Windmill Production Company’s Mama Does Derby will be performed at Sydney Town Hall, 15–22 January, as part of Sydney Festival; and at the Adelaide Entertainment Centre Theatre, 27 February – 8 March, as part of Adelaide Festival
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