Eighteen

This is not a show about being eighteen – which I assumed from the two glamorous women on the poster.  It’s about two women who have been BFFs for eighteen years – from 13 to 30.  They met at school and bonded, and they’re still bonded - and this sketch comedy show is made up of their comic reminiscences about their school days and about how – amazingly, despite their marked differences – their friendship has endured. 

For instance, Caitlyn absolutely loves sport.  Tiana has no interest whatsoever – and at school she would even fake long-lasting periods to avoid PE.  To this day, Caitlyn cannot understand this.  In their school drama classes and plays – a central component of the show - Tiana would always be cast as ‘Asian dancer’ – or ‘refugee’ - while Caitlyn always got ‘Mother’.  Both resented these cliché if unsurprising choices, but their friendship is indestructible. 

Their school drama teacher, it seems, was not a music theatre tragic like Mr G, but a very, very serious man, who wrote his own plays for the students to perform. These worthy, agit-prop plays always dealt seriously with the very, very serious issues of the day.  Such as bullying, drugs, discrimination, refugees, etc, etc.  Caitlin and Tiana don’t quite dismiss these topics, but instead treat us to some excerpts, which they swear are verbatim – and sure enough they are as predictable and on-the-nose as you imagine… 

In case we’re missing the point, the women get audience members to play the stereotype characters, giving them high-lighted script pages to read aloud.  Naturally this demonstrates even more clearly how wince-making the girls’ teacher was as a dramatist.

Sometimes Caitlyn and Tiana play other characters they experienced in their growing up.  A highlight is two pushy salesgirls at Bras’n’Things when Tiana goes to buy her first bra, despite not yet having anything much to put in it.  Later, the women don logo-adorned jackets to play butch but bewildered male PE teachers.  (The show could do with more of this sort of character comedy.)

The friends’ bond, they say, is their agreement that when everyone else is wrong, they are right.  But what really holds them together – right there on stage – is their shared sense of the ridiculous and their affection for each other.

After a successful season at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, Staples and Hogben have revived their show for two nights only at the Motley Bauhaus.  It’s a warm, good-hearted, feel-good show focussed squarely on the friendship.  Important incidents, relationships, parents and other circumstances that might’ve broken up the pair are excluded from the show - so there’s no jeopardy and no tension. 

As writers, the women’s material is silly and funny and a tiny bit risqué, but mild, almost innocent.  As performers, they might mistake exuberance and enthusiasm for entertainment.  There are some clunky songs and clunky dancing, performed with giggly faux amateurism, but Caitlyn and Tiana are so likeable they just about get away with it.  Certainly our audience, especially anyone there who had shared those years with Caitlyn and Tiana, entered into the spirit of things and clearly had a good time.

Michael Brindley