Sara Pascoe arrives on stage with a notebook, her phone and some pens. I wondered if the show was a work-in-progress, but she put them all aside until later in I Am a Strange Gloop, a show where we discover Sara is herself a work-in-progress. A life interrupted by having two children in her early 40s, after an adulthood of freedom to be herself and explore her own gloopiness. She’s jealous of her mother, who had Sara when she was 19 and “only has one story that doesn’t involve me”. Having had a wonderful child-free life, now she’s sleepless, frantic – with an excessively tall husband who leaves his canoe-sized shoes around the house and doesn’t want to get involved in housework.
There are
moments in Sara’s show that sound like the female-equivalent of the put-upon
male comics who were always complaining about their wives, as if that was the
height of comedy. But Sara is fully aware of how she might come across – hating
her husband and her kids, and she apologises profusely throughout. Not for the
hate, exactly, but how we might judge her.
Her thought
patterns are scattered, but you can tell it’s carefully crafted. It’s not like
Ross Noble hang-on-for-your-life style comedy – Sara warns about tangents and
purposefully alerts us to foreshadowing so we’re not left wondering why she’s
veered so far from her original point.
It’s been
ten years since I last saw Sara at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival
and she’s still worried about telling hacky jokes. Now, though, if she knows
she’s got a joke that sounds tired, she’s set up an alternate punchline to try
out, too. Strange Gloop might still be in test mode, because she does
pull out that handy notebook towards the end – to try out something the crowd
groaned at the night before. But after we laugh, she’s worried we might have
done it to spare her feelings.
I Am a Strange Gloop is chaotic in the way that someone
diagnosed as having ADHD by a friend who has ADHD (it’s a pyramid scheme) might
deliver the story of their lives. But we’re on her side all the way through,
even when we can’t quite keep up with her. Gloop touches on Sara’s thoughts
on her post-partum body and her gender expression in a way that is refreshing,
but might benefit from more fleshing out. Her reaction to being turned into AI
porn was interesting because it was so unexpected.
Sara Pascoe
runs a tight ship. She has to. Her husband’s no help. But he’s also good
material, as is her whole family life. And it all spins off into some hilarious
and cutting comedy about the excessive trauma in the modern world and how we’re
all struggling to cope. It’s expertly constructed and pays off exquisitely.
- Keith Gow, Theatre First
Comments