REVIEW: The 18th Annual Miss Virtue Beauty Contest - Vena Cava Productions

The 18th Annual Miss Virtue Beauty Contest

Created and Presented by: Vena Cava Productions

Venue: VENTspace, South Brisbane

Date Attended: 27 September 2026

Director: Daniel Gough

Assistant Director: Lottie Babic

Artistic Director: Georgia Hollis

Sound Designer: Hannah Grabski

Lighting Designer: Jon Whitehead

Stage Manager: Kat Coomber

Assistant Stage Manager: Abi Roots

Cast: Cleo Bell, Annabel Baker, Sophie Duck, Reid McWha, Nicola DeFazio, Georgia Holland, Genevieve Nix, Lillian Murrell-Edwards, Millie Costello, and Liv Gainsford.

Photography: Aidan Calleja

"Empowered women change societies!"

Welcome to The 18th Annual Miss Virtue Beauty Contest! The smiles are compulsory, the beauty standards unattainable, and all the contestants wish for world peace. Their visible distress is no cause for concern.

Presented by Vena Cava Productions, this student-devised theatrical experiment takes the spectacle of a beauty pageant and subjects it to a rather gruesome makeover. Beneath the glitter, gowns, and fake pleasantries lies an industry that exploits women and commodifies their bodies.

The cast and creative team have devised this unnatural world together. Our lovely contestants have labels like Miss Chastity, Miss Liberty, Miss Joy, Miss Courage, and Miss Kindness. Each represents an admirable quality. Right? They resemble reality TV personalities, programmed to be appealing and endlessly available for public consumption. Draped in satin and sequins, these women parade before us with plastered smiles and terrified eyes. Their bodies twitch, jerk, and glitch like robots caught in the rain, as though their programming is beginning to malfunction.

The competition follows familiar pageant conventions, including glamorous introductions and the all-important talent portion. Singing, juggling, ballet, magic... all perfectly respectable choices. But one contestant takes a slightly different approach to demonstrating her talents. She gives birth onstage. Yes, childbirth as a talent. I suspect that's a first for the pageant circuit! And given the show's warning that audiences may encounter blood splatter, those sitting closest to the action have good reason to remain vigilant.

The beauty industry's relationship with consumerism receives particularly scathing treatment through a series of live advertisements. From weight-loss solutions and cosmetic surgery to nappies and motherhood products, the contestants enthusiastically promote everything a woman supposedly needs to "get perfect fast!" These commercials are performed behind a sheet, with live footage projected onto its surface. The women deliver their sales pitches with the nervousness of hostages reading prepared statements. They're selling products while being presented as products themselves.

Elsewhere, the pageant's corporate dealings unfold behind translucent sheeting, like a crime procedural we're not supposed to be witnessing. The real competition happens beyond the contestants' control, in rooms where money and influence dictate their fate. Even the pageant hosts remain anonymous. Concealed behind a pink glitter curtain, they communicate through microphones and expressive hand gestures. The people orchestrating this nightmare remain safely out of sight. Even the programme serves the purpose. Designed like a police investigation report, it describes each creative through their physical appearance and suitability as the 'perfect contestant'.

Under Daniel Gough's direction, Miss Virtue unfolds as a collage of advertisements, pageant rituals, and disturbing interruptions. There's no conventional narrative to follow, and the writing swings wildly between broad satire and graphic horror. The creative team draws inspiration from disturbing real-world revelations. Their writing reflects a generation watching these stories emerge and wondering how much worse the truth could be. There's anger behind the satire, and a confronting awareness that the freedoms many of us enjoy coexist with suffering elsewhere. The play doesn't pretend to have solutions. It's more interested in making us uncomfortable enough to question what we accept, and for how long.

I admire the ambition of this young ensemble. They've created the work together, from its initial concept to the finished product. There's an appealingly rebellious quality to the whole affair. They've taken every expectation of what a respectable beauty contest should look like and fed it through a meat grinder.

The 18th Annual Miss Virtue Beauty Contest is messy, provocative, and grotesque. And after all that smiling, singing, and suffering, one contestant is crowned the winner. Of course, the title comes at a price. In this competition, the winner can be purchased by whoever is willing to pay the most. Smile for the cameras, ladies. Someone's always watching.

After all, guess who co-owned the Miss Universe Organisation for nearly two decades? Go look it up.