I Promise This Isn't About You

Queer theatre company Pigeon Pigeon (that's us!) are once again taking over the carpark at Melbourne Fringe’s Festival Hub, for I Promise This Isn’t About You (Even If It Feels Like It Is), their two-time Green Room Award nominated play about friendship in your early twenties.

After taking home the prestigious Crowd Pleaser Award at the 2025 Melbourne Fringe Festival, and receiving writing and directing nominations at the 2026 Green Room Awards, the show reunites an ensemble of emerging queer creatives for the "ultimate fringe festival experience” (Limelight Arts).

The play follows five young people in Melbourne’s southeast thrown together for a night of bacchanalia and melancholy at an end-of-lease house party. Amidst overlapping masculinity crises, spirals of loneliness, and queer audacity, I Promise This Isn’t About You becomes an ode to the relentless discontentment of youth while the party rages on outside.

Performed in a graffiti-covered carpark, the work turns a disused corner of the Festival Hub into an intimate house party bathroom, where the murmur of the Fringe outside, gets transmuted into the sound of anxious young people drinking just outside the bathroom doors.

I Promise This Isn’t About You was written by emerging playwright Sarah Matthews. Sarah is a recent graduate of the VCA Master of Theatre (Writing). She is the recipient of the 2024 Canberra Youth Theatre Emerging Playwrights Commission and has developed work with both Australian Theatre for Young People and Voice in my Hands.

Describing her play she says that:

Platonic relationships, and in particular, queer platonic relationships, allow for deep emotional bonds that provide unconditional love, acceptance, and understanding—the sort of thing that conventional drama suggests is only possible in romances. So with this script, I wanted to create a work which explores the messiness and diversity of love in all it’s overlapping forms, within the context of young people here and now in their first years of adulthood.

★★★★ “scarily accurate” - Stage Door
★★★★ "the ultimate fringe festival experience” - Limelight Arts
★★★★ “a must watch for anyone who’s ever attended a messy house party” - What’s The Show