Jokes About The Time I Went To Prison review | Melbourne International Comedy Festival | The Toff in Town

In 2021, Andrew Hamilton was arrested and charged with supplying psychedelic drugs. After spending four months in two Sydney maximum-security prisons, the self-proclaimed Mushroom King of Sydney decided that if he couldn’t help people get high on drugs, he’d help them get high on laughter, and so he turned to stand-up comedy. The Melbourne encore season of his show, Jokes About the Time I Went to Prison, is quite literally just that: jokes about the time he went to prison.

Hamilton has an affable nature and easily draws in his audience. He has a solid grasp of his material and delivers it with confidence. As the narrative structure weaves in and out of his life before, during, and after jail, his reflections, along with a steady stream of dad jokes and one-liners, keep us entertained. One particularly memorable anecdote recalls how his bail conditions required him to be accompanied in public by his 70-year-old parents, so they had to chaperone him to his stand-up gigs.

Blind Spot - Melbourne Fringe Festival review

In 1972, Edwin John Eastwood and Robert Clyde Boland, kidnapped six female pupils and their teacher in the rural town of Faraday. They demanded a million-dollar ransom but were later captured when the hostages  escaped. Fast forward 34 years later, and Daniel Santangeli's immersive theatre performance Blind Spot offers a fresh look at this crime and its related events for Melbourne Fringe Festival.

Blind Spot is a show for two people at a time (so bookings are absolutely essential) and begins at the end of the story as we work our back to the start. As we play the role of the two men, we are taken through various moments surrounding this event, located in prisons, courtrooms and homes. The less said about the story and the process of the show the better, as the element of surprise and the unknown works best here.

Blind Spot - Melboune Fringe Festival preview

Melbourne Fringe Festival is always an opportunity for not only artists to try new things, but also audiences, and this year, Blind Spot is definitely going to be one of those shows that is bound to have people talking long after it's over. This latest work by performance-maker Daniel Santangeli is a story told in reverse and is performed to an audience of only two people at a time.

"In Blind Spot, you experience a crime story in reverse order. It starts with the main character's release from prison and finishes 11 years earlier on the night before the crime. The audience are literally on their feet the whole time, being led through each episode and it's not until the end that they can piece it all together," Santangeli tells me. "Blind Spot is being made with sound designer Rosalind Hall so a lot of the work is experienced aurally: through payphones, hidden speakers and helmets with sound devices in them made specifically for the show."

The Exonerated review | Chapel Off Chapel

The death penalty has, and probably always will be, a contentious issue. There will be one side that states you have to pay for your crimes, while the other would say no one has a right to take anyone's life. While no side is "correct", The Sol III Company's production of The Exonerated will have even the most staunch believer of the death penalty questioning their stance.

Writers, Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen, spent the year 2000 interviewing a number of people who had all been wrongfully convicted of murder and placed on death row. After spending years and sometimes decades in prison, these people were later exonerated with Blank and Jensen using six of these people's stories in this production.