Melbourne International Comedy Festival review by Steve Bennett

There’s almost no making sense of the erratic outpourings of Sam Simmons’s ludicrous brain, so tenuous is his grasp on reality. However in Death Of A Sails-Man, he has come up with the perfect excuse for his surreal thoughts, since his character is lost at sea, and the heat, solitude, dehydration and starvation are playing havoc with his fragile mental state.

Thus he hallucinates conversations with coconuts, argues with his subconscious, plunges into a fantastical undersea world and messily devours the random apparently inedible contents of his bum-bag – all in the context of a man losing his mind.

That man is Todd Blankett-Child, a thrusting big shot in the world of museli bars and part-time corporate poet, who finds himself Adrift after a windsurfing excursion goes wrong, hence the beautiful pun of the title.

As madness creeps – or rather barges – in, Simmons’s ‘character’ (well, he is wearing a wig) has an existential debate with the voices in his head, played out on backing track, that takes us from patently ridiculous discussions about fantasy dinner-party guests to the dark subjects of cannibalism and depraved sexual urges. Sea creatures and other strange objects frequently swirl around him, depicted in high-tech cardboard cutouts, operated by henpecked stagehand Jennifer Wong. A possible lifeline comes from the Vodafone salesman, cold-calling about his account, while he tries to find inner fortitude from his hero, Vin Diesel.

This is all pulled off with an admirable audacity and unshakable commitment to the joke that’s seemingly at odds with the budgetary constrains and manically slipshod performance, often racing against the timing imposed by the pre-recorded sections. Once the juggernaut is in motion, which comes after an apparently genuine false start tonight, it can’t be stopped.

The pace needs to be relentless as there’s a lot going on here, from songs including a neat David Bowie parody, poems, physical shenanigans, wordplay, while the style lurches from the enjoyably quirky to the disconcerting to the hilarious to the brutal. He probably does launch the C-torpedo as a blunt punchline just a little too often, but then there are moments of pathos, too.

Part of the joke is that, whatever the audience might think, Simmons doesn’t believe all this nonsense is particularly weird at all, not by his standards, and he has a nice dynamic with the crowd urging, nay berating, them to get on board. His fast-paced scattergun approach certainly requires some commitment, and although it can be hard to stay with him through some of the more self-indulgent episodes, he has most of the room on side by the end.

Even if the waters of this particular show are sometimes choppy, props are certainly due to an original comic for his uncompromising adherence to his own path.

Review date: 3 Apr 2014
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Melbourne International Comedy Festival