Nickyboy & Queen Fee - Adelaide Fringe Review

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Sun 19 Feb 2023 - Thu 02 Mar 2023

On Saturday night, February 18, the Fringe came to the Basket Range Memorial Hall in the form of the Nickyboy and Queen Fee show. It would be safe to say that the lighting on the old stage had never been quite that shade of pinky-lavender before. It would equally be accurate to note that the frequency of the f- and dreaded c- words being uttered would have multiplied exponentially with each anecdote and punchline from the eponymous Nickyboy and the irrepressible Fiona O'Loughlin. The show began a little late and ran very late, not for of any tardiness on the part of the Basket Range Memorial Hall committee, but rather the time O'Loughlin took up in finishing any one story, given the five consecutive narratives crowding her headspace.



Nickyboy – in trademark comic black T-shirt, jeans, tousled hair and tattooed arms - made his grand entrance to the strains of the audience singing along to Neil Diamond's Sweet Caroline, right when we got to the part about 'hands … touching hands … reaching out, touching me … touching youuuu…' Looking somewhat wind-blown and world-weary, compared to the slick imagery of him in the big screen behind him, he launched into his set, which detailed the three times he saved someone's life and the one time someone saved his.

Suffice it to say, the three incidences of Nickboy as lifesaver were not what you might expect of such a claim, but if laughter is the best medicine, all three are currently alive and well. Nickboy also reminisced on his Catholic upbringing in western Victoria near Ararat, with its mothers of eleven children and attendant rural comic observations on a youth attempting release from the strictures of Catholic dogma. The conservative farmer parents spawning the fourth, somewhat unexpected progeny continued to be surprised as he evolved into a young guy eminently unsuited to farming life and an enigma to his older siblings.

Nickyboy's relaxed, almost deadpan story-telling style draws the audience in as they engage with anecdotal material delivered with unruffled smoothness, and erupt at the abruptness and accuracy of the balloon-pricking punchlines. Nickyboy's set was polished and poised, with a clear build to a comic conclusion, where the tale of his own being saved had echoes for us all. The choice of Neil Diamond's classic song as a show-starter becomes apparent, as Nickyboy's set invariably connects with our own lives in the form of experiences that – if we reach out to meet him – touch us all.



In contrast, after the short interval, Fiona O'Loughlin made her entrance from below the stage, almost as if she had just turned up off the bus, in a rush to be there for the starting whistle. Frocked up in vintage pink, with blond fringe constantly flopping over her large, blue-tinted glasses, she took a full minute to articulate her first sentence, conflicted it seems over which anecdote best served as her starting piece. Her trademark grin is a kind of punctuation mark. She uses it tellingly as a comma before a punchline, or a question mark before something rhetorical or genuinely obtuse, or almost self-deprecatingly as an exclamation mark to something hilarious.

O'Loughlin is a comedian in renaissance, a recovering alcoholic finding a second coming in sobriety and in the relatively recent adult diagnosis of Attention Hyper-activity Deficit Disorder, a condition that fills her with unashamed delight, because as she puts it: 'Nothing is ever my fault.' She has come a long way from her 'Judy Garland moment', when in 2008 – more than well-lubricated - she passed out twenty minutes into a set onstage in Brisbane and woke up the next day in hospital.

Having long since come to terms with her alcoholism and more recent life setbacks, O'Loughlin now maintains a continuous comic inner monologue, where the everyday and ordinary can provide her with great amusement. This, allied to her ADHD, translates into livewire performances where she maintains up to four or five concurrent narratives, which spill one into the other continuously, while somehow she finds her way to the punchlines before each meanders off into the ether of ramblings that go nowhere. In this performance, she enlisted a lady in the front row called Antoinette to remind her where she was. In referring back to her she never got the name right once and at the end she declaimed, 'and I will never forget you, Tatiana…'

Like Nickyboy, her Catholic family life is a rich source of story-telling and she is able to emphasise the most ludicrous with salt-laden punchlines and liberal doses of both the f- and c- words. The deeper her set went the more involved the story-telling and audience engagement, the latter something that terrified her in the past. The 45-minute advertised set time came and went, then disappeared way back into the rear vision mirror. She was enjoying herself with the audience largely lapping it up. If there is any criticism of her set, it must centre on maintaining a tighter grip on her material. If she had packed as many laughs into 45 minutes as she did into about a hundred and five minutes, we all might have needed hospital to recover from battered funny bones.

But as chaotically amusing as Queen Fee was, covering many stories from her past, she saved a couple of the best lines for the end, one involving Great-Uncle Eugene on his deathbed and one involving her Grandma. The jury might be out on the veracity of the latter, but with an understanding of the humour inherent in Irish Catholic bloodlines, I will accept the former as a given:

Priest: Eugene, my son, d'ye reject the devil and all his works?

Eugene: Now Brian, I think it's a little late to be making enemies…

I am paraphrasing somewhat below:

Fiona as a young child: Grandma, I thought you said if you couldn't say anything nice about someone you shouldn't say anything at all…

Grandma: That's because he's a c***, dear…

Fiona O'Loughlin and Nickyboy should prove to be hits of the Fringe, both separately and together. See below for details.

#comedy
#festivals
#fun_things_to_do
#near_adelaide
#shows
#february
!date 19/02/2023 -- 02/03/2023
%wnadelaide