Melbourne International Comedy Festival review

Vidya Rajan frames this show in terms of reincarnation, jokingly suggesting it’s some ‘cultural thing’ to lure in liberals guilty about comedy’s race and gender imbalance. In fact, it’s just a neat MacGuffin to allow her to respawn as various silly characters, such as a worm, a ‘mouse uncle at a wedding’ or ‘identity crisis wolf’.

The guise she most often adopts, though, is stand-up comedian – what sins must she have committed in her previous life for this to be her fate? – regaling the audience with half-surreal, half-true stories. This means the tone is uneven, as is the quality, but the hour is not short of funny slices of life and memorably oddball moments.

She is far from being the only comedian to have spent her lockdown in her childhood bedroom, but her take on being a disappointment to her parents is an original one, as she imagines her mother comparing her to the daughter she never had – an inanimate household object.

Elsewhere she takes amusing swipes at thoroughly undeserving targets such as Malala Yousafzai. ‘I’m not judging the Dalai Lama,’ she says at one point… before, of course, doing precisely that. 

Rajan has a witty euphemism for climate change and runs through the horoscopes of the future when its effects are harshly felt. She also has the Nanette-like serious point 45 minutes in, but - as is becoming the trend - self-consciously draws mocking attention to it.

Not that this show ever gets too thoughtful. After all, she does deliver it all into a banana in the place of the microphone, and never draws attention to the absurdity. And the show’s payoff is very silly indeed.

Rajan has, perhaps, been overambitious trying to meld different approaches and angles into a debut show when she’s not yet totally in command of her performance to nail the complexity. But better that than playing things too safe, and there are plenty of original, offbeat ideas at play here.

Review date: 24 Apr 2022
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett