Review by Steve Bennett

He takes on every role, from the god-bothering tennis has-been to the nine-year-old boy documenting life at the club on his video camera, all with subtle brilliance. Without the aid of exaggerated accents, wigs or costumes, Callinan skilfully evokes the full cast, all with their distinctive foibles.

There’s the night’s MC a brash, opinionated blokes’ bloke, who starts chatting at the audience and handing out raffle tickets before the night’s entertainment ever begins. He’s not a million miles from Britain’s own Pub Landlord, Al Murray, so you don’t need to know anything of rural Aussie towns or sport to know the type. That’s true of every delicately larger-than-life creation Callinan conjures up, whether it be the ex-Aussie rules player with intellectual pretensions, the local historian chronicling the past of Bodgie Creek (population 4,333) to the reluctant can-throwing audience, or the over-earnest spoken-word artist mistakenly booked in place of a rowdy comedian.

It soon becomes obvious that the footy team is in danger of being expelled from the league, following a particularly violent on-pitch melee; an incident which is never fully described but teasingly referred to indirectly. Their new coach intends to introduce an increasingly unlikely range of New Age practices to help quell the squad’s vicious tendencies.

If there’s one criticism of the show, it’s a repetitive reliance on contrasting the knuckle-headed stereotype of your typical AFL player with ideas of high culture or namby-pamby spiritualism. The joke is sustained through footy tours that take in the opera and Europe’s artistic highspots as well as the players’ controlling their anger, but it is overused.

However, the script is never short of gags, and Callinan’s peripheral characters provide plenty of interest and a rich vein of witty lines. His exaggerated spoken word guy, for instance, is worthy of Simon Munnery, and there isn’t much higher praise than that.

This isn’t a brand new show for this year’s festival, but a reprise of one of Callinan’s earlier shows – and it’s easy to see why it’s worth dusting down. It’s a tour de force of character comedy, painting a vivid, affectionate picture of small-town life, and boasts plenty of strong jokes to match the nuanced performance.

Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Melbourne, April 2007

Review date: 1 Jan 2007
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett