Billed in the
season book as a “kind of Don Quixote for the female comic,” Zoë Coombs Marr’s Is This Thing On?
is the story of one woman’s journey as a stand-up comedian. As we follow her
career from her awkward first gig to her mid-career crisis and her eventual
comeback some years later, not only do we see a character and person grow, but
we also see Coombs
Marr’s skills as a writer become apparent, because Is This Thing On? is essentially five overlapping and intersecting
comedy routines, performed by five different actors, in five different moments
in time.
Staged in Belvoir’s tiny little Downstairs theatre,
Ralph Myers’ set of an inner-city pub, with its seedy patterned carpet
(complete with stains), its makeshift stage in the corner, the pokies around
the side, and the sticky tables and chairs, is scarily realistic; there is
perhaps too much care and attention to detail here to be called healthy. With
each incarnation of Briana clearly differentiated through their costume (they
aren’t so much costumes as clothes), tone, and performance style, moments bleed
into one another, are shared between two or three Briana’s; we are not so much
watching a comedy routine as part of one, whether we like it or not.
Is This Thing On? plays to the room, unapologetically
so, and milks it; in this way, it is fearless, and even though it feels fresh
and new, raw with the carefully scripted plot of a good stand-up writer, I
wonder how much of it is in fact improvised on the night, how much is left to
the actor to create, how much relies upon audience interaction to guide its
shape. Verity Hampson’s lighting – using the kind of warmth and sickly light
usually found in pubs and clubs – creates intimacy and atmosphere, and subtly
accommodates the shifts between solo show, audience participation, interludes,
and back again.
Directed by Coombs
Marr and Kit
Brookman, the play unfolds with an engrossing intimacy – as Susan Prior’s
Brianna progresses through her ‘night from hell,’ we are drawn into the world
of this comedian at the end of their wits, and as things begin to unravel for
her, former and future selves appear and deliver their own material, some of
which echoes across multiple incarnations. Tightly controlled, rather than it
seeming forced and repetitive, we see the importance of new material, the role
memory and past experiences have on the formation of material, as well as the
struggles that face any comedian today. Where Susan Prior’s Brianna becomes
increasingly inebriated until she ‘hits the wall,’ an affecting mix of anger,
frustration and weariness, Genevieve Guiffre is perhaps more eager and
adrenalized; Nat Randall is more self-assured, and her coming out allows her more
freedom as a performer and an individual. Fiona Press is perhaps slightly
world-weary, but more mature, slightly cynical, but mischievous to boot, while
Madeleine Benson as the fifteen year-old Briana is slightly nervous, but has
more than enough charm and fiery capricious spark to see her right in her
future.
Slightly chaotic,
a little bit mad and full of the Quixotic kind of passion you have as a
performer to share your work with as many people as possible, Is This Thing On? is certainly funny and
entertaining, but underneath it all is a serious heart – how far do we go in
the name of our art before we put our well-being at risk? How desperate are we
to get a laugh from a crowd of strangers; how far can we fall before we are
caught and propped back on our feet by those around us?
The only thing
missing from this production is Coombs Marr herself on stage, as her voice and
mannerisms are all through its fabric; it’d be fascinating and more than
slightly mind-bending to see if it was possible to do a one-woman version of
this show…
Theatre playlist: 62. Cheap Wine, Cold Chisel
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