{"id":637290,"date":"2026-04-29T00:24:20","date_gmt":"2026-04-29T00:24:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/637290\/"},"modified":"2026-04-29T00:24:20","modified_gmt":"2026-04-29T00:24:20","slug":"australian-actor-megan-wilding-stars-in-game-set-match-a-play-that-feels-like-tennis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/637290\/","title":{"rendered":"Australian actor Megan Wilding stars in Game. Set. Match, a play that feels like tennis"},"content":{"rendered":"

Megan Wilding doesn’t think she would have been cast in Malthouse Theatre’s latest play if she hadn’t written it herself.<\/p>\n

Game. Set. Match. follows Ray (Wilding; Blackie Blackie Brown<\/a>) and Joshua (Rick Davies; Offspring) who meet after the funeral of his mother, an Australian tennis legend.<\/p>\n

As the night wears on, what starts as off-kilter banter and flirtation descends into something much darker, when Ray reveals she first met Joshua a long time ago.<\/p>\n

“It’s a rom-com until it isn’t,” Gamilaroi actor and playwright Wilding tells ABC Radio National’s Awaye!\u00a0<\/p>\n

“And big Blak women with opinions don’t usually get cast as romantic leads.”<\/p>\n

But that’s not the only reason Wilding thinks she would’ve been overlooked for Game. Set. Match.<\/p>\n

“At the moment I’m considered quite a good comedy actor, and I love that,” she says. “I am. I’m an excellent comedy actor, but also I’m an excellent dramatic actor.<\/p>\n

\"On<\/p>\n

Wilding is known for her roles in comedy plays, including A Fool in Love (pictured, with Contessa Treffone) in 2024 and Banging Denmark in 2019. (Supplied: STC\/Daniel Boud)<\/p>\n

“Sometimes I underestimate myself and I think that could potentially hold me back, but I also think that sometimes people casting these things underestimate me. So that’s why I go ‘I don’t know if this would land on my desk’.<\/p>\n

“But it has. I mean, it was borne from my desk, so it landed on it all right.”<\/p>\n

Finding the right time<\/p>\n

In 2017, Wilding was two years out of drama school but had only been cast in a handful of TV shows including True Story with Hamish & Andy (Channel 9) and The Edge of the Bush (ABC TV).<\/p>\n

\"In<\/p>\n

Wilding and Davies previously worked together on True Story with Hamish & Andy in 2017. (Supplied: \u00a0Malthouse\/Peter Tarasuik)<\/p>\n

So, she decided to turn her hand to writing, toying with the idea of a play that uses tennis as a framing device for a much bigger conversation between white and Blak Australia about colonisation and sexual violence.<\/p>\n

“I was sitting around, just catching up with myself and processing the colony and acting and conversations,” she says. “I guess it all got chucked in a slow cooker and kind of mingled around and Game. Set. Match. was born.”<\/p>\n

Wilding applied for the Balnaves Aboriginal and Torres Strait Fellowship, winning the opportunity to spend a year writing the play with Sydney’s Belvoir St Theatre.<\/p>\n

“And then it sat for a bit because I don’t know if I was in a place to fully go where the piece needed me to [and] the conversations we were having [about race] needed to catch up,” Wilding says.<\/p>\n

Four years later, Game. Set. Match. won the Griffin Award for new Australian playwriting.<\/p>\n

“And then it was massaged again at Griffin Theatre,” Wilding says.<\/p>\n

Even then she didn’t feel the play had reached its full potential, so she put it back in a drawer.<\/p>\n

But as more time passed, the conversation about Indigenous Australia changed, especially in the wake of the failed referendum in 2023. Wilding’s play changed too.<\/p>\n

“There was a great heartbreak with the Voice to Parliament, but then the rebuild of going ‘I don’t need anyone to tell me whether I have a voice or not’,” she says.<\/p>\n

Wilding made the script “punchier, gutsier”. And it was this “braver and bloodier” iteration that she finally felt ready to show audiences.<\/p>\n

\"Megan<\/p>\n

“I feel like where I’m at as an artist now is exactly what Game. Set. Match. deserves from someone,” Wilding says. (Supplied: \u00a0Malthouse\/Gianna Rizzo)<\/p>\n

She sent the script to director and dramaturge Jessica Arthur (Koreaboo), who brought it to Malthouse.<\/p>\n

“I’m the most happy I’ve been with the script so far,” she says. “A lot has changed, but I think the underlying fire is still the same. The characters now have more of a hold of it and aren’t shying away from it.”<\/p>\n

