Insomniac Mixtape review | Melbourne Fringe Festival | Trades Hall

There is nothing worse than going to bed at a reasonable time and being awake all night. You've done all the right things to be able to fall asleep but to no avail. Insomnia is here. Telia Nevile knows exactly how that feels and in her cabaret comedy, Insomniac Mixtape, she takes us through her journey of restlessness and watching the clock tick tick tick away towards the morning sun.

She begins with a variety of exercises to get us sleeping, including visualisations and breathing techniques but despite her determination to stay in the present, Nevile's mind begins to race from worry to worry. It is clear from the laughter in the audience that we have all been there before too and perhaps some of us have been triggered by her thoughts and are now worrying about these exact same things.

Pulling an all-nighter with Telia Nevile (Melbourne Fringe Festival)

There is a lot that keeps Telia Nevile up at night. So much so that she decided to make a new Melbourne Fringe Festival show about it. In Insomniac Mixtape, Nevile takes a deep dive into the subconscious, where she talks and sings through the real and imagined things that go through her - and your - mind in the middle of the night.

"My brain has a love of chasing its tail, and periodically lighting its hair on fire while it does this," she explains. "Combine that inclination with being a very light sleeper and the result is long periods of staring at the ceiling when I want to be sleeping. The things that wake me up in the middle of the night vary wildly, but are usually driven by anxiety, stress, or an inability to stop turning a problem over. Then again, sometimes it’s the snoring beside me. Occasionally it's a loud car or our downstairs neighbours. It’s a lucky dip of sleepless treats!"

type-a-poet review (Melb Fringe)

As you enter the Temple of Poetry you instantly feel like you have been transported into an otherworldly place. Cushions are scattered on the floor, two chairs and a table are to your left and a small set of shelves hold stacks of paper kept in place by crystals and paperweight.

And there, at the head of altar sits The Poet (Andi Snelling) by their typewriter, like a street performer waiting for someone to drop some coins into their hat before they move. This is type-a-poet, a 1:1 silent ten-minute encounter where Snelling writes a poem for your soul based on your speechless interaction.

Dorr-e Dari: A Poetic Crash Course in the Language of Love review

Dorr-e Dari: A Poetic Crash Course in the Language of Love brings three artists sharing stories of Persian poetry and the multiple forms of love that exist around us. Presented in English and Persian, it's a moving evening with singing, dancing, storytelling and language in which to remember and reminisce through.

There is great rapport between the three performers, Mahdi Mohammadi, Hasiba Ebrahimi and Jawad Yaqoubi, and through this they are able to collectively project this friendliness and kindness to the audience. They recall anecdotes and stories of their childhood and adulthood with warmth and humour, including the consequences of three schoolboys who write a love letter to their classmate.

Paradise Lost review

Based on English poet John Milton's epic 1667 poem "Paradise Lost", local independent theatre company The Bloomshed presents its interpretation of the temptation of Adam and Eve by fallen angel Lucifer and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden with its trademark contemporary satirical style.

This is the third iteration of Paradise Lost by the company, and each one has been unique in scale and delivery. The first in 2019 was an in-development season at The Butterfly Club, with minimal set design and a highly frenetic pace. One year later, we were blessed with a remarkable radio play adaptation and in 2022, The Bloomshed have come back to the stage in a momentous way. With the years spent working on Paradise Lost the cast and creatives have finessed the foundations of the narrative they want to share while continuously challenging themselves to take this production to the next level.

Little Monster - Melbourne Fringe Festival interview

We all have voices in our heads. The voices that keep us up at night, the ones that make it hard to focus on that report that is due that week or the ones that make us doubt ourselves when we are actually amazing at what we do. Returning to the Melbourne Fringe Festival, Telia Nevile digs into her own voices with her new show, fittingly titled Little Monster.

