Oh, Yuk, It’s Me

Oh, Yuk, It’s Me is a revival of Jessie Ngaio’s successful 2022 Fringe Festival show for which she achieved Green Room nominations for Best Performer and Best Production in the Independent Theatre category.  More recently, she was a co-devisor and performer in Stickybeak which won Best Comedy in the 2023 Fringe.  In that show she demonstrated her astonishing abilities as a clown and a mime – as well as an ability to transform herself and disappear inside the character of a dog, or a nasty old man, and more.

Oh, Yuk, It’s Me relies as much on words as images and is nakedly, honestly autobiographical.  Ngaio creates two personas: ‘Lulu’, an always smiling, loveable clown (Ngaio the performer) in a bunny hat, and Jess, the darker, serious and vulnerable other side. 

Both come from the same place and Ngaio demonstrates that graphically.  She has brightly coloured structure on stage, which has a space for her face at the top, and a representation of a vulva from which either Lulu and Jess can emerge – or to which they return.  Changes of character – Lulu to Jess and back again - happen inside the womb where they can speak to each other.  Sometimes Lulu has to beg Jess to come out.

No doubt it is this ‘two sides to the one person’ that is a crucial aspect of the show which touches audiences.  Audience responses to the 2022 show repeatedly mention both laughter and tears – and often describe the show as a ‘roller-coaster ride’.  I saw the show on a Wednesday night and the theatre was full.  Clearly, Ngaio is a loved performer who articulates feelings and fears, and touches nerves.  The title, Oh, Yuk, It’s Me suggests some kind of discovery: we find something that is ‘yuk’ inside us, and then we realise, ‘oh, it’s me…’

The impetus for this show was a kind of near-death experience: Ngaio standing on a New York subway platform, hearing an approaching train and contemplating suicide.  And then, at the very, very last second, deciding against it and instead finding a reason to live.  The second half of the show is devoted to that quest.  Stripping totally naked and gradually covering her body with fluorescent paint, Ngaio becomes a living statue, and she finds reasons, both real and metaphorical, in the destruction of the Great Barrier Reef and the fight to save it.

Ngaio is an experimenter, exploring her own personality (she tells us she is autistic) via music, visual art, theatre making, and aspects of her sexuality via polyamory and feminist porn.  Those elements are all present here and may be the reason that Oh, Yuk, It’s Me doesn’t seem to know quite what sort of show it is.  Structurally, it is not cohesive and the switches Lulu to Jess and back are awkward.  We could do with more Lulu and less preachy Jess.  The switch to the paint covered naked body is such an unintegrated difference in style that it feels like another show tacked on.  But that seems not to matter.  Her audience responds to her warmth, her jokes and songs, her confessions and revelations, and puts them together for themselves.

Michael Brindley