Joining a wave of Bla(c)k artistry<\/p>\n

Game. Set. Match is also a kind of revenge play, in the tradition of Gamilaroi and Torres Strait Islander playwright Nakkiah Lui’s Blackie Blackie Brown (2018) about an Indigenous archaeologist turned vigilante superhero, and Black American playwright Aleshea Harris’s Is God Is (2018) about a pair of sisters who go on a Tarantino-esque road trip of retribution.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

Wilding starred as an archaeologist vigilante in Nakkiah Lui’s Blackie Blackie Brown in 2018. (Supplied: Sydney Theatre Company\/Daniel Boud)<\/p>\n

“It seems so easy for people to lie to us but I think we’re smarter [than that],” Wilding says.<\/p>\n

“We prove every single day how intelligent we are when we call bullshit. I see it in the matriarchs I’m surrounded by [and] the artistry of Blak women that I’ve witnessed in my career.”<\/p>\n

Those matriarchs include playwright-performers Ursula Yovich (Barbara and the Camp Dogs) and Leah Purcell (The Drover’s Wife).<\/p>\n

Wilding recalls being in the audience of their shows at Belvoir and “getting chills, seeing a Blak woman own her words”.<\/p>\n

She’s similarly enamoured with her friend and peer Dalara Williams.<\/p>\n

Rachael Maza on new play Black Light<\/a><\/p>\n

The former head of Indigenous theatre company Ilbijerri teams up with her sister Lisa for Black Light.<\/p>\n

“The last play I did in Sydney was last year, Big Girls Don’t Cry by Dalara Williams, shout out.” she says. “And that was just a different experience to what I’d ever done in Sydney because it was just so Blak and for mob.<\/p>\n

“I think the way that she tapped into the voice of Redfern and was able to amplify that was just so exciting. She found a voice that she didn’t shy away from.”<\/p>\n

It’s something Wilding hopes she can replicate at Malthouse in May.<\/p>\n

“I want [audiences] to go, ‘Oh, that was good tennis’,” she says. “Because I’ve really tried to write these two characters in a conversation that feels like tennis.<\/p>\n

“And I think tennis naturally goes into theatre because one of the first things you get told in drama school is to play to win.”‘It’s a gift’<\/p>\n

For Wilding, starring in her own play isn’t totally new.<\/p>\n

In 2019, she wrote, directed, and starred in A Little Piece of Ash, a semi-autobiographical story about a straight-talking millennial reckoning with her mother’s death.<\/p>\n

\"Megan<\/p>\n

Wilding in 2019, for A Little Piece of Ash, a story about grief, loss and the survival of the modern Aboriginal woman. (Supplied: Chandel Brandimarti)<\/p>\n

But making Game. Set. Match. felt different. Now, Wilding is excited, nervous and scared.<\/p>\n

This means that sometimes she has to choose between the contradictory impulses of “Actor Meg” and “Writer Meg”.<\/p>\n

Occasionally “Writer Meg” coaxes the actor to go further with her character in rehearsals, reminding her theatre is a collaboration and an actor’s performance enriches the writing.<\/p>\n

“I think [Actor Meg] is going, ‘OK, writer, you do it and I’ll just follow’,” Wilding explains.<\/p>\n

“And I’m going, ‘No. But you’re also my muse, my love. Please come sit with me. What do you want to do? What’s yummy in your mouth? Because you’re going to know the character more because you’re going to have to bring it to life’.”<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Earlier this year, Wilding featured as the Rainbow Serpent in Indigenous late-night show Always Was Tonight. (Supplied: ABC TV\/Teresa Tan)<\/p>\n

Ultimately, it’s this challenge that excites Wilding the most.<\/p>\n

“I think that’s an indicator to just run towards it because I’ve just never done anything like this before in my career,” she says.<\/p>\n

“I feel like it’s a gift I’ve been given and I’m going to try my darnedest to serve it.”<\/p>\n

Game. Set. Match.<\/a> is at Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne from May 1-23.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Megan Wilding doesn’t think she would have been cast in Malthouse Theatre’s latest play if she hadn’t written…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":637291,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[308482,64,63,280655,110297,44152,134,308484,308485,308481,308480,308483],"class_list":["post-637290","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-aboriginal-theatre","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-australian-actor","tag-australian-theatre","tag-awaye","tag-entertainment","tag-game-set-match","tag-malthouse","tag-malthouse-theatre","tag-megan-wilding","tag-whats-on-melbourne"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/637290","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=637290"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/637290\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/637291"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=637290"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=637290"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=637290"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}