Melbourne International Comedy Festival review

Getting a boat – which she could barely drive – is not the highlight of Geraldine Hickey’s year, nor even this show. Nonetheless, it kicks off another hour of mellow comic storytelling, which sneakily envelopes audiences in a snug cocoon of shared experience, ensuring everyone leaves the auditorium with a smile on their face and warmth in their heart.

No doubt it was the same emotions that earned her the big award at last year’s comedy festival – when such a simpatico approach chimed strongly with a city feeling battered and isolated by draconian lockdowns. Covid measures also form the backdrop of her follow-up, from the freedom of the titular boat being the antithesis of stay-at-home orders, to the troubles travelling interstate that compelled her to find her own adventures in Tasmania and Western Australia as her fiancée battled on the front line in Melbourne.

Crucially to this show, her escapades included sea kayaking with a friend, which did not go at all to plan, and the bucket-list expedition to swim with whale sharks, via some dolphin-feeding. This is a woman who loves the ocean.

Calmly regaling us with her apparently straightforward anecdotes, she describes the mundane and the dramatic with equal lack of urgency, slowly building to self-effacing jokes about her misadventures that elicit a trickle of gentle but genuine laughs building toward each emotionally rewarding payoff. Yet while all may appear calm on the surface, there’s a strong undertow that pulls you inexorably and imperceptibly ever-closer to her.

Hickey has an appealing, authentic vulnerability which she laughs off with the irreverent spirit of someone who’s accepted life’s ebbs and flows and decided that  easy-going good humour is the best response. She makes repeated use of the rhetorical device of asking herself questions which she immediately answers, which reflects how she knows what the audience is thinking.

She builds up a winning picture of how she realised her long-held dream, as well as depicting her affectionate relationship with her partner and indeed the wider world. By sleight of storytelling, she gets you on board without you even knowing, until you are swept up in the simple sweetness of her visual climax.

Other shows might have bigger laughs but, paradoxically, few will make you feel quite so happy.

 • Geraldine Hickey: Now I've Got A Boat is on at Arts Centre Melbourne at 6pm until April 24 (5pm Sundays, no show Monday)

Review date: 12 Apr 2022
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Melbourne International Comedy Festival