There’s a line in the opening moments of Anne Edmonds’ Bad Company that announces the show’s premise: “Money is the death of creativity”.

Delivered by Margie Argyle (Edmonds), the wildly self-assured artistic director of the Argyle Theatre, it’s meant to be funny – a declaration so absurd, so blinkered, we recognise the comedy in it immediately.

The trouble is the line reveals the show’s inherent outdatedness. Margie is raging against a battle Australian theatre fought – and largely lost – decades ago.

Tension between creative ambition and institutional sustainability is not imaginary. Smaller, more innovative companies – most likely to produce new work – were disproportionately gutted by Brandis-era funding cuts.

The cultural stakes of the argument Margie is making were once genuinely urgent. But Bad Company doesn’t seem aware of this history. The show presents the creative-versus-corporate conflict as if it were fresh provocation rather than the settled vocabulary of a debate Australian performing arts administrators have been having, wearily, for at least 30 years.

I found myself wondering: for whom is this new?

Are we just recycling old jokes?

The show is positioned as a Fisk-adjacent workplace comedy, riding the critical and........

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