Scout Boxall: Good Egg

As we enter, Scout Boxall, dressed as a fried egg, dances in faux awkward style.  You have to be good to get a laugh out of bad. Boxall knows, and deliberately sets a self-conscious faux awkward tone. A voice over announcement informs us that the show we’re about to see has no narrative and no arc.  This seems to be welcome news: the audience applauds.  It’s also true.  Boxall, in white jump suit and pudding bowl haircut, then informs us that if we don’t understand the show, then it’s Art, also explaining that ‘egg’ is gender neutral term for someone emerging from binary sexuality, on which topic jokes and speculation follow…  

In fact, what follows is pretty much what the press release/program blurb promises: an absurd ‘genre-defying sketch-clown-stand-up-drag multi-tool show’.  It segues, or switches, from one item to another with no logical or developmental connection whatsoever, but it’s all held together by Boxall’s charm – which makes us collaborators – the exquisite timing and a sharp awareness of audience response. The material per se may be just a little uneven, but we stay with it because we’re simply drawn in, fascinated and primed to see what comes next. 

Some examples, in no particular order.  Listening to the ‘sound’ of the ocean from a seashell, then the sound from a wine glass, a bottle of chilli sauce and a tube of Pringles.  Dressed as a nun, Boxall takes us through an exercise regime, ‘Cardio for Christ’ (this goes on a beat too long, but has a pointed, nasty sting in its tail).  How the invasion of a girls’ school by a crazed gunman is thwarted by the girls singing Enya’s ‘Orinoco Flow’.  The story of how Boxall's parents met while working in the Federal Treasury Department and falling in love over ping-pong, complete with financial jargon euphemisms.  Claiming to be Tim Winton’s younger brother, Kim, with bush hat and a Drizabone, reading from Kim’s latest fiction – a straight-faced but sly send-up of the faux realist Winton style.  Squeaky, squirmy sound effects accompanying an examination of a very carefully painted (says Boxall) water colour diagram of a vulva.  An account, with riveting digital demonstration, of sexual molestation at an office Christmas party – to the ‘tune’ of The Last Post’… Finally, a complete wardrobe switch from the white jump suit and into a kind of Superhero outfit as Russia’s first entry (1994) into to the Eurovision Song Contest!

That should give you some idea of Good Egg.  On opening night, the bio-box techie was a bit over-taxed in keeping up with Boxall and the many, many sound and music cues, but Boxall’s directions from the stage were as if meant and fitted perfectly with the bear-with-me-faux-amateur rest.  Boxall won Best Emerging Artist at Melbourne Fringe 2019 and this seems not only deserved but appropriate since ‘emerging’ is a major theme in this new, tweaked and improved version of a show that has no narrative and no arc, just a heap of great and very eccentric and original jokes.

Michael Brindley

Photographer: Theresa Harrison