While I’m Away
Telia Nevile
25 September 2009
Fringe Hub, Lithuanian Club
Telia Nevile continues to bring something unusual, intimate and unexpectedly delightful to the Fringe. This year she is working solo, with a slide show, in the While I’m Away.
As the Poet Laureate of the wonderful Last Tuesday Society, Telia has spent recent months re-introducing us to poetry. As we learn in primary school English: poems rhyme, use metaphors, create images and reveal the heart and soul of the lovelorn poet (because it’s not possible to be a poet and not be seeking, pining for, or have recently lost our favourite emotion).
With the heart and fashion sense of a Beatnik and the soul of her nanna, Telia the poet is awkward in herself, but confident of her poems. She doesn’t care when her rhymes trip over the beat or her metre runs amok, because it’s all about taking us on a tour bus that travels her life-long quest for love, be it her teenage longings in ‘Blue Light Disco/Green Light Love’ or her mild erotic fantasies involving bitterly cold ski slopes.
Telia’s world is subtle and delicate, filled with intricate