Getting Out in Front of It

Nikki Britton jumps onto the stage with a few high kicks.  She’s all exuberant, high energy, a noisy, in-your-face middle-aged woman.  Perfectly happy with no kids.  She’s been held down and bottled up.  Now she bursts free, just so delighted to be back on stage, back in front of an audience after a two-year absence from Melbourne’s Comedy Festival. 

Indeed, that lockdown hiatus is Nikki Britton’s subject.  She’s an expert at telling stories – against herself but – please note – without apology or self-pity – or delicacy, as it happens.  If ever there was a woman who bounces back from a set-back or even a catastrophe – and gets a gag out of it – it’s Nikki Britton.

So in her non-stop, breathless routine she covers some of the things she did (and some she missed) to counteract loneliness and a debilitating lack of oxytocin.  Oxytocin and serotonin are essential.  You can die without them.  They’re released in the body by exercise, or diet, or touch.  Touch might be best.  And if you can’t get someone else to touch you, Nikki tells us, you can always touch yourself…  Those two hormones are what Nikki desperately needs to be ‘happy’ and counter stress.  How about cost of living stress: when one piece of cake in a café costs $18, what can you do?  Go home, get some cake mix and then… eat a whole cake… youself.

She gets onto on-line dating sites, maybe to find a bloke to share her bubble, specifying an age range of 35 - 45 – but finds that aspiring lonely hearts all lie: they all claim to be thirty-five.  She shows us (rather cruel) photographs to prove it. 

Having seen Nikki’s two previous shows, we know she’s, well, frank, never one to shy away from her sexual needs - what some folks might think was ‘over-sharing’ or vulgarity or that old concept, just ‘bad taste’ – and draw gasps from the audience.  When she gets those gasps, her response is always an innocent, ‘What? That’s life, isn’t it?’

This is a woman who waxes rhapsodic about being fingered by mature tradies’ gnarly hands…  But in this show, blocked in pursuit of human connection, needing to touch and be touched, she thinks of getting a pet – another way to restore oxytocin.  We see more photos.  But Nikki didn’t count on all the ‘suitability’ hoops she’d have to jump through, forms she’d have to fill in, the trial walks she’d have to go on…   

Possibly one of the best routines in the show is Nikki’s portrayal of an on-line ‘wellness’ and ‘mindfulness’ advisor, a beautiful woman in white linen, who speaks in an exalted whisper, as if – as Nikki puts it – she’s on the brink of an orgasm with every sentence.  The advice, of course, is nothing much but the blindingly obvious.

The lockdowns are an irresistible subject for many comedians this year.  It’s hardly surprising: what was there to do during those times apart from thinking up routines?  That is, if you could overcome the loneliness, desperation, depression and suicide ideation – and turn them into jokes.  That’s just what Nikki does in this show: she gets out in front of it - as the title of her show has it – and she triumphs. 

Michael Brindley

BUY TICKETS HERE.