Billed as a ‘new, surreal, post-apocalyptic-romantic-black-tragi-comedy,’ Even If We’re The Last Two People On Earth centres around Lewis Sargent (Will Cox) and Emily Price (Molly McCormack), a pair of nineteen-year-old survivors who find themselves thrown together after the rest of the human race is wiped out by the apocalypse of December 21, 2012. Written and directed by Jack Atherton, the story follows the duo’s progress as they travel through the remains of society, their feelings for each other growing as they come to terms with everything they’ve lost. Along for the ride is Isabel Meow (Monica Guilhaus), an unhinged exotic dancer picked up in a strip club along the way.

The main problem with this show is the script. It isn’t without redeeming value –occasionally there are sharply-written lines which provide momentary comic relief – but on the whole it feels too long-winded, leading to the show exceeding the advertised time of 60 minutes by nearly half an hour. A fourth character, in the form of the Ghost of Post-Traumatic Stress (Matt Williams) breezes on and off stage at random intervals, rattling off lines with little to no explanation about who (or what) he actually is. Little background is given on the nature of the apocalypse itself, or how and why it happened. While this ambiguity initially provides a backdrop to the characters’ development – one of Lewis and Emily’s first real discussions highlights their conflicting theories over what’s actually happened to them – over time the lack of clarification starts to feel like a cop-out on the writer’s part.

Perhaps the greatest difficulty of all is that the narrative between Lewis and Emily doesn’t often connect with the reality of the apocalypse happening around them. In a post-apocalyptic world where food, water and survival of the fittest on a day-by-day basis are paramount, the two characters’ obsession with their own relationship – love, sex, and marriage (is that last even possible in a post-apocalyptic world?) – feels disjointed and unrealistic.

The acting is similarly patchy. Guilhaus delivers the strongest and most memorable performance of the show with her portrayal of a deranged stripper, although the non-stop wackiness does grate over time and, more dangerously, begins to overshadow the central love story between Lewis and Emily in the second half of the play. Lewis has some of the best individual lines in the show – his prayer to a ‘genocidal, megalomaniacal Lord’ is great – but Cox’s tendency to whine his lines really lets his character down. Price’s emotive performance as Emily is perhaps the most consistent of the three leads, although one could argue that her often-complaining character is the least sympathetic of the three.

I had high hopes of Even If We’re The Last Two People On Earth, and while I really tried to enjoy it, in the end I just couldn’t do it. As a hard-core fan of apocalyptic novels and films, I was eager to see how a piece of theatre in that same genre would work performed onstage. That I came out of the performance feeling let down really says it all.

Most people have heard of Claire Hooper through the hit TV show Good News Week, where she acts as a team captain and channels her comedy stylings through discussions of current affairs with other A-list personalities from around Australia. The show she brings to the Adelaide Fringe, however, is quite different, instead drawing inspiration from Hooper’s views on art; namely, what does and doesn’t constitute it. One particular work she mentioned again and again throughout the show was a work of art which involved 100 million hand-painted porcelain replicas of sunflower seeds – is that art? Isn’t it?

It’s an odd choice of subject matter, and perhaps a rather limited one; while it could have filled a segment of her show, it wasn’t really enough to carry the whole thing. Laughter from the audience on her ‘art jokes’ was primarily of the polite and abbreviated kind rather than hearty and sustained, and there were long pauses between gags where Hooper seemed to struggle to think of what to say next. This is part of her onstage manner, of course, which unfortunately didn’t translate well to the acoustically-limited confines of The Deluxe at the Garden of Unearthly Delights. The same could also be said of her notoriously deadpan delivery, which does work within the confines of a well-amplified Channel 10 studio in Sydney, but at The Deluxe often came across as more subdued than intended, even lifeless at times.

However, despite all the aforementioned working against her, Hooper made the best of a bad situation and managed to carry the evening capably, if not spectacularly. Some of her other gags fell flat – the random emergence of a woman from a box onstage ten minutes into the show received a lukewarm reception from the crowd and made no sense to me at all. Especially since I couldn’t even see said box over the heads of the crowd, which means something as I’m six foot two.

Hooper’s best moments came when she broke free of her rehearsed routine and engaged with individual members of the crowd on the spur of the moment – the tried-and-true technique of greeting latecomers as they attempted to sidle past the stage to their seats drew laughs, as did her brilliant response to an audience member telling everyone about a letter to the editor she’d once written about the “state of the world.” “Don’t take this the wrong way, but… couldn’t you have just told your cat?” Points also to Hooper for carrying on like a trooper (yes, I went there) when two gentlemen near the back decided that the middle of her show was an excellent time to stage a loud, energetic conversation that filled the entire tent (luckily they left soon afterward.)

