Inside Kirsty Semaan’s ‘Contest’: A Sweaty Celebration Of The Women Who Play On

Five women, a netball court, 75 minutes and no interval—just bodies in motion and the truths that spill when pretending halts. For Space Jump Theatre Company director Kirsty Semaan and her latest production, Contest, that’s precisely the point.

Written by Australian playwright Emilie Collyer, and playing now at Flight Path Theatre, Contest follows a community netball team whose fragile balance begins to cracks when a new player arrives.

Secrets surface, grievances accumulate, and every pass and pivot carries something unspoken.

The structure tracks a single training session from warm-up to cool-down, but Collyer’s writing moves underneath that frame with a poetic looseness that refuses to be pinned down.

Semaan founded Space Jump to champion Australian work written by, for, and about women. Not women flattened into mothers and archetypes, but women with presence, contradiction and weight.

“It’s real women rather than a stereotypical woman,” she says. “They get to scream and shout and sweat and just actually be alive. And that’s really spectacular.”

The casting call went out for women over 35, and the physical demands pull no punches. The cast never leaves the stage, moving continuously for the full running time, sweating through every minute of it.

When injuries hit during rehearsal, the company absorbed them rather than working around them. One cast member performs with a mobility aid, while another is on a scooter after a fractured foot.

“We’ve just embraced the theme of the show being ‘play on’,” Semaan says, far from consoling.

To keep the sport honest, Semaan’s cast drew on their experiences, like the qualified netball coach and umpire as movement director, while cast member Melissa Jones has spent a lifetime of playing the game.

Every woman arrived with her own relationship to sport, her own agenda, and that fed everything.

Setting the play in amateur rather than elite sport was a deliberate and generative choice. A social netball team throws together women who would never share a court in any other context, and that accidental chemistry is where Contest gets interesting.

“It becomes more pedestrian,” Semaan says, “and therefore more universal.”

Rehearsal room conversations kept circling back to the same territory without anyone steering them there—sport, relationships, competition, the quiet tax of being watched and judged. “It was literally our lives,” she says.

For Semaan the connection between sport and theatre runs deeper than metaphor. “What I do love is the team aspect of sport. To me, that’s sort of very reflective of theater, that you have to work together to get to the common goal. Like that, to me, is the biggest resonance of the two worlds colliding.”

Three months of rehearsals, three times a week, with space supported by Inner West Council, gave the company room to find it.

One moment the play is sharp and funny and the next it cracks open into something raw and unexpectedly tender. Keeping both alive without tipping into performance was the central challenge.

“We didn’t want these women to be caricatures. The funniness had to come from the real.”

Collyer herself attended opening night, the first staging since Victoria in 2018, and told Semaan it felt completely different and deeply familiar at once.

“She agreed the play would continuously evolve depending on the performers,” Semaan says. “And that’s the beauty of working with Australian playwrights.”

Independent theatre is doing it tough, and Semaan does not sidestep it. “People are finding it really difficult to not only afford, but put time and money aside for things that are special, like theatre.”

Three shows in, audiences are leaving energised and slightly off-balance. “It’s not what they’re expecting,” she says, “and they leave invigorated.”

Sweaty, dynamic and raw—Semaan’s three word proclamation—insists that the play isn’t for sport junkies.

It’s for anyone willing to sit with women given the space to be loud, funny, heartbroken and completely unstoppable, all at once.

Contest is playing at Flight Path Theatre till 28 March. For more info, visit Flight Path Theatre.