Review: Blake Everett and Oliver Coleman defy the odds in ‘Dig Their Own Graves’
Words by August Billy
Oliver Coleman’s 2019 Fringe Festival show,
Poolside, was a revelation, introducing the young Melbourne comedian as a gifted performer who could easily switch from elaborate sketches to tongue-in-cheek stand-up.
Coleman also displayed an easy, offhand penchant for crowd work and wasn’t afraid to stir up awkward energy.
All of these ingredients are transferred into
Dig Their Own Graves, a work of narrative sketch comedy that sees Coleman teaming up with fellow Melbourne comic and actor Blake Everett as part of this year’s Melbourne International Comedy Festival.
Pandemics aren’t the only punchline in Melbourne
The Melbourne International Comedy Festival returns. Performer Sam Taunton. Photo courtesy: Grant Gibbins
April 11, 2021
For the past three weeks, the Melbourne International Comedy Festival has heralded Victoria’s return to live arts. An array of local acts and international headlines have taken to the city’s stages in one of Australia’s first international events since the start of the pandemic. Local acts like Wil Anderson, Tom Gleeson and Gen Fricker were joined by international comics freshly out of quarantine like Daniel Sloss.
For many Victorians, the festival provided the first chance to see a live performance since Victoria’s 102 day lockdown. Opening the Oxfam Gala, host Becky Lucas caused an eruption of sound as she asked the crowd who hadn’t had a big night out in the last year. Audiences flocked to buy tickets, with artists like Nina Oyama and Aaron Chen selling out early in thei
Melbourne International Comedy Festival review
It’s rare for an audience to be put at ease within the opening moments of a show by a relatively unheralded act - especially when they can’t actually see the performer - but Daniel Muggleton pulls it off.
Starting the show from the back of one of the kookier rooms of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, the Sydneysider immediately connects with the crowd and makes it clear we’re in safe hands before bounding to the stage in a bright red tracksuit.
As well as presumably helping to differentiate him from the majority of his comedy peers – see show title – the outfit is a nod to his failed attempt to assimilate during a working stint in the UK, and it would have been interesting to see how his sharp social observations might have landed on British shores. They certainly hit with sufficient impact here, as Muggleton laments Australia’s colonial legacy and its current age of bogan supremacy.
Words by Luke Carlino
Another stellar show from Australia’s favourite inherited comic.
Did you know that Arj Barker was with us here in Melbourne throughout the whole of COVID-19? He feels the lockdown pain we’ve all endured and has a few thoughts about it.
He happily shared them all with us during his Melbourne International Comedy Festival 2021 run in
Arj Barker Comes Clean, a stack of poignant new material that encompasses the happenings of Barker’s life and the world at large over the past year or so.
No stranger to our shores, Barker has frequented the Australian comedy circuit sharing his philosophical outlook with us for the past 20 years.
Despite the drought, it was a very fluid summer.
After a stint with the KGB, Mrs Robinson swaps her Kalashnikov for a camera obscura. Feeling the heat she lifts her skirt, zooms her fisheye lens onto her own dysfunctional family and…
Warning: contains absurdity, audacity and climax change.
Ella Filar’s Krows Bar Kabaret in vintage underwear will have you dying for love and gasping for lust while the all-star cacophonous collection of vulgar, grotesque, sexy and sublime singers and musicians rock your jocks off with preposterously witty, madcap ideas and songs of the Weimar variety.