All in all, the show was still good enough for me to come out of it with an opinion of Claire Hooper as an excellent comedian who picked a bland idea for a show. I still have faith in you, Claire. But next time, drop the sunflower seeds.

Most people know by now what to expect when they walk into a Fiona O’Loughlin show: anecdotes about her family; liberal use of the word ‘fuck;’ usually a rant or two about a handful of public figures; and plenty of cheerful references to her well-publicised problems with alcohol. This is pretty much exactly what you get at Fiona O’Loughlin in The Divine Miss O, the comedienne’s twelfth offering to the Adelaide Fringe in as many years.

Except she’s added something new this time. Interspersed between O’Loughlin’s stand-up segments are pre-recorded ‘interviews’ between Fiona and two outrageously gay PR agents at Bitch PR, an agency to which Fiona has supposedly gone in order to get an image makeover. It becomes increasingly obvious that O’Loughlin is targeting the gay audience with this particular show (the clincher being her entrance on stage in a Cher wig singing Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves.) As O’Loughlin herself happily admits, she’s struggling to generate fresh material now that her kids are all grown up, which apparently means it’s getting increasingly difficult to tell embarrassing stories about them for public amusement. This new angle has good and bad repercussions for her act. While the Bitch PR video is good for a laugh – the guys in the video do hilarious impersonations of the bitchy gay stereotypes usually found in Hollywood rom-coms and American TV shows – the fakeness of the staged clips does clash with the ‘no bullshit’ persona that radiates from O’Loughlin every time she opens her mouth – a persona on which she’s built her entire career, in fact.

That being said, there were perks to the new format. Even I was looking forward to the cataclysmically-funny result when, at one point, O’Loughlin flounced onstage wearing a peroxide-yellow wig while a pre-recorded voice intoned ‘it doesn’t matter if you love Him, or capital H-I-M.’ While O’Loughlin piked out of that particular song before it had even started (Lady Gaga’s Born This Way, if you’re unfamiliar) she does close the show with a rendition of a Bette Midler tune you’ll be unlikely to forget anytime soon (I won’t give away the name.)

All the window dressing, however, doesn’t detract from the heart and soul of O’Loughlin’s show, which are still her stories about her family. Her poor kids are shown no mercy; one of them is casually and repeatedly referred to as a ‘big fat bald guy’ throughout the entire introductory segment. While I did notice one or two of O’Loughlin’s stories from previous live and TV gigs being sneakily recycled throughout this show, they were all so expertly told that I didn’t mind in the least hearing them again. O’Loughlin’s apparent inability to resist the humour of her own stories – she cracks up constantly throughout the show – only adds to their charm.

Throw in a rant about Dr. Phil, F-bombs exploding left, right and centre (including the rather awesome word ‘fuck-knuckle,’ which I’d never heard in my life before that night), and a closing story about a howlingly hilarious social gaffe from her time in rehab, and you have the latest proof as to why O’Loughlin, more than a decade into her career, continues to lead the pack in Australian comedy. The Divine Miss O, indeed.

Given the action-packed state of Australian politics in recent weeks, it’s no wonder that Political Smack-Down! opened to a relatively full house on Wednesday night at the Wheatsheaf. With a line-up of TV writers – including Toby Halligan, Scott Abbott, Courtney Hocking and Matthew Kenneally – headlining the event, as well as being hosted by local comedian Jon Brooks, each performer takes the stage in turn and shares their thoughts with the audience on various aspects of current affairs (mainly politics).

Political comedy by its very nature tends to polarise, and not just in the sense of pitting the Left against the Right, the Labor supporters against the Liberals, and so on, but also in the effectiveness of the comedy itself: it’s often either gut-bustingly funny or yawn-stiflingly weak. Political Smack-Down! is unusual in that it occupies a kind of middle ground. Granted, it’s much closer to the former than the latter. The audience remained far from quiet throughout the night, and there’s no doubt that all five comedians were capable of showing their audiences the funny side of politics. Particular standout moments included Brooks’ politically-slanted ‘changing a lightbulb’ jokes; Hocking’s exaggerated reading of the Gina Rinehart poem ‘Our Future;’ and Keneally’s critique of Gillard’s views on ‘mateship.’ That was the good news: that there were plenty of moments like these which kept the audience chuckling throughout the night.

