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In their latest standup show God’s Favourite, Scout Boxall invites their audience back to one of the worst nights of their life.

While gradually donning a hand-sewn 14th-century nun’s habit, Boxall tells the story of a time they realised they had forgotten their medication for bipolar disorder while staying in a caravan park in regional Victoria. Without transport or internet reception, and no way to access more, they enter withdrawal and experience being unmedicated for the first time in 12 years. As they drift further from reality and time becomes slippery, the show’s narrative becomes less linear, jumping between medieval martyrs, Wordle strategy and disastrous psychiatrist visits, sometimes without taking a breath.

The reason Boxall has ended up so far from a chemist is to attend a wedding. Not a real wedding, they emphasise, but a Larp wedding. Larp, or live-action roleplay, is an elaborately constructed game of costumed roleplaying, often staged over whole weekends. Boxall is a Larp fanatic. They spend nights and weekends improvising epic battles and dangerous quests – think Dungeons and Dragons, but if you’re really committed. And when choosing a character, Boxall is drawn again and again to playing a nun.

Religious women, Boxall tells us, had a lot right in the middle ages. Quiet, safe, tight-knit communities of women with shared interests and an in-built justification for any pesky “visions”. For those with complex mental illness, the middle ages generally meant asylums. For the ambitious, Boxall proposes another route, one that is no less bleak but at least means being remembered: martyr.

In the depths of the early morning, Boxall remembers what life was like before they were diagnosed with, and medicated for, bipolar. In their senior years of school they produced writing that gained them top marks, acclaim and a full scholarship to university. While at university they earned more money in six hours of mania than they have cumulatively since. They wonder if being medicated means being unremarkable – the martyrs of old didn’t have access to seroquel. This isn’t helped by a psychiatrist’s suggestion that Boxall doesn’t need the meds that have held them together for over a decade. Boxall finds themselves nostalgic for a time they were willing to flay themselves alive in pursuit of perfection.

God’s Favourite blends traditional standup with storytelling, described on Boxall’s website as “part standup, part theatre”. The production is polished but understated, leaving nowhere to hide between the carefully timed sound and light queues. Boxall interacts with recorded dialogue, taking us into conversations from across their life that start to bleed together as the night unravels. Despite the tight writing and careful staging, the show manages to still feel raw. Like a well-planned Larp, meticulous logistics and scaffolding allow space for freedom and candour.

This blend of storytelling and jokes has become extremely common among comedians in recent years. But there’s something about God’s Favourite that feels new. Perhaps it is Boxall’s energy and their willingness to get the audience offside where the joke warrants it. After all, withdrawing from bipolar medication while dressed in a hand-sewn nun habit isn’t a universally relatable experience. And Boxall is personable and charming, even as we travel with them to the depths of destructive and splintered streams of consciousness.

There is no grand revelation in this show, just a sleepless night and the tangents we encounter along the way. It is the kind of show that creeps up on you afterwards. It is a gentle nudge, rather than a firm push, to think about history’s sidelined women, about community and neurodivergence and embracing the nerdiest parts of yourself.

But the biggest question at the heart of this show is an old one – do artists need to be tortured to make great art? And if they do, is the price they pay worth the masterpiece they create?

God’s Favourite is more than the sum of its parts. It is a show about what it means to be good, rather than great. Boxall didn’t quite flay themselves alive to create it, but they have still managed to produce something that is very near to perfect.