Melbourne International Comedy Festival review by Steve Bennett

This is the tale of Clem Bastow’s two years spent in Los Angeles, trying and failing to make it as a scriptwriter. But judging from this confused, uncompelling yarn, Hollywood has not lost out on one of the great storytellers.

Even that classic actor’s question: ‘What’s my motivation?’ isn’t covered here, as it’s not immediately clear why she felt working on her magnum opus in the Starbucks at Hollywood & Vine would be any better than working in her local coffee shop in Melbourne.

She doesn’t seem to have picked up many good stories from her time in Tinseltown, either. She tells us of the stupid questions on the US visa waiver forms; that she smoked dope; that she was scared of earthquakes and that she once saw Ryan Gosling in a bar. That’s the whole story.

In the final reel of the show, some point emerges as she explains how her lack of success as a screenwriter and being away from home took its toll on her mental health and led to her Hearing Voices in her yoga classes. At least this section is supposed to be discomforting – but the route leading up to it is jumbled, and none-too interesting.

Barstow tells her tale dressed in an Dorothy costume, but more bafflingly accompanied recorded sound effects punctuating almost ever paragraph.

KER-THWACK!

ZING!

DINGLE-DINGLE-DINGLE-DINGLE-WHOOSH!

Apart from making the narrative sound like a 1960s Batman serial, these effects, mixed in live by DJ Slig, is the aural equivalent of slapping a dozen exclamation marks on the end of a sentence to emphasise an unfunny joke!!!!!!!!!!!

Mind you, perhaps she feels she needs to bring her laugh track, since what she thinks are gags fall on stony ground. Just as one of many examples he tells us at one point she’d decided to become a carefree white girl, then pauses a beat too long. ‘I guess from the lack of laughs that not many of you are on Tumblr,’ she says, bafflingly. It seems not to have occurred to her that he phrase ‘carefree white girl’ on its own doesn’t count as a joke. Sadly, there’s precious little here that does.

Review date: 17 Apr 2015
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Melbourne International Comedy Festival