Shabamalam

Kate Dehnert (another Moosehead and RAW Comedy winner) hurls herself into her show with a manic, frenetic energy that is curiously vulnerable and engaging.  She boogies, she rants, she speaks in different voices.  She doesn’t let up.  Only for scant moments do we see what might be the ‘real’ Kate Dehnert behind the manic screen.  What’s intriguing and what grips your attention for her fifty or so minutes is the contrast and tension between the mode of delivery, the absurdist humour and the dry, bleak satire in the material.  (When a time machine dumps ‘Kate’ back from the future and into the present, a voice announces, ‘Welcome to the Age of Smug.’)

A very clever audiotape provides comment and prompts throughout – a compere, ACMI staff announcements, alien scientists…  First is a hard sell masculine voice ‘introducing’ Ms Dehnert as ‘the funniest woman in Victoria!’  She undercuts that right away with a really very bad joke and veers off into a routine about how time machines – time travel - might be a very bad idea.  The time machine concept turns out to be a set-up for the extended narrative that makes up the rest of the show.  An insouciant female voice announces that an asteroid has smashed into the earth… And now Ms Dehnert  - or her alter ego ‘Kate’, crazy party girl - is the last person left alive – which also makes her very, very important… only there’s no one really to be important to… except worms… but hierarchies and status and bossing people around can’t be abandoned just because the world has come to an end… and then, after a technological blunder that leaves her with two personalities, one an insufferable DJ, the other the bewildered ‘Kate’ - as a subject for experimentation by condescending aliens who regard humans as very stupid indeed.  Ms Dehnert’s performance in juggling her DJ and ‘Kate’ while responding to the aliens is nothing short of brilliant.

Strangely, most people in my audience were not laughing much.  Maybe laughing isn’t cool.  Or maybe Ms Dehnert is just too far out there?  Actually, she has the rare ability to stretch absurdity to the limit and yet make sense and pointed comment on our world.  If I have a slight reservation, it’s that the pace is unrelenting, exhausting and strays into garbled incomprehensibility occasionally – which is a pity since she is technically accomplished and the material is so good.  Director Colin Lane might well have advised a little variation – or he might not – or he did and Ms Dehnert didn’t listen.  Nevertheless, this is a genuinely original and clever show by a talented performer pretending to be close-to-panic crazy.  Not easy, not relaxing, but very, very good.

Michael Brindley