Melbourne International Comedy Festival review

Hot Department’s After Party comes on like a drunken flirt – sexy, sloppy, in-your-face and madly unpredictable. Big on energy but low on clothing, Honor Wolff and Patrick Durnan Silva serve up a wild, silly cocktail of inventive, in-your-face sketches with a high-octane ‘let’s get this party started!’ vibe. 

Yet there’s also depth to their hot-mess personas, a feeling they are concealing insecurities with a giddy hedonism. ‘Like a cabaret show... but on acid,’ is a cliché, but these two make it true. Not just ‘a little bit surreal’ true, but ‘pounding panic attacks and disturbing hallucinations of a killer clown’ true.

However, any awkward or bleak thoughts are quickly drowned out – most times, at least – by another club banger heralding the start of the next brash sketch. There’s some impeccable character work in some of these, such as the rundown of the kind of people you meet at parties – an all-too identifiable menagerie of oddballs that brilliantly sets out their stall.

You’ll be hard-pressed to take your eyes off their irresistibly forceful performances, with a real sizzle between them that wobbles intriguingly between the sexy and the disturbing. Yet there’s inventively funny content behind the twisted burlesque, too.

Or at least for the most part. As their attention turns to the business of entertainment in the final third, eccentric parodies of bad improv, bad stand-up and a bad jazz bar – built around deliberately lame surrealism – all prove over-long.

But that detracts only slightly from the unmistakable thrill of watching two such exciting performers, filled with a well-earned confidence and a reckless willingness to take risks with the artform. A cult following is assured.

• Hot Department: After Party is on at the Victoria Hotel at 11pm on April 21, 22 and 23 and 10pm on the 24th

Review date: 18 Apr 2022
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett