In Conversation with Iris Warren | FEMOID.
- 8 hours ago
- 4 min read
In today's Backstage Blog, we spoke to Iris Warren, playwright and performer in FEMOID., which follows up it's successful 2025 Perth season with a run at Explosives Factory next week before heading to Sydney next month.
FEMOID. confronts the dark, growing presence of misogyny in contemporary society. Combining text, voice-over, and projection, the show draws from verbatim incel forum board posts and merges them with in-yer-face theatre to create a visceral and unsettling experience. It offers a rare insight into the complex ideologies of the incel community, exploring their attitudes towards women, sexuality, and the world around them. Through this layered storytelling, FEMOID. interrogates the full spectrum of misogyny, from the extreme and radicalised corners of the internet to the everyday microaggressions that often go unnoticed. It asks: how did we let it get this far, and what happens if we continue to look away?
Q: Welcome to Theatre Works! How are rehearsals going? How are things shaping up?
Currently, we have been hard at work rehearsing in the Bowery theatre and Gasworks theatre! This show has been in development since March 2024 and has moved through so many iterations and lives that we are so proud and eager to polish its final version for our Theatre Works season. As we have begun to detail the work, we’ve found specificity and precision in the show, but devising is usually a long process in which we experimented at great length to perfect the story we wanted to tell. After throwing a lot of offers on the floor and finding a lot of success (and failure), we discovered the core story of three young school girls; Olive, Rory and Piper, as they navigate the growing misogyny of their world.
Q: FEMOID. Had a successful season at The Blue Room in Perth in 2025, and will head off to a season at the Old Fitz in Sydney shortly after its Theatre Works season. How different would you say the show is from it's first run in WA? How has it responded to changes in online culture?
Incel communities, as well as any online subculture, evolve at an incredibly fast pace and are constantly being influenced by the mainstream culture that surrounds it. While we only opened the show a little over a year ago, we have already had to challenge the piece to ensure we are accurate in our portrayal of the rich and insidious incel community. For example, over the past year there has been a visible increase in the casual usage of words that originated in incel communities. Instagram, tiktok, twitter, (social media that all have a significant portion of young users) were featuring terms like Looksmaxxing, -pilled, -cel, chad, stacy, mew, foid, all of which have their roots in incel and other extremist communities. We adjusted the piece to portray how the young girls' world is beginning to bleed with the incel world, a reflection of the reality many teenagers are unknowingly experiencing today.
Q: Interacting with the incel subculture can be a confronting thing. To any audience members unsure how to engage with such upsetting material, what would you say to encourage them to do so?
During the writing of this piece, I spent countless hours collating verbatim from online forum boards. It was confronting, distressing, and completely overwhelming. I would oscillate between feeling grief when I acknowledged how much hate was in this world, and being completely desensitised from what I was reading. While I can personally attest that this incel world is challenging to face, I was inspired to stage these words as a recognition that evil does not go unnoticed. If we hide, reject, or ignore what these individuals have to say, we are passively allowing hatred to breed and influence our culture; In bringing this underbelly to the surface, we are exposing a community that feeds on their ability to be anonymous and unknown.
Q: What will surprise audiences about this work?
This work is joyful! It sounds completely antithetical to the piece, but through hatred and grief, joy prevails. The love between these girls is ultimately the greatest act of resistance they have; they are funny, vulgar, silly, and completely themselves, unknowingly defying every wish that the manosphere could have for them. We never wanted womanhood to exist completely as victimhood, when truthfully, the nuance of the human experience is our capacity to feel on a large spectrum.
Q: What has been the most memorable moment in the process so far?
This work was originally developed at WAAPA as a piece for our final year in university, and has since been put on at the Blueroom, as well as developed at LA MAMA, ATYP, The Bowery and Gasworks. Every few months when we return to the piece from our separate projects across Australia, we get to see how each member of our team has developed as artists. It is so joyful and rewarding to witness the growth of each other every time we are lucky enough to return to the world of FEMOID.
FEMOID. plays at Explosives Factory 11-21 March.
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