Photo by Adam Thomas

- By Amelia Drew

Now Hear This was an evening of enlightening, hilarious, but at times slightly waffly, real life stories. Eight performers were tasked with telling a story about ‘The First Time…’ doing, seeing or achieving anything, in less than ten minutes.

The arriving audiences were serenaded by Zach Raffan’s marvellous musical talents, and as the sun set, the spectators settled down in the intimate courtyard of the National Film and Sound Archive. The weather was in favour of the outdoor event, and stayed pleasantly rain-free. Unfortunately the mosquitos seemed to enjoy the change in weather as much as the crowd.

But the mosquitos were soon swept aside when Joel Barcham began to recall childhood memories of catching and ‘pacifying’ a fish with his father, a traumatic event he described as arising from a “biological desire to impress my dad”. Stephan Walker sent spines tingling, at the Indian funeral of Indira Gandhi. Ben O’Reilly spun a tale about suffering a botched hair extension job, after getting desperate living with “Marge Simpson” hair.  Jane Vincent told of the pride in winning a bronze medallion. And an inspirational walk along the Kadoka track was on the menu thanks to Nick Peddle. The cringe-worthy account of Rod Saciler holding up cricket at the MCG with an announcement blunder made the audience laugh.

An honourable mention must go out to Kylie Walker and Jeff Thompson. Walker who tugged at our heart strings as she shared her pain and joys in overcoming cancer, and Thomas by retelling the first time he experimented with “nightly emissions”, and almost being caught by his evangelical family, in a can’t-help-but-pee-your-pants funny story.

Between these tales of delight, Melanie Tait, our host from the ABC and whose brain child Now Here This is, explained to us the rigorous process the speakers undertook in order to take to the stage. The procedure involved scrupulously auditioning and workshopping their tales, and most notably memorising their scripts. Indeed the memorised stories enabled the tellers to become more animated in their movements, but disappointingly only a few of the performers took the opportunity. Instead the rehearsed lines led to some of the acts feeling slightly stale at times. Another fault of the overall show was the time limit. Where at times I felt a conclusion had been reached, many of the storytellers continued to press on, presumably to fill in the allotted ten minutes. Perhaps a more succinct time limit would be more entertaining, and lead to crisper climaxes? Pardon the pun!