OBSERVER: Zoe’s Killer Instinct


New Melbourne theatre collective Primitive Streak presents Zoe’s Killer Instinct at the Motley Wherehaus, Melbourne, from October 5-11.
Zoë Jensen returns to the Australian stage from Germany for the first show from Primitive Streak, which showcases a one-woman performance in the Melbourne Fringe Festival.
This ‘unhinged, razor-sharp satire’ features original music inspired by vaudeville and Weimar.
The origin of this surreal story began in 2020, when Zoë inexplicably found a random bag of knives in a park at night.
As a woman of limited stature (five-foot-one (and-a-half)), she felt, for the first time in her life, that she could defend herself if threatened.
With a valuable cultural distance from ‘Australia’s pervasive epidemic of male-on-female violence’, the idea of Zoe’s Killer Instinct was born.
The show follows a fictionalised Zoë, a disillusioned, down-on-her-luck desperado with dreams of stardom.
Fed up with failure and Australia’s endless cycle of femicide, Zoë flips the script and starts to murder strange men, stealing their inherited power to become a showbiz success.
So begins a story that asks what you would sacrifice for your dreams. A story about victims who victimise. A story about the shadowy voices of authority that direct our fate from the wings.
Fresh from its debut, sold-out season at Sydney’s renowned Old Fitz Theatre and Tasmania’s Junction Arts Festival, this is the Melbourne debut of Zoe’s Killer Instinct.
Primitive Streak is a theatre collective based in Melbourne. Formed in 2026 by wife-and-husband duo Zoë Jensen and Michael McStay, who first met as NIDA Acting students (class of 2013), the collective is driven by a desire to create original Australian work that is intellectually rigorous, philosophically eclectic, epic in theme, and deeply human, imagining theatre and cabaret as a liminal space both sacred and profane.
Performance Dates: October 5-11 at 7.45pm
Venue: The Salon, Motley Wherehaus
Duration: 60 mins
Tickets: melbournefringe.
com.au/zoeskillerinstinct
Cheryl Threadgold

Pictured: Zoë Jensen in Zoe’s Killer Instinct