Insomniac Mixtape review (Melbourne Fringe Festival)

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.

Cry Baby review (Melbourne Fringe Festival)

Isabella Perversi has written three plays, each one dealing with heavy emotions. With Cry Baby she explains that she wants to branch out and create a piece of work that is different. Something that is light, and happy but she also lists a number of other requisites about what she wants and doesn't want to do.

However, no matter what she tries, she seems to fall back into the pit of sadness that she's building an artistic reputation for.
Perversi has set up a good structure to explore these worries and she starts off with a burst of colour and movement as she removes her black oversized coat and trousers to reveal (and revel in) a bright orange leotard. She energetically gets into an aerobic routine, brimming with forced positivity that eventually begins to wear her down and she succumbs to the sads. But that's OK, she'll simply move on and try something else to help guide her writing process.

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!"

kerosene and SIRENS review

I remember the first time I watched kerosene and being completely engrossed by Izabella Yena and the ferocity and tenderness she brought to her role. Over a year later, I remember the first time I watched SIRENS and sitting in awe as Benjamin Nichol presented a story that was so rich in detail and raw in emotion. Now for the first time, audiences are seeing these critically acclaimed plays as they were intended to be seen: together. While each story is distinct, unique and stands on its own, what ties the two together is the exploration of belonging, environment and disillusionment and how the harsh realities of life can be difficult to overcome.

Nichol and Yena have collaborated extensively on these projects, with Nichol writing kerosene and Yena performing in it and sharing directing responsibilities. SIRENS has been co-created by the two with Nichol also serving as writer and performer (and direction by Olivia Satchell). They are quickly proving themselves to be a formidable duo in the performing arts scene and it is very exciting to see what they come up with next.

Love and loneliness with kerosene and SIRENS

After critically acclaimed seasons of kerosene and SIRENS, independent theatre company The Voice In My Hands is giving Melbourne a second chance of seeing these powerful works with a new double-bill season at fortyfivedownstairs. These one-person shows present rich character and environmental exploration with strong performances by its two actors, Izabella Yenna and Benjamin Nichol.

Both shows are also written by Nichol, who displays an incredible skill in bringing characters so vividly, passionately and frighteningly to life. Both shows have been nominated for a number of Green Room Awards, including a Best Production win for kerosene. We spoke to Yena about returning to the role of Millie for kerosene after two years and how she's changed since the first performance and to Nichol about his creative process in creating a narrative for two similar but very different people and circumstances.

Moth review

In Declan Greene's Moth, two teens narrate a chain of events that lead to a tragic outcome for a pair of high school outcasts that leaves one unconscious and one missing without explanation. It's a fast-paced two-hander that highlights themes around mental health and identity through the friendship of these two people and the shared - and individual - experiences they go through growing up together.

Admittedly, I had some trepidation of whether a play written in 2010 about two teenagers would be relevant in 2023 but fortunately Moth still feels fresh and innovative. Greene depicts the horrors of high school and the long-term impact these instances can have, through authentic teenage voices and one can only imagine the power of this work back when it was performed.

Case Numbers review (Melbourne International Comedy Festival)

Dylan Cole inherited a locked briefcase from his grandmother, and in Case Numbers, he takes the audience through the mystery of cracking the code and what he found inside it. But before that, he needs to advise us of some pre-show notes and disclaimers so that we are fully aware of what we are getting into.

Over the next twenty minutes, Cole goes through almost twenty points of reference for us, stressing that there is no beginning, its middle is pointless and the ending is endless. And the following forty minutes? Well that would almost ruin the surprise, but it does involve a number of dated pop references (although it depends how old you are because I knew pretty much all of them) and ties to 1990 American submarine spy thriller and Sean Connery film, The Hunt for Red October.

SIRENS review (Melb Fringe)

Eden is a young gay man in a rural town. He spends most of his time having random hook-ups with older men he meets online. A beachside encounter with a man called David opens up a world of possibilities for him, but at what cost? Presented as part of the Melbourne Fringe Festival, Benjamin Nichols' new play SIRENS, in which he also stars in, is a stirring piece of theatre that speaks of the queer experience and the need we all have to be loved in some way.

Nichols is absolutely phenomenal as Eden. The way he carries Eden's dreams, aspirations and his heartbreak is utterly captivating to watch. His switches to secondary characters are seamless as he instantly takes on their mannerisms and voice. It's difficult to not get emotional from how convincing the bonds between Eden and David and Eden and his mother are displayed and how they develop.

Shut Up, I'm a Vampire review (Melb Fringe)

Shut Up I'm A Vampire is not your traditional vampire story. Presented as part of the Melbourne Fringe Festival and written and performed by Jessica Stanley, the show follows a woman who has been bitten by a vampire and attempting to come to terms with her transformation. Except that it's not. It's about something bigger and deeper and human.

Stanley plays Sophie, who is on a journey to discover what happened to her on that fateful night. Along the way we meet her friends, doctor and a dark, brooding stranger looking for their cat, all of which help Sophie put the pieces of the puzzle together. For the most part, Stanley takes on the roles of all the supporting characters and she makes sure that even if they have a few lines of dialogue, they come across as fully fleshed out characters with backstory.

