Writer and Director: Elise Marra
Two soldiers, one forest, and nowhere left to fight. Sweet Victory strands a British and an American soldier together in the closing days of the American Revolutionary War, and finds most of its comedy, and its heart, in how badly they get on.
Mikkie-dené Le Roux opens the show alone as John Thomas, and the solo stretch does a lot of heavy lifting. Strong sound design and a handful of props are all the actor needs to fill the space, holding the stage on confidence and improvised energy alone. Laughs land from the first minute, and the scene sets a loose, easy rhythm that carries through the rest of the play.
Emma Wilkinson Wright’s John Smith arrives to complicate things, and the pairing quickly becomes the engine of the piece. Wright plays Smith as tightly wound and rule-bound, a stickler defending the Crown with a nervous energy that never lets up across the hour, while Le Roux’s Thomas drifts through the same conversations looking entirely unbothered, even when the subject turns to trauma.
The contrast is where the comedy sits: Smith’s wounded pride and denial bouncing off Thomas’s dry, knowing sarcasm, with neither man quite realising how alike they are underneath it. Smith’s stiff patriotism plays as a kind of denial, a loyalty to home that hardens the more it gets questioned, while Thomas’s apparent ease masks a sharper read on the world than his casual manner lets on.
What starts as bickering shifts gradually into dependence. Smith grows visibly more concerned with what Thomas thinks of him and of home, while Thomas, for all his laid-back front, turns out to be the first to admit he doesn’t want to be alone.
A late reveal about Smith’s background tips the balance between them further, and the power in the friendship quietly changes hands, with Thomas proving far more perceptive than his opening scenes suggest. Both characters also get a chance to sing during the run, a nice surprise that catches the audience off guard and lands well.
Wright’s performance carries a serious undertow beneath the comedy. The nervous, twitchy physicality is sustained without a single slip across the full hour, an impressive feat of stamina in itself, and by the closing scenes it opens into something rawer, touching on guilt and self-doubt without ever tipping into melodrama. It is a controlled, well-judged shift that gives the ending real weight, and a reminder that the play has more on its mind than the odd-couple setup first suggests.
Marra’s script keeps the humour constant without ever letting it flatten the stakes underneath, and the two performers hold that balance right to the end. Funny, briskly paced and better observed than its premise suggests, Sweet Victory finds genuine feeling inside a very odd wartime friendship.
Runs until 28 September 2026