In her previous shows, Nevile uses nostalgic pieces of media or childhood pop culture such as Disney or John Hughes movies, to create a darker tale around mental health or facing the often harsh realities of life, and this trend continues with Little Monster, where she performs in the rhyming style of Dr Seuss. "I've always loved how musical Dr Seuss' rhyming style is and how much momentum it has. It kind of runs down a path, tripping over its feet like a puppy," Nevile tells me. "After the last two years, I wanted to challenge (and reward) myself with something fun and free-wheeling, and the language that this style encourages is so playful and very open to the ridiculous."

Whiplash - Melbourne Fringe Festival review

Scott is on a date with a woman when his heart decides to disappear. Left with no choice but to deep dive inside his own body to try and locate it, where he meets an assortment of 'characters' along the way, including Brain, Dick and Mr. Fuck You Guy. Performed by Scott Wings, Whiplash is a thoughtful reflection on masculinity, mental health and relationships expressed through spoken word and physical theatre.

Wings conjures strong visual images with his descriptive words and in return there are plenty of emotional reactions to be felt. There is a vulnerability in the narrative and he isn't afraid to open himself up to a room full of strangers. He has a knack for finding the humour in a situation and ensures the story is filled with these observations. As he passes the stomach and comes across a ball of gum and nails long ago consumed, we smile at the familiarity of that brief comment. His tone and intonation throughout are effective in creating the atmosphere and his considered pacing stresses the urgency and intensity of our protagonist's circumstances but also allows for a breather as needed.

The Unfolding of Benjamin’s Misery review | Melbourne Fringe Festival | The Burrow

Winner of the Liverpool Poetry Slam 2018, spoken word performer and poet, Hideto Ambiguous brings his show, The Unfolding of Benjamin’s Misery to the Melbourne Fringe Festival. Hideto weaves a tale involving immigrants, exploitation and racism as we follow Benjamin, an undocumented immigrant, who is stuck working in a performance venue for an ungrateful employee who takes advantage of his situation. 

With no lighting, sound, set pieces or props, Hideto places everything on his own shoulders to engage the audience and for the most part he manages to do this quite well. His original songs and poems, including "Everyday Dissident", leave you considering the role we play - and have played - in embracing the "other", which is particularly fitting given the multicultural hotspot that is Melbourne.

Make Me A Houri review

In Islamic religion, Muslim men who die as "believers" are rewarded with 72 beautiful perpetual virgins as wives in heaven. These women are known as houris. In Emina Ashman's Make Me A Houri, two women who meet in the afterlife begin to question and confront how religion and society view and use their bodies and their spirits. 

Ashman creates some moving poetry with her story of these two women as they come to grapple with their own desire and the expectations placed upon them. Regardless how confronting the topics discussed are, through her considered and open dialogue, she allows the audience to lower their guard and be drawn into what is transpiring. Where this story comes up short is that the characters are largely unchanged throughout it. There is no build up to anything climatic or revelatory and the women remain static as they recall personal experiences that lead into deeper philosophical analysis.

World Problems review

Emma Mary Hall remembers a lot. She remembers 9/11 and the first funeral on Mars. She also remembers when George Clooney died and the birthday cakes she's eaten. In World Problems, Hall shares her memories - some factual, some probable, some pure fiction - with us while also expressing what it is like to live in this world and how all our actions are interconnected with something much bigger than us. 

By exposing her vulnerability to the audience through her memories, Hall creates an intimacy that grows with every passing minute. The accomplished way she makes us believe in everything she is saying is testament to the stage presence that Hall possesses. She presents to us as a figure of authority but also as a person having a casual chat with a friend. Her jumping of memories between time and space elicits a very emotional and personal response to a global issue.

Death and Other Things review | Melbourne Fringe Festival | The Butterfly Club

Eidann Glover appears on stages dressed as a clown. Or it a mime? Or a goth? Really though, it doesn't matter. What matters is, she appears. Like Death winding its way through The Butterfly Club upstairs, then downstairs, turning the corner and there it is. In Death and Other Things, Glover shares stories and her thoughts around death and all the fun stuff surrounding it, like grief, power and anxiety. 

No sooner that Glover begins her cabaret with what feels like a quasi-therapy session, along with the assistance of her three-piece band and their variety of instruments, she decides to scrap it. Forget what you've just seen she tells us. It's her show, she can do whatever she wants. She has a better beginning for us and so she starts again, this time with a different act. Repeat.

While the acts themselves are amusing and at times offer interesting interpretations on death and dying, the show requires a tighter structure to keep the flow going and to build its momentum. Death and Other Things needs to realise what its story is, what does it want to talk about and more importantly, what does it want its audience to feel when they are walking away. It went from topic to topic but felt like each one ignored everything that had come before it.

Untitled No. 7 - Melbourne Fringe Festival review

We all want to succeed in life. We all have goals and desires we would like to achieve and to be recognised as successful by our friends, family and society. But how do we measure this? By the size of our property? By how many letters come after our name or perhaps the number of children we have? In Untitled No. 7, Telia Nevile explores the mentality we have on success and our fear of failure.

The show is set up as part fairytale, part poetry and part something unexpected. We are introduced to our heroine Darling, who is searching for a golden key that will open the door of possibilities and opportunities for her. While this is a story we've all heard before, Nevile's masterful use of language and words throughout, lift this story to become something fresh and exciting. It's also great to see how much she has developed as a writer and performer since her 2015 Melbourne Fringe Festival award for Best Emerging Writer.

Untitled No. 7 - Melbourne Fringe Festival preview

At the 2015 Melbourne Fringe Festival, Telia Nevile won the Best Emerging Writer award for Poet Vs Pageant. In 2018, she returns to the Festival with a new show called Untitled No. 7, where through a mix of poetry, cabaret and performance art, she takes an offbeat look at what it means to fail and how success is measured.

There is an incessant need in society to define ourselves by our careers, relationships and successes, which Nevile is keen to challenge, beginning with the name of her show. "I've always loved how visual artists don't need to name their work, and that the non-name they choose to give it - Untitled - leaves the meaning of the work completely open to interpretation," she explains. "It doesn't define anything, and this whole show is all about defining things and then learning how to redefine, or un-define, them. I picked the number 7 because figuring out life and success and failure and ambition is always a work in progress, so you've got to go through a few drafts to get it right."

Whine List - Melbourne International Comedy Festival review

There are comedy shows that are remembered for their extravagant set pieces, others for their energetic performances and others for the splattering of jokes that are churned out each second. And then there is Marcel Lucont's Whine List, a show with the most minimal of sets, lowest of energy and more despair out loud than laughs out loud. But it is a show where this kind of approach works in its favour.

Drinking his bottle of red wine and wearing a blue suit, the barefooted Frenchman exudes the confidence and arrogance that stereotypes are made of. He cares little of what we think of him and cares even less about us. He's here to basically make us feel a little bit shit about our lives and ourselves.

Eve St John - Melbourne Fringe Festival preview

Expecting the unexpected at the Melbourne Fringe Festival is the norm when it comes to the type of events a person might come across. One show that is bound to have audiences in quite a different state of mind to when they arrived is Eve St John, an immersive one-on-one show that is potentially the most intimate show of the festival. 

"Eve St John is a poetry immersion where individuals come, spend time hearing poetry and their hands, feet and face are washed by the poet who shares the experience with them as a mute attendant," the show's creator, Brodie John tell me. "It's an 11-minute experience where spiritualities collide to subvert how we experience poetry and ritual in our modern lives. I selected the name based on the biblical characters of Eve who for me represents passion, nature, curiosity and motherhood, and John who represents cleansing, intimacy and transformation of the self. These themes are part of the experience and the poetry content."

