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.

Down The Rabbit Hole review | Forum Theatre | Melbourne International Comedy Festival

She won the award for outstanding emerging performer at the 2017 New Zealand International Comedy Festival for her show Down The Rabbit Hole, and now Angella Dravid has come to Melbourne to share her unique story of how she got married to a man 30 years older than her and then ended up in prison with a criminal conviction. 

Dravid's life is incredible fodder for a comedian and you can easily picture them becoming very animated with the audience and really playing up the experience, however Dravid has decided to go with a completely opposite approach. Her delivery for the entire show is completely deadpan, and in some ways this works in her favour as it allows the audience to focus on the story and to imagine the situation as it is being described. Some clarity and further details on the events leading up to her arrest are needed though, as the way it is currently described leaves some ambiguity as to what actually occurred.

This Is Eden review

While waiting in the foyer for This Is Eden to begin, a young woman in a bonnet and dress appears. Her name is Jane (Emily Goddard), a Female Convict Heritage Tour Guide, who provides us with a brief but entertaining overview on the history of female convicts. Jane is wide-eyed and enthusiastically explains how most women convicts who were sent to the Cascades Female Factory in Hobart were non-violent criminals, and we all laugh as she fumbles with putting on a spiked iron collar that women convicts often wore; it's easier to discount the tales of atrocity experienced this way.

Devised by Goddard and Susie Dee, This Is Eden is more than just a story about Australia's convict history. It is also about the treatment of Indigenous people throughout time and our treatment of asylum seekers today. Through the show, it is clear we have yet to learn from our mistakes and like Jane, we seem to be more upset over failed relationships than we do by sending people to certain death.

Once ushered to our seats, Jane hopes we enjoy the show and as she leaves, we are enveloped by silence and darkness. Moments later, Goddard reappears on stage, unrecognisable this time as convict Mary Ford. Her wild hair and near deranged demeanour is unsettling yet captivating as she shares the stories of her captors.

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.

Can you Escape…?

I've recently added a new addiction to my life and it is Escape Rooms. It's a fairly new idea to the Melbourne scene, where you have 45 minutes to find clues and solve puzzles to help you escape from a "themed" locked room. 

Escape Room has been open for roughly two months and comes with six themed rooms - Slaughterhouse, Vampire Chronicles, The Gallery, Jungle Safari, Prison Break and The Mummy Returns. There is a gradual turnover with new rooms every six months or so, and one upcoming room is an "Up" themed room!