The less good news was that there were rarely any jokes that sent the audience into fits of uncontrollable, belly-aching laughter for any sustained length of time, which remains in my book the definitive mark of a truly great comedy show. It was all too common throughout the night for the audience to respond to a particular joke with a quick burst of laughter, only for it to end abruptly, with several seconds of awkward silence descending on the room immediately afterward, as though the performer had expected the laughter to last much longer than it did. Part of this could be attributed to the twenty- and thirty-something performers not judging their audience as well as they could have done. Halligan’s casual and overly-vulgar references to gay sex acts – as well as somehow managing to equate the mining industry with pornography – didn’t exactly send the mostly-older crowd into hysterics. Likewise, Abbott’s segment on Facebook and the Kony campaign went right over their heads.

The lack of political balance among the line-up was another issue. All five acts leaned rather noticeably toward the Left, and as the evening progressed a clear bias developed against Tony Abbott and the Liberals. Admittedly, asking a comedian to resist the temptation to go to town on Abbott is like asking a bull not to charge at a red rag, and to be fair neither Gillard nor Rudd escaped the evening completely unscathed either. Nevertheless, there’s no doubt that a greater Right presence among the line-up would have brought more political and comic diversity to the show.

Perhaps the best way to resolve some of these issues would have been to let the comedians loose on the audience as a group rather than one-by-one. I couldn’t help thinking throughout the show, ‘God, this would have worked so much better as a panel.’ Let’s face it: if Channel 10 has taught us anything, it’s that political humour can work well in free-for-all situations, with programs like The Panel, Good News Week and The Project providing key examples. Lining up all the comedians of Political Smack-Down! on a bench and letting them bounce off each other for two hours could have taken the comedy to another level. All five commentators certainly seemed intelligent and spontaneous enough for that kind of improvisational humour. But sadly, it was not to be.

So is the show still worth seeing? If you like political humour, I would say yes. It’s by no means a bad show. It’s even a good show, which achieves its stated aim of providing a night of ‘comedy with brains.’ The only problem is that the show it COULD have been is so much better than the show it currently is. If Brooks is planning to bring it back next year, he may want to take that into account.

Stepping into the world of The Boy James is a strange experience, to say the least. Describing it is somewhat difficult; the plot is far from straightforward, and the characters are more metaphors than actual people. The subject of having to say goodbye to one’s ‘inner child,’ however, is expressed all too clearly – sometimes painfully so – and provides a theme which ties the entire sixty-minute performance together.

The audience is greeted at the door by The Boy James (Jethro Compton) with a shy, Cockney-accented “It’s all right. Come on in.” The audience files into a nineteenth-century drawing-room, complete with piano, writing-desk and drapes hanging from the walls and ceiling. Armchairs and sofas line the sides of the room, and everyone is told to “sit just where you like.” So begins the interactive component of the evening, which includes making friends with the person next to you, an all-audience game of Wink Murder, and everyone putting their hands over their eyes, blowing a raspberry in the ear of the person on their left, and telling them to ‘pass it on.’

While this last activity is going on, the adult James (Dominic Allen) walks into the room, stares stonily around at everyone, and tells them that ‘none of you ought to be here’ before he walks out again. After this, the audience is treated to a lengthy monologue by The Boy James about all the adventures he and adult James have had with simply the power of their imaginations. Before long, however, the audience is also visited by The Girl (Serena Manteghi), a deceptively-innocent adolescent in a white nightgown, whose corrupting influence becomes immediately apparent as she tries to pressure the hopelessly chaste Boy James into drinking, vandalism, swearing and sex. At which point the show, needless to say, takes a decidedly darker turn.

The production is supposedly inspired by the life of Peter Pan author JM Barrie, although most people would never know it based on the performance alone. Parallels with Pan itself can be seen, however, with The Boy James as the titular character who never wants to grow up, and The Girl as some kind of warped Wendy who represents the darker side of adulthood. The lack of any positive personifications of adulthood to counterbalance The Girl could be seen as something of a bias in the show’s perspective on growing up.

There is certainly a lot to admire about individual components of the show, however. Compton displays remarkable control over his voice, movements and facial expressions, which exude childlike innocence to a T; his seamless performance is more than enough to carry the show. The set design displays extraordinary attention to detail; the room contains everything from a writing desk to a piano, with antique chandeliers inserted in the drapes on the ceiling. It’s rather like sitting in one large, elaborate, nineteenth-century bedsheet fort. This, of course, was probably the designer’s intention in the first place.

