2004

Kit and The Widow
Banquet Room

Peter Berner ‘Live’
Dunstan Playhouse

Greg Fleet
Radioville : Population 1
Dunstan Playhouse

Murray Bramwell

I can understand why baritone Kit Hesketh-Harvey is Kit, but why is pianist Richard Sisson the Widow ? These and other questions are not answered in the duo’s song and satire show but with its sleek, fast-paced tux-and-tails camp, you don’t even think to ask. No cow is too sacred, no area too no-go for these purveyors of delectable derision. We get the Cuban treatment with Guantanamo Bay, where the rules are so last week, while for Presidents Blair and Bush, the ‘truth’ goes marching on.

Percy Grainger gets a lashing in his English country garden and Edith Piaf some gallic sauce – they are soft targets perhaps, but the dash of their lyrics and the virtuosity of rhyme is often startling. Gays in the clergy receive some back-handed support with a scathing musical setting of the wisdom of Leviticus, then it is back to cooking with Nighella and her bon appe-tits.

Kit and the Widow are smutty and smart, topical and very tight. Sex toys, laptops, Joan Rivers’ plastic surgery are all fair game, as is The Leopard, a straight song about Hesketh-Harvey’s native Malawi. And, after eviscerating Steve Irwin with new lyrics to I Will Survive, Wit and the Kiddo have us community singing a curry house menu to a chorus from Turandot. It is one crowded hour.

The Cabaret Festival has programmed a range of Australian stand-ups from the Fringe circuit. Some, such as Flacco and Sandman, Mary G and Lano and Woodley are inconveniently after our deadline but familiar faces Peter Berner and Greg Fleet have paraded their rumpled wares.

I have been following Greg Fleet’s particular brand of comic confession since his Thai Die days and marvel at his willingness to accentuate the uncomfortable, His Radioville show examines another rich vein, if one may so tasteless. But Fleety’s first night is pretty ragged. The idea is great – a journey to the lower depths of commercial radio and an exploration of its verbal thuggery. However, the show rambles, the frame narrative at the Pearly Gates is wordy and some of the absurdist loops wear thin. But that’s Greg Fleet, you take the lumps with the laughs – and he does have a great voice for radio.

Peter Berner is a much more careful operator but his show is a surprise. After his TV work I expected much more party political topicality but while he deals with the general paranoia of 9/11 and the Terror, his approach is idiosyncratic and obsessionally detailed. Many comics have done airline humour – the safety warnings, the seat belt requirements and so on – but Berner macabrely and systematically does them to death. It is clever and his persona is often interestingly unsympathetic.

“Purveyors of delectable derision” The Adelaide Review No. 250, July, 2004, p.30.