You know when a play is really pushing buttons, strumming raw nerves. Audiences get loud. It happened in Belvoir’s production of August: Osage County last year and it’s happening again in Belvoir’s 2025 season opener, Jacky, a serrated-edge comedy by Arrernte playwright Declan Furber Gillick that had its Sydney opening night audience yelling in disbelief.

Guy Simon and Mandy McElhinney in Jacky. Photo © Stephen Wilson Barker

Brought up in a former mission community up north, Jacky (Guy Simon) is a sex worker living an otherwise straight life in Melbourne. Smart and ambitious, he’s being courted by a social enterprise-cum-employment agency run by an old mentor, Linda (Mandy McElhinney), which offers Jacky the opportunity to leave sex work and join the white-run organisation as its indigenous representative, secure a mortgage and join the ranks of the propertied.

But a measure of chaos has arrived in the form of Jacky’s younger brother Keith (Danny Howard in his Belvoir debut), a quick-witted knockabout who has flunked just about every opportunity put in his way. Warily, Jacky offers him a roof over his head on the proviso that Keith gets his act together and...