Sunny Productions | Review by Grace Cassidy
Sunny Productions’ Do I have your attention? is a fierce portrait of a girl breaking free
3 December 2025
In theatre, there are few things as fascinating as a one-person show. They’re kind of like the Olympics for actors. A lone performer takes up the task of holding an audience’s attention entirely on their own — a single person transforms into a cast of characters, becoming the sole vessel through which a story is told. It’s a lot of pressure, but it’s also a chance for an actor to show audiences what they’re made of, and you’d better believe that Paris Scharkie rises to that occasion.
Directed by Jade Breen, Do I Have Your Attention? is a powerful show that stars its playwright, Paris Scharkie, and takes audiences on the journey of a young girl’s path to adulthood. We begin with a starry-eyed little girl named Elizabeth playing war games with her brother in the park across the road; that girl becomes an adolescent struggling with the reality of growing up between two households, and she grows into a confident young adult, ready to carve out her place in the world. In a tight 90-minute run, this show delivers the compelling story of one girl unravelling her complex relationship with her mother, the rest of her family, and herself.
Paris Scharkie delivers a tremendous performance, effectively building a clear portrait of Elizabeth by exploring different facets of her personality as she grows up: her adoration of her brother, her vivid imagination, the notions she takes as gospel that have clearly been fed to her by her mother, her hopes and her fears. Scharkie also takes on the role of Elizabeth’s mother, a perfectionistic, image-obsessed narcissist with a breathy, drawling accent that harkens back to a bygone era. At the same time, she plays Elizabeth’s loving, grounded step-mother and does a brief stint as a porn star who sounds uncannily like Jennifer Coolidge (it must be said that the last thing I expected when seeing this show was to once again be green with envy when confronted by someone else’s bang-on Jennifer Coolidge impression – a voice that try as I might, I simply cannot do). Supported by simple but effective staging, lighting and sound, Scharkie jumps nimbly between key players in our protagonist’s life, skillfully painting the picture of a girl realising her childhood is not all that it seems.
At its heart, Do I Have Your Attention? is a play about child abuse. It follows Elizabeth as she gradually detangles herself from the grips of her narcissistic mother, who treats her daughter as an extension of herself. Elizabeth braves psychological warfare at the hands of her mother and brother – a storyline complemented by the rather literal motif of the siblings playing wargames together, with the brother casting himself in the role of commanding officer. When Elizabeth’s brother relays instructions that have seemingly come from their mother, he says the orders come ‘straight from the top.’ But while this is the central thread of the story, the play also manages to touch on other themes without losing focus.
A tightly-packed piece of sharp and cohesive storytelling, Do I have your attention? boldly and thoroughly rejects the notion of conforming to someone else’s idea of perfection. By showing the world through the eyes of a child born to an image-obsessed mother, the show lays out the impossible beauty standards society projects on women; it touches on the sexualisation of girls from an uncomfortably young age; and it challenges audiences to change the reality that girls are taught, by media and popular culture but, more insidiously, by those closest to them, that their greatest value is their beauty. Deeply compelling from beginning to end, it’s safe to say that this stunning one-woman production does indeed have our attention.
Grace Cassidy is a writer and aspiring actress. Over the past two years, she has fallen in love with Canberra’s theatre scene by participating in theatre workshops, acting in local short films and getting involved in the Canberra Youth Theatre’s Emerging Artist programs. Grace is passionate about storytelling and has a soft spot for theatre that explores complex family relationships, ride or die friendships, and themes of hope.
