Adelaide Fringe. Radio Adelaide. 5 Mar 2014
What a great idea. A radio show which is a theatre piece about a radio show. Or a theatre piece which is a radio show about a radio show. All of it presented inside a radio studio.
This is Zoe McDonald's offering for Fringe 2014.
Zoe, who bears a passing resemblance to Ellen DeGeneres, is a performance artist who specialises in character cameos.
In the guise of a volunteer safety warden, she greets and counts up her audience on arrival in the Radio Adelaide foyer, tagging everyone with large white stickers bearing either their name or a name of their choice. I was "Sunny" for the night; my partner was "Nevermind". I noted "Crispy" and "Fearful" among others.
As they file into the dark little studio, each audience member is equipped with headphones which they are asked to don as McDonald opens the show. Therein we meet a perky British anchor, a tough tattoo artist, a vagazzling beauty shop owner, and a South African feminist, among others. They adorn the Zoe McDonald radio show which starts with studio and phone interviews each of which showcases McDonald's alacrity at jumping from character to character and accent to accent. She does very good accent, her British absolutely hitting the spot and her South African being so gloriously clipped it could be a parody were it not so precisely so. While the vocals are highly skilled, the story line is decidedly dodgy. There's a fair bit of Lesbian innuendo, there is a hidden-behind-the-desk scene of Zoe suffering a "lady garden" waxing by her guerrilla beautician.
The strength of the script lies in the play on acronyms. Social media has evolved an obfuscatory and absurd lingo and, as McDonald demonstrates, it is language on the go. Hence, one can go past FOMO and LOL and L8R, through PLMK (Please Let Me Know) to OOMF (One Of My Friends) and YOLO (You Only Live Once) through to whatever wild extension suits the moment. She gives this subject a pithy workover.
The radio interview evolves into a strange little ‘This Is Your Life’ with Zoe's friends keen to spill the beans on her. The tattoo artist says she is outside the studio trying to come in. It is all too much for Zoe and she would seem, at last, to prefer MO to FOMO. Her escape from the studio is tragic-comic and she uses the soundproof radio studio's window exterior to very good effect as yet another performance space.
This girl is extremely talented. She is extremely likeable. There are some gems in the show. But, as an entity, it seems to craze off sideways with just a bit too much preoccupation with the pudendum and not enough with the actual idea of FOMO.
Samela Harris
When: 7 to 16 Mar
Where: Radio Adelaide
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
