Melbourne comedy festival review by Steve Bennett

Tessa Waters acknowledges that her role is to be the ‘biggest dickhead in the room’, and joyously embraces that task with her daft clowning – a talent she’s apparently been working on since a child, the natural entertainer in her rural Queensland family.

It was honed at the Parisian clown school run by  Phillippe Gaulier, where – as she wittily describes –  the notoriously taciturn Frenchman branded her The Truck. It’s not a flattering sobriquet, but Waters gleefully embraces it as her clown persona. After all, sturdy thighs have been the pride of her foremothers, especially her great-grandmother Sarah Chinnery.

Hers is a remarkable story, from being the second woman in England to owning a motorbike to becoming, unusually for the time, a dentist. But she made her mark as a photographer, travelling to Papua New Guinea to document the people of the nation at the time when camera equipment came in a box the size of a small coffin. And there, volcanic activity meant she got caught up in a flight for her life worthy of the most effects-laden Hollywood blockbuster.

Waters pays a fitting tribute and brings the story to life with real drama. Whether it’s strictly a comedy anecdote is moot. It’s amusingly set up – with the help of the most dubiously inaccurate Belfast accent – but when it comes to the meat of the adventure, there is little more humorous flourish than giving the colonialist she travelled with the spirit of Rik Mayall’s Captain Flashheart.

Still, she is a natural storyteller and this incredible story of the eruption of Mount Tavurvur requires no embellishment to have impact.

Before we get to this point, the gregarious, welcoming Waters warms the room with a few silly exercises: prowling the stage to find its funniest point based on  involuntary audience titters (a routine done by Jimeoin for many years) plus a couple of interactive games, possibly drawn from her other job as a children’s entertainer, that brings out a competitive spirit in the room.

She’s previously built a whole show on such exuberant, warm-hearted playfulness, but Volcano demonstrates another string to her bow, as an evocative and compelling raconteur. 

Review date: 2 Apr 2018
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Melbourne International Comedy Festival