August 25, 2026 — 5:00amPlaywright Jorjia Gillis feels like she’s about to give birth to two babies this year – the child she’s currently six months pregnant with and the world premiere of her new play Mum Club for Griffin Theatre Company.The comedy stars Stephanie Somerville as Sadie, a Martu woman and new mum who has moved from Western Australia to Sydney. Sadie has no community and is dealing with the aftermath of a traumatic birth, so joins an exclusive inner-west mums’ club that turns out to be heavy on the maternal judgement. Mum Club playwright Jorjia Gillis.Steven Siewert“What I wanted to show as somebody who’d been through it [and] was not shying away from those lonely, tough, raw moments,” Gillis says. “Struggling with breastfeeding, mastitis, feeling ostracised. And also that thing where the mum club, I think everyone had the best intentions, but it felt at times like you were going back to high school.”The play draws heavily on Gillis’s own experiences after giving birth to her first child, a daughter, in 2020, in which she felt the burden of isolation.“Literally the week after I had her, we had the COVID lockdown, so I was separated from my family, my community. I didn’t know anything about postnatal PTSD or anxiety and had a lot of stuff going on from the birth, so I joined a mum club, which was very heightened because of the COVID world,” Gillis recalls.“I had a lot of funny stories from all these adventures that I tried to go on to meet people, but I just really struggled. I had always thought, ‘oh, maybe I’ll write this, but it’s just so personal’.”Mum Club playwright Jorjia Gillis with castmembers Ruby Teys, Alex Malone, Stephanie Somerville and Zarif.Steven SiewertWhen Gillis, a recipient of the prestigious Balnaves Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Fellowship at Belvoir in 2020, applied for the 2024 Griffin Studio artist development program she had been planning to pitch a dark psychological thriller. However when it came time for the meeting she found herself spilling forth a completely different concept.“I had no intention of pitching this,” says Gillis. “I thought no one cares about mums on stage, who’s going to watch this? And in the interview they asked me, ‘What are you most excited about?’ and it just came out. After the interview, I went to my family and I was like, ‘Oh well, stuffed that up.’“Then [Griffin] was like we love it. It started as a one-woman show and I very quickly realised there are so many amazing characters that I wanted to showcase, we need a proper comedic ensemble for this.”Jorjia Gillis was isolated by COVID but found support from other First Nations mums. Steven SiewertThe rehearsals for Mum Club have looked a little unusual with lessons on how to swaddle and education on placentas, a necessity given that no one in the cast of five is a mother. The show also took the family-friendly step of programming two babes-in-arms sessions for the play (both of which are sold out).As a Budawang/Yuin woman herself, Gillis’ play examines the experience of Blak motherhood and draws on the real-life support she received from other Indigenous mums. Sadie finds solace in a connection with a character she meets outside of her mothers’ club at the Aboriginal Medical Service in Redfern.“She’s based on four women who really shaped my motherhood experience, who were all Aboriginal. They provided reassurance and went above and beyond to be there for me and my daughter, so it was really important to highlight that. I wanted to show the craziness, the competitiveness and the funniness of a mum club world, but also that difference of how Blak motherhood works.”Despite having been in the works since she started writing it in 2024, Mum Club arrives on stage at a particularly timely juncture, with mothers’ groups gone rotten having come into the spotlight earlier this year when High School Musical actor Ashley French (formerly Ashley Tisdale) wrote a viral article entitled “Breaking Up With My Toxic Mom Group” for The Cut. In it she detailed feeling excluded from her allegedly celeb-filled mothers’ club.“I can’t remember what draft I was on, but I was like, see, this is what I’m talking about!” says Gillis of the essay. “One of the girls in the play went on a full-blown deep dive and then got up in front of everyone during the first week of rehearsals. She’d researched Mandy Moore’s page, Hilary Duff’s, from all the perspectives, and then gave her take on it. So I think it is in the zeitgeist.”While Mum Club is billed as a “takedown of modern parenting culture”, Gillis says what she’d most like to see change is the impossible expectations and criticism levelled at mothers.“That real pressure that especially new mothers feel, just give them a break. You get so many random people on the street commenting you should be holding your baby like this, they’re crying, they’re cold, they’re this, they’re that. Let’s let a lot of this stuff go. We should be celebrating mums.”Griffin Theatre Company’s Mum Club is at Belvoir St Theatre from August 22 to September 20.Want more arts stories?Revealed: The five exhibitions to open the Parramatta PowerhouseLabor wanted to restore Sydney’s nightlife. But young people don’t have ‘time for hangovers’David Hockney’s immersive display speaks to you ‘over your shoulder’From our partners