Show Rating:

‘So I made my first suicide attempt at High School,’ says Australian comic Geraldine Hickey matter-of-factly towards the start of her story of self-harm, depression and detainment in a psychiatric unit. It doesn’t look like this is going to be 45 minutes of chirpy gag-driven comedy…

One Week In Paradise is by no means hilarious laugh-a-minute stand-up, but an honest, insightful tale told with dry wit and an emphasis on finding the absurd, which extreme situations like the one Hickey found herself in have a tendency to throw up.

There’s some distance now, between the bleak events of her youth and her standing in an Edinburgh pub basement telling them, which allows the audience to be comfortable laughing. And since she first performed the show in Melbourne three years ago, she, too, has grown comfortable in recalling those events.

She tells her tale with low-key warmth and a disarmingly casual approach to the potentially bleak subject matter. The monologue is punctuated with the occasional distraction - a sock puppet, card trick or attempt to recreate the Commonwealth Games on a micro scale – but it stands on her ability to hold the room with the story alone, which she undoubtedly does.

Laughs, when they come, are often at the expense of her fellow patients’ foibles – it that’s not too euphemistic a word for mental illness. There is a touch of chuckling at the unfortunates, here, but laughter is an instinctive response to such awkward situations, and Hickey is never mean about these people, only affectionate.

It’s not a side-splitting story, always a drawback for a show billed as comedy, but interesting, warm and well-told; and that’s satisfying enough.

Reviewed by Steve Bennett