The saying goes that women can have it all, just not at the same time. Like most pieces of life advice, it sounds black and white until it collides with the untidy reality of everyday life. Children get sick during budget week. Political scandals erupt during school holidays. The washing still needs doing whether you’re running a household or helping run the country.

And while role models like Jacinda Ardern exist, comfortably bringing their child into Parliament and seeming to make it all look effortless, there is a lingering suspicion that things cannot possibly be as picture-perfect outside the frame.

Housework is interested in that off-camera reality, focusing less on the policies debated across the chamber floor than on the machinery of opportunism that keeps the system moving and the constant compromises that shape the public and private lives of those caught within it.

Susie Youssef and Emily Taheny in Sydney Theatre Company’s Housework. Photo © Prudence Upton

Set over a chaotic sitting week in Canberra, Emily Steel’s sharp political satire follows newly elected MP Ruth Mandour (Susie Youssef), her highly skilled and persistently undervalued Chief of Staff Anna Cooper (Emily Taheny),...