The one woman show: a resurgence of storytelling
Amelia Pitcher’s POLES (top left), Hannah Camilleri’s Lolly Bag (bottom left), and Nat Harris’ Sal + Friends (right)
Review by Clare Rankine
The one woman show has made a powerful return to stages across Australia, the US and the UK with work like Prima Facie, Angel and Eryn-Jean Norvill’s triumphant The Picture of Dorian Gray. It’s a fabulous feeling, seeing a performer come into their own creating clear characters with the help of intricate sound design and intelligent writing. As a lover of comedy, especially long form, theatrical work, I’m always drawn to performers creating refreshing, poignant, and hilarious stuff that veers away from the confines of straight stand up and into deeper exploration of story.
As a critic, I could contribute a stale take: the types of one woman shows on stages now are indebted to (or just like) the globally popular Fleabag and Nanette. We know this isn’t true, when women have been creating work like this long before we cobbled Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Hannah Gadsby together in our heads. Yet, the immense popularity of these two works has garnered interest in these kinds of stories, making the space for performers to play. Three recent works I saw at the Melbourne Fringe Festival highlight integral work from three fantastic performers doing just that. In Lolly Bag comedian Hannah Camilleri has mastered the art of physical, intelligent comedy with a joyous approach. Amelia Pitcher creates a messy, loud, recognisable existence as Cora in POLES: The Science of Magnetic Attraction. Comedian Nat Harris is a tour de force in Sal + Friends with a parade of hilariously real characters.
Lolly Bag is a mix of delicious creations, and Hannah Camilleri is magic to watch. Her writing is intelligent in its simplicity - she uses one single repeated phrase for comedic effect, or lets her excellent, moldable face do the talking. In the opening sketch there are no words at all, just the mirror fantasies of a vampire who longs for blood, but can’t quite make her first kill a reality. For the first five minutes of the show, Hannah says nothing, is truly silly, and we absolutely lose it. The first hints of Hannah’s physical comedy prowess are here too; with a flick of a delicate wrist, her vampire climbs a magnificent imaginary staircase. Creating everything from nothing is a clear strength of Hannah’s, and her playground is the blank stage.
Hannah then leads us through a misty moor where a woman searches for her lost husband. With a swing of her blonde wig and sparkly scarf, her search becomes a dance (assisted by hers and Pat Moon’s sound design), her frustration peaking with hilarious squawks and squeaks. The stage morphs into an alien’s press conference, sparkly scarf now wrapped around Hannah’s head, eyes and nose, and her movements liquid, languid. From this murky world, Hannah snaps to reality as your Year 8 teacher who doesn’t care if she’s talking loudly during the exam: she’s assisting a student, thank you very much! Here, Hannah gives her character and audience time to breathe. Even the cadence of her teacher's voice as it arched upwards brings tears of laughter from audience members on the edge of their seats.
World building like this is strong too in POLES. Cora is a dancer at a Melbourne strip club, and her life is a little bit of a mess. She’s in love with a girl called Lauren who doesn’t love her back, she’s got two dollars in her bank account and a group of pimply teenage boys have just stolen her underwear mid lap dance. Glittery pleaser heels, sharp as a knife, lie abandoned on a pink velvet chair that exists simultaneously in the South Yarra cafe that Cora frequents with Lauren, in the corner of her apartment and centre stage at the Spearmint Rhino. The throb of text notifications, thump of strip club bass, and monotonous Uber rumbles are expertly designed by Callum Cheah. Club banger “Baddest Of Them All” bookends:
Do you wanna dance, baby? I know you see me lookin' at you on the daily
Ooh, I'm in a trance lately, I need something to wake me up, something to phase me
Cora’s life is full of boring clients that use her as a counsellor and forget her fake name. She’s sleeping through the day and dancing all night, scuttling to the fire escape between dances to check her blank phone. We groan along at the men she dates who try to “fix her”, especially Kale, the faux hippy boyfriend who moves in without asking and doesn’t think she should give her “energy” to so many different men. These men are only heard as voice overs, and yet, Cheah’s sound design makes us feel Kale is sitting in the audience right with us, judging Cora in his upper-middle class Brighton-to-Fitzroy drawl.
In Sal + friends Nat Harris expertly builds her world by weaving characters between scenes, offering a brief glimpse into the next whilst in character as another. That way, when we’re introduced to a new one, we’re already howling with laughter because we know them all too well. There’s Owen, the laconic personal trainer from California who’s into ethical non monogamy and free climbing. The nameless manager of the local council complaints line scrawls messily on her squeaky whiteboard in a Kmart skirt suit while eating a dry salad.
But the star of the show, of course, is the one and only Sal. A love letter to your Mum’s weird, posh friend, Sal is so vivid. She’s frazzled, screaming at Alexa to “play Vance Joy by Riptide'' while scolding the family dog Lilly who is “getting so fat.” She’s getting “shredded” for her long suffering husband Mark’s sixtieth birthday who is “better socially when he drinks”, is obviously in lust with her trainer Owen and has an almost parasocial relationship with her son Brendan (a DJ, he lives in London). Nat goes a step above her contemporaries here: husband Mark is no voiceover, but a real flesh and blood actor. The perfectly cast Peter Knight, looking like he’s just stepped off the green at the Sorrento Golf Club, helps make Sal’s world a reality. We as an audience no longer feel like we’re watching a play, we’re at Mark and Sal’s house in Alphington, sitting on their deck resplendent in West Elm furniture and Blackhearts and Sparrows chardonnay. A standout moment is when Sal has a breakdown in her Spanx, pouring chardonnay over her head. You can’t help but feel sorry for her as she blinks at the audience through her thick glasses, her iconic orange visor wet with chardy.
In POLES too, we can’t help but feel for Cora who lives in an often threatening world. She wakes concussed and naked surrounded by people she doesn’t remember meeting. She stumbles home, one shoe tangled around her foot. Her phone is cracked, the glass making her fingers bleed. We’re terrified for her, because she pushes everyone away until she’s all alone. Even her ugly cat runs away to live with the wholesome family next door. She’s a sad, beautiful figure alone on the stage. Under the makeup and tacky tracksuit with “Angel” spelt out in diamante across her bum, Cora is a twenty something woman just trying to figure it all out.
There is no other performer who comes into their own onstage as much as Hannah Camilleri. The absolute joy radiating from Hannah, as performer, is what makes her shine. With a wry look, and a tug of her wig, she warmly invites you in on the joke. But the best moments come when she takes off the wig and we get a glimpse of who she really is: earnest, true, hilarious.
I return, thrilled, to the theatre experience — that was whisked away and took its sweet damn time coming back. Women making theatrical work about themselves is often lauded only when convenient, and then quietly put back in the drawer. Not today. I’m proud to watch these women on stage, holding their own. Their voices are stronger than ever.
POLES: The Science of Magnetic Attraction plays at the Trades Hall - The Studio until 23 October. Find tickets here. It then tours to Fringe Brisbane from 3 November.
Lolly Bag returns to the Trades Hall - Quilt Room on 22 October. Find tickets here.
Sal + Friends plays at the Trades Hall - Archive Room until 23 October. Find tickets here.
You can get 15% off all three shows if you buy tickets in one go as a “Fringe Binge”!
POLES image by Kyle Dobie, Lolly Bag design by Pat Moon, Sal + Friends image by Abigail Varney.
Clare Rankine loves cry laughing at high octane comedy and her cat, Crumpet. She’s also a comedy writer, producer and performer with a sick website that has a sparkle emoji cursor you can find here.
We paid Clare $25 for this article.
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