The Tired Old Mother Of Multicultural Jokes

The Age

Thursday May 4, 2006

CAMERON WOODHEAD, REVIEWER

COMEDY FESTIVAL REVIEWS: IT'S A MOTHER *? North Melbourne Arts House, Until May 7; NICOLA GUNN - AN UNFORTUNATE WOMAN **** La Mama, 205 Faraday Street, Carlton, season ended

IT'S a Mother is certainly energetic, but it isn't that funny.

The problem with this collection of skits is that the material isn't sufficiently developed or variegated. The humour derives from two bald stereotypes: hopeless sons and their domineering Greek mothers. These might be staples of multicultural comedy, but without appropriate garnish, they're a bland recipe.

Not that there aren't laughs to be had - one elaborately coiffed mother rejects to the point of absurdity a line of potential brides for her son, and another browbeats her priest into allowing her morally dubious offspring to receive communion.

But it's a drum banged once too often in this show, and the central paradox this sort of comedy rests on - that the people who most embarrass, frustrate and torment us are usually the ones who love us the most - doesn't really shine through.

What we are left with are parodic iterations of varying degrees of accomplishment and sophistication. The actors - Alex Blias, Elena Carapetis, and Phaedra Nicolaidis - have to work to wrest laughter from the script. They're good actors - as is made clear in a disturbing dramatic short about a middle-aged man and his dying mother - but they're not natural comedians. The chutzpah and the timing just aren't there.

It's worth noting the script has more than a smattering of Greek, which drew belly laughs from those who understood it. Alas, it was all Greek to me.

AT FIRST, Nicola Gunn's kooky one-woman show looked as if it would be an hour of comic mime. But just as the eyes prepared to roll, she spoke.

An Unfortunate Woman turned out to be an unusual, sophisticated and very skilled hybrid performance. Gunn employed physical theatre extensively to play her cast of characters. On the verbal side of things, she mastered a range of naff English accents.

But it was the show's plot that impressed the most. It involved a bureaucratic bungle with dire existential consequences, and combined the best of two kinds of British comedy - the primness of Keeping Up Appearances, and the bizarre, dystopian vision of Terry Gilliam's Brazil. The narrative was set up as a mystery, but links between seemingly disparate elements only emerged slowly, leaving the audience bamboozled at first, then utterly engrossed.

Gunn's performance was a vigorous portrayal of no less than 14 characters, all sufficiently contrasted to avoid confusion. Given the sinuous storyline, you didn't want to miss anything.

An Unfortunate Woman was occasionally laugh-out-loud funny, but more typically this was comedy tinged with melancholy - a bittersweet assay into the way our humanity can be distorted by regulation, on the one hand, and emotion on the other.

© 2006 The Age

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