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), enthusiastic young staffer Kelly Sheppard (Franca Lafosse) and cunning media adviser Ben (Laurence Boxhall).

As Ruth attempts to mark her arrival in federal politics with meaningful reform for women, scandals threaten to derail careers, media storms gather momentum and backroom deals multiply with alarming efficiency. Idealism soon finds itself outmatched by political reality, as each character discovers that changing the system is considerably harder than surviving it.

The audience’s transportation into this world begins with Ailsa Paterson’s clean-lined set, a sleek abstraction of Parliament House that gently satirises the infamous corridor leading to the media pen. Brought to life by Nigel Levings’ subtle lighting design, a central boardroom table rotates within a high ceiling building façade to become the House floor, a restaurant, an office and the countless liminal spaces where political careers are made and broken.

At times, the sheer scale of the set threatens to engulf the cast yet it also serves as a fitting visual metaphor for the institutions the characters are attempting to navigate.

Sydney Theatre Company’s Housework. Photo © Prudence Upton

Within this space, Steel’s script meets audiences at the nexus of politics, idealism and gender, deftly crafting characters with distinct perspectives through which to examine both the possibilities and limitations of our political system.

Humour is deployed astutely: as a tool for character development, a mechanism for advancing the plot and, frequently, as incisive commentary in its own right. Youssef enriches the text with effortless physical comedy, finding humour in the smallest gestures and reactions while maintaining Ruth’s steady resolve.

Taheny is, incontestably, much like her character, the show’s engine room, keeping the plot churning and the audience’s mind turning, expertly balancing exasperation, competence and satire. Lafosse’s convincing guilelessness provides a stark contrast to the hardened pragmatism that surrounds her.

What distinguishes Housework from more conventional political satire is its refusal to present politics as a contest between right and wrong. Steel is less interested in ideology than in the systems and relationships that give ideology its power. Kelly enters Parliament believing policy can change lives, but the play gradually reveals that policy is often the endpoint of a much longer process of negotiation, alliance-building and compromise.

Johnny Nasser and Laurence Boxhall in Sydney Theatre Company’s Housework. Photo © Prudence Upton

In this world, success belongs not necessarily to those with the best ideas, but to those most adept at navigating power. It is an observation that feels particularly resonant in an era where public conversations about politics are increasingly framed around personalities rather than policy outcomes.

Director Shannon Rush finds a home for Steel’s text in the empty space. The production balances rapid-fire dialogue worthy of a political sitcom with longer, more subtle scenes that give the play’s weightier themes space to resonate. Johnny Nasser is particularly effective in mastering this tone, sitting in the moral greyness of the Minister for Science and Environment with the confidence of a silver fox.

Importantly, Housework never feels as though it is lecturing its audience. Rush trusts the material to lead audiences. Rather than fixating on the summit, she is interested in the terrain, allowing the audience to navigate the winding path of compromises, contradictions and morally grey victories that lead there.

The result is a production that is both sharply entertaining and unexpectedly affecting. Beneath its wit and political intrigue lies a more searching question about who bears the burden of compromise, at home and in public life.

By turning its gaze away from policy and towards power, Housework reveals politics as an endless exercise in negotiation: between ideals and pragmatism, ambition and responsibility, conviction and survival. It is in those spaces between competing demands that the production finds its richest insights and its sharpest laughs, reminding us that the real work of politics often happens outside the frame.

Housework plays in the Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House until 17 October.