★★★★★
Adelaide Fringe. The Coconuts. The Bally @ Gluttony. 8 Mar 2023
Languidly relaxed, Leela and Shaban are The Coconuts. They are so at ease on their tiny stage in a very tiny venue offering a comedy gig based on their Fijian/Indian/Lebanese identities. Brown.
If you’re going to get close and intimate with very touchy feely issues looking for humorous introspection and laughter, you better hope you have some kind of magic audience bonding spell happening. Leela and Shabana have totally got that.
They’re a comedy band. Three guitars and one small soft toy guitar. Caveat: A band with a near, yet restrained, vicious punk mouth belying expressed honey-soothing 60s-70s folk/pop rhyming lyrics and harmony.
The audience is hooked completely. Darkly funny, open observations of what it’s like being brown in a white world wash over with ease. You adore the presentation; the message sinks in because of that. You laugh.
Magnificent trap that is.
Taken to the heart, Leela and Shabana can get away with anything, and they do. With a warm intelligence to their humour, despite its rather savage and salacious bite, they delivered delightfully unforeseen comic outcomes on the night of this performance.
They turn the very racist notion of being a coconut and curry muncher inside out completely. They reframe, to hilariously tremendous effect, the stupidity of what equals a white to brown cultural identity graph in a brilliant piece of image projection. Donald Trump’s tan anybody?
They expose themselves for the inner ‘whiteness’ and cultural hangovers from Abrahamic/Judeo Christianity. They bend the white, brown, Indian nexus every way they can with deft comedic effect.
There’s a lot more besides that. It’s a bit R rated.
The Coconuts managed to make a small venue feel so much larger. They managed to embrace an audience in a discourse of difficulty with an articulated intimacy of spirit only finely crafted comedy can do. It’s a cliché I know. Don’t miss it.
David O’Brien
When: 7 to 19 Mar
Where: Gluttony – The Bally
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