Benjamin Nichol on his new show "SIRENS" and making noise about the queer experience

Fresh from his critically acclaimed and award winning show kerosene, playwright Benjamin Nichol is returning with a new play for Melbourne Fringe Festival, SIRENS. This queer coming of age story, in a solo performance by Nichol, introduces us to 22 year old rurally isolated Eden who after a chance encounter with a drag queen has a world of possibility and hope open up to him.

The premiere of SIRENS has been a long time coming and with the success of kerosene, Nichol is even keener to finally get some eyes on it. "I’ve been coming back to this again and again for several years now, so to say that I am excited it’s about to be given life would be a significant understatement. kerosene was such a joyful creative process and in many ways I see SIRENS existing within the same theatrical universe," he explains. "It’s a fresh story with a very different character, but it is stylistically comparable and intentionally explores similar themes of obsession, isolation and resilience. My dream is that one day SIRENS and kerosene will be programmed together as a double bill, which was actually our plan for last year's Fringe Festival prior to the lockdown!

The art of deception with "Heather"'s Michelle Perera and Kristina Benton

You shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but should you judge a book by its writer? Thomas Eccleshare's Heather attempts to answer that question in the Australian premiere of this play at this year's Melbourne Fringe Festival. A reclusive author is hesitant to go public despite her agent (and her fans) desperately wanting to meet her. A cat and mouse game emerges between the two with one trying to coax the other to achieve their own end.

While the plot of the play might be mysterious and ambiguous, the roles that actors Michelle Perera and Kristina Benton take on are just as vague in this thrilling drama with a twist. "I play multiple roles, which is intended to perplex, and hopefully, only for a moment, disorient the audience," Perera says. "I love that the play plays on the multiple personalities we often harbour." It's a sentiment shared by Perera's co-star, Benton. "It's what drew me to the play. That there is this exploration of the struggle to accept both the light and the dark within ourselves."

JSMR - Melbourne Fringe Festival interview

There's a new thrill-seeking pass-time that's been happening worldwide over the last few years. Causing tingles to run through the back of someone's head and down their spine, it's a sensation that only be achieved from the intimacy of watching someone whispering into a microphone, or slowly brushing their hair or even crinkling wrapping paper. Yes, we are talking about the the world of autonomous sensory meridian response, or ASMR. As part of this year's Melbourne Fringe Festival, performer Jessica Stanley is delving into the ASMR world with her show JSMR. 

While this has become a recent obsession for people, with millions watching these videos on YouTube, Stanley's fascination with ASMR began during her schooling days and has continued to grow since then. "I remember, in the later years of primary school, I really enjoying when friends borrowed stationery from me – a rubber or pencil, something like that – and I got nice head tingles while they used it," she recalls. "And it has grown from there, where I now love roleplay ASMR videos, where someone is pretending to give you a haircut or check you in to an appointment. I enjoy the specificity and variation, and that they can allow for quite lengthy videos too. I used to really like falling asleep to videos by an artist called Amalzd; I’m pretty sure I stumbled across her YouTube channel by chance and just really enjoyed her voice, accent and roleplay scenarios. I would also recommend ASMR Bakery for someone who wants to watch a whole variety of objects being tapped or played with."

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."

Dog Park - Melbourne Fringe Festival interview

It has been proven that dogs can reduce stress, anxiety, and depression, ease loneliness and encourage exercise and playfulness. They truly are a human's best friend. Walk past a dog park and you're bound to see dogs sniffing each other, running for tennis balls and marking their territory while their owners gather around catching up on local news and talking about their fur-baby like parents waiting to pick up their children from school. But what happens when that pocket of sanctuary is threatened by an unspeakable act? Presented by Lab Kelpie, Dog Park is a satirical and biting look at how one dog park community is impacted when a private school boy on exchange from Sri Lanka, is found dead in the leafy suburbs of a Melbourne dog park covered in bites.

In some ways, Dog Park is a work almost 30 years in the making when director Lyall Brooks, who also serves as Artistic Director of the now regional-based not-for-profit theatre company, first met the show's playwright Sally Faraday. "Sally and I used to act in shows and musicals together back in the *cough* late 90s *cough* when she was studying at Monash University and I was basically just hanging around there pretending to be a student because they had an incredible Performing Arts program," he recalls.

Love By The Hour - Midsumma Festival review

In Caleb Darwent's Love By The Hour, Eve announces to her friends that she is a sex worker. She is tired of hiding it and no longer wishes to feel any shame with what she does. As she sees it, it is simply a business transaction. Until one of Eve's friends requests to book her services that leads them both to question their ideas on friendship, sex and closeness, and if it is possible to distinguish between them. 

While the script keeps its attention on Eve and Ashish, Darwent opens the conversation to issues around being trans, racism within the LGBTQ community, loneliness and the struggles that many face with accepting who they are. This makes Eve and Ashish more well- rounded and fleshed out and they become something greater than their current circumstances. This is supported by Kitt Forbes' direction where the characters express themselves through tender body language and gentle touches of physical contact.

