Wild Bore

Wild Bore
Sydney Festival. Carriageworks. January 24 - 28, 2018

Three female, boundary-bulldozing cabaret performers put their arses on the line with this spirited show attacking critics of their other shows.    

Zoe Coombs Marr, Ursula Martinez and Adrienne Truscott quote back these hyperbolic negativities through their three articulate arses, propped up on a table of mics as in a panel discussion – of arseholes.

It’s a masterstroke of comedy which reaches new heights when the trio, now wearing arses as heads, move to a supersized table, suck their pencils contemplatively, scratch themselves and excrete yet more crap.

While critics (to audience applause!) are demonised for their prejudices, conservatism and limited understanding, the trio do relish their extreme metaphors of outrage. Here Wild Bore begins to stagnate into repetitions and lost opportunities, before moving to newer territory with the feminist assertion that critics just don’t get women.

In an hilarious image, Coombs Marr resorts to other channels by haranguing us as a penis projecting from Truscott on stilts.  Responding to another critic crying out for more ‘personal truth’, Martinez brilliantly bores us silly with a story of her visit that day to the local IGA. 

And quick posturing vignettes by the trio, finally stripped naked, is also witty, once your quest for meaning is abandoned.

A surprise final newcomer, British trans performer Krishna Istha, wonderfully sabotages this pageant of white-women self-pity, with an acerbic monologue brimming with yet newer PC agendas.  Good luck to critics through those minefields.  

Martin Portus

Photographer: Tim Grey.

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