Audience members have control the entire time of the show and they can choose how intimate they want the experience to be, so the washing is purely optional. "The provocation of the Melbourne Fringe this year is Out of the Echo Chamber, and I realised that to really say the things we need to, requires an incredible amount of trust. My passion in my creative outputs is consent, and so we've set up an experience that can be as intimate and unique as the ticketholder chooses," he says. "We provide a lot of information up front about how the experience works so the only surprise is the poetry and the messages. This allows each audience member to really relax into the workings and allow the poetry to stand out and be heard in an intimate setting."

Joan review

It was only a matter of time before experimental feminist theatre company The Rabble decided to take on the life of Joan of Arc, the woman who helped France win the war over Orléans and was later burnt at the stake for heresy and cross-dressing. Twenty-five years after her death, she was declared innocent of her crimes by the courts and was canonised in 1920. Her struggle and persecution is something that still resonates with us today, and with a fierce and poignant feminist perspective on her story, co-creators Kate Davis and Emma Valente bring her plight into a contemporary spotlight.

The show begins with a projection of an eye onto a scrim at the front of the stage. While it originally challenges the audience, there is a vulnerability and apprehension to the blinking eye that lingers in the room. The sound of burning logs and crackling wood as it continues to stare into the audience further builds on the unease and is a hint of what's to come. While we may know the story of Joan of Arc, there are still plenty of surprising and gripping moments to unfold in this production.

Ode To Man review - Melbourne International Comedy Festival

Premiering her new show at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, Emma Mary Hall's Ode To Man is a poetic look at the death of heroic masculinity and how it has changed over the years. Hall smashes through these concepts in her assertion that being a man should no longer be about aggression, dominance and physically strength, but about honesty, openness and awareness.

Hall's performance essay is sharply written and flows smoothly as she blends stories of past relationships with philosophical, historical and biological perspectives on men and women and gender roles and ideas. There is purpose to every word that Hall utters and each one builds on what she has previously shared with her captivated audience, listening intently to what she imparts. Hall absolutely shines when she gets into an impassioned speech and the anger, frustration and disappointment she is expressing is palpable.

Death Suits You review | Chapel Off Chapel

Everyone has moments when they feel underappreciated and ignored at work and frustrated with their overall work/life balance, but none more so than Death. This is someone who meticulously plans how each and every mortal will meet their ultimate demise, and then needs to ensure our own stupidity or actions do not interfere with these plans. Death must watch over us all the time, even when we are sleeping. In cabaret show Death Suits You, this hardworking individual recalls some of his finer achievements and attempts to have us understand the complexities of his role.

Alpha review - Melbourne Fringe

In this day and age, queer identity is more important than ever. Or is it? In Sebastian Robinson and Tamara Natt’s Alpha, the two explore the idea of what modern day queer identity looks like - and if it actually exists. Through poetry, movement, music and sound, the two create a world where the roles we choose to take on in life are revealed and questioned.

 

Robinson and Natt appear on an empty stage, dressed in matching white shoes and black tracksuit outfits. They spend the next 50 minutes creating some beautiful visuals for us not only through their soft and fluid movements and exploration of the space but also through their words. From a Britney Spears song to an Auslan interpretation of a Delta Goodrem song to one of their original works of poetry, Alpha shows how words can do so much to an environment even when you are staring at an empty stage.

All the Animals We Ate review | Melbourne Fringe Festival | Arts House

Last year, James Tresise’s mother passed away. During that same time, Sean M. Whelan’s pet spoodle passed away after 13 years. In All The Animals We Ate, the two come together to grieve and mourn the passing of someone they love and to celebrate their life. Death may be the end of one thing but it not need be the end of everything.

There is a lot of heart in this show; it’s hard not to feel sadness as Whelan’s recalls the moment he found out his beloved dog, Cady, had died. Despite the show being predominantly about the loss of animals, we are invited to link these experiences to any sense of personal loss we’ve had, let it be animal or human. This empathy is created in part through the animal impersonations the two performers take on throughout, emphasising their connections to human beings.