The real sticking-point is the script. If you’re not a fan of surrealist theatre, then odds are you’re probably going to struggle to keep up with the action. The general thrust of the play should be obvious enough for most people – man has an inner child, man struggles to deal with inner child as he grows up, man’s inner child is destroyed by the pressures of adulthood, et cetera. Some of the more technical aspects of the writing, however, may prove frustrating for people accustomed to a more traditional, succinct approach to storytelling. Characters which aren’t fleshed-out human beings as much as they are symbols of different facets of the human psyche; rambling monologues by The Boy James about various ‘adventures’ he’s been on; and a general lack of clarification about where, when, why and how any of this is happening are just some of the potential stumbling blocks for audience members.

That said, if you’re able to turn off the technical side of your brain, let the more enigmatic moments wash over you and simply immerse yourself in the show, then you may find an emotionally rewarding experience awaiting you. We all have to grow up sometime, but just for one night, The Boy James may make you wish you never had.

The name really says it all. Faulty Towers: The Dining Experience is just that: the live show of classic British sitcom Fawlty Towers (the spelling having been changed for obvious copyright reasons) where the audience is treated to dinner and a show, courtesy of Basil and Sybil Fawlty (Kevin Whittle and Karen Hamilton) and hapless Spanish waiter Manuel (Andy Foreman.)

The show takes place at Aces Bar & Bistro in the Central Market where, upon arrival, audience members are seated individually (and rather haphazardly) by Basil and Manuel. The three actors then launch into a two-hour show which incorporates all the barely-controlled chaos that only Fawlty Towers (or Faulty Towers) can provide. Never fear, though: the food arrives on time and (despite what the cast might imply) is completely free of anything unpleasant which might have ended up in the meals on the original TV series.

The show is presented by Interactive Theatre International, a company which prides itself on productions which incorporate as much audience participation as possible. Strict re-enactments of scenes from the original aren’t on the menu here, although the actors do pay homage to it with a running storyline where Manuel places $50 on a horse while Basil (unsuccessfully) attempts to keep the whole business a secret from Sybil. Rather, the three actors stay firmly in character for the entire performance and rely on improvisation and audience interaction to provide the bulk of the comedy.

While it certainly helps to be a die-hard fan of the TV series, it’s not necessary to have seen every single episode of it in order to enjoy yourself. Various elements of the stage show draw on aspects of the sitcom; catchphrases like Sybil’s bark of “Basil!” and Manuel’s famous “I know nothing” both drew cheers of recognition from the audience. However, you don’t need to be familiar with the intricacies of the BBC original to get a kick out of Manuel’s ability to misinterpret every single one of Basil’s instructions, nor to laugh at Basil’s seething contempt for – and crushing fear of – “mein Fuhrer” Sybil. “She breathes fire, you know,” he remarked conversationally to me at one point in the evening (after Sybil was well out of earshot.)

The acting is impossible to fault. Whittle, Hamilton and Foreman provide spot-on impersonations of Basil, Sybil and Manuel, from the costumes and voices right down to individual mannerisms. Whittle in particular has John Cleese’s wild, flapping hand gestures down to a fine art. It’s perhaps notable that Hamilton’s Sybil – who fawns over the guests exactly as Prunella Scales’ original did – has an underlying snarkiness that Scales’ portrayal didn’t have. Upon noting a large butter stain on my napkin as she tucked it into my shirt, she commented “that’s probably why she dresses you in black, dear,” referring to my all-dark clothes that night. It’s one-on-one character interactions like these with audience members which make this show such a unique experience.

The production isn’t perfect, of course. The lulls in the scripted routines while meals are served drag on too long (especially if you’re a fast eater like me) and at these points the evening becomes little more than your average meal out. While the cast continue to engage sporadically with audience members during these times, it’s difficult to remain entertained by these interactions unless one of them happens right at your table. Fans of Polly the chambermaid will also be disappointed by her character’s absence from the entire show, perhaps out of fear that her relative voice of reason could have watered down the chaos provided by the other three characters.

But all in all, the show is a masterful tribute to one of the greatest comedies ever made. Anyone with even a passing interest in Fawlty Towers – or even British comedy in general – can expect to witness a thoroughly enjoyable performance. Oh, and the food’s not bad, either.