Love By The Hour - Midsumma Festival preview

Darwent & Gray are known for creating musical comedies exploring sex, sexuality and gender. Their previous outing, The Rest Is Drag, looked at the labels we place on ourselves and the complexity of building relationships based on those labels. For the 2020 Midsumma Festival, the company is yet again tackling labels and relationships but in a theatrical drama without their trademark music and songs.

Love By The Hour investigates the boundaries of friendship when one discovers his friend is a sex worker and decides to book them for an evening. Writer Caleb Darwent drew from a number of events and moments in their life that subsequently released a Pandora's box of ideas to navigate through. "The central concept sprung from a conversation with a friend of mine who had recently been offered money for sex by a Grindr Daddy. They were contemplating accepting his offer and start to do sex work. My first thought was how awkward and inappropriate it would be if I were to hire them, considering our pre-existing non-sexual friendship. The more I considered this, the more ethically complicated I realised it was," they tell me.

A Room of One's Own review

In her essay, Women and Fiction, Virginia Woolf discussed why women throughout history were so limited in achieving success in literature. The essay and the series of lectures it evolved into in 1928, remain a potent feminist examination on three areas: what women are like, women and the fiction they write, and women and the fiction written about them. 

In A Room of One's Own, Peta Hanrahan has taken Woolf's words and adapted them for the stage putting her 90-year-old thoughts under a compelling new light. First performed in 2016 at La Mama Theatre, Hanrahan's production returns for a second season at fortyfive downstairs with four actors expressing Woolf's thoughts and ideas as if they were an internal dialogue. Hanrahan eloquently interprets these to present an intelligent and articulate conversation on feminism while ensuring a relevance to the contemporary world we live in.

Never Ending Night - Melbourne Fringe Festival review

For years now, the Earth has been a site of devastation with humans now forced to live underground in various bunkers throughout the world. Cyprus Pod has been home to a community of people for 15 years, and all is as normal as can be until a Messenger arrives with a request for the pod to take on eight more people. With her, she brings three of the eight who are given the task to familiarise themselves with Cyprus Pod and endear themselves to the residents. With limited rations and space, the survivors must decide if they will allow these eight people to stay or turn them away. So begins Never Ending Night, an immersive theatre show presented by Libby Brockman and Russell Sims.

In this show, audience members are permitted to explore the pod and observe and listen to the various conversations happening between the residents, the Messenger and the Messenger’s guests. The nature of an immersive show such as this is that everyone will have a different experience depending on who they follow but the conclusion should provide enough information to put all the pieces of the puzzle together even if they have missed certain scenes. In this instance, I chose to shadow one of the messenger’s guests who tries to charm and manipulate his way into the pod. While initially an interesting character, his scenes and dialogue began to get slightly repetitive with his constant advances towards his female counterpart and in his belief that a place should be made for him because he is young, strong and fertile.

19 Weeks - Melbourne Fringe Festival preview

Creating theatre can often end up with the maker revealing the most personal details of their life to strangers. For Emily Steel this resulted with her award-winning play 19 Weeks, in which she opens up about terminating her pregnancy after her baby was diagnosed with Down Syndrome. Staged in a swimming pool at the Adina Apartment Hotels, this site-specific work has actor Tiffany Lyndall Knight performing the lead up and aftermath of Steel's decision.

It was the loneliness of facing an experience such as this that inspired Steel to write this show, and while it is of a highly personal nature, 19 Weeks was something that she felt she had to do. "When you go through something like that, it can make you feel very alone. And then it feels like you’re not supposed to talk about it, which makes the isolation worse. I wanted to talk about it. I wanted people with similar experiences to feel less alone. As a playwright, I’m particularly interested in challenging stories and complex female characters. This is one of those stories. If I hadn’t told it, I wouldn’t have been doing my job."

Do You Know Me? - Melbourne Fringe Festival preview

Melbourne Fringe Festival is a great opportunity to experience shows that you wouldn't ordinarily get the opportunity to see. Written by Tiffany Barton and Kim Ho, Do You Know Me? is one such example with a site-specific immersive show that shares the stories of Melbourne's homeless people and rough sleepers.

"Do You Know Me? is a collection of stories, scenes, song, animation and puppetry that explore the experience of homelessness," Barton tells me. "It's based on interviews I conducted with 12 homeless and ex-homeless participants and contains a lot of verbatim material. I mainly focused on their resilience and relationships as I didn't want the play to be poverty porn, so there's a certain lightness in the material to counterbalance the heaviness of the topic. We don't shy away with the darker stories however, we just try to temper them with some lightness and hope." 

Barton had never worked with Ho before and their collaboration was borne from a chance assignment during their Master of Performance Writing studies at VCA. "We were sent on a field trip to explore an area in the city and come back with a pitch for a site specific play. We went to Degraves Street and got talking to two homeless men who impressed us with their clarity and likeability," she recalls. "We pitched the idea for a site specific play about homelessness and the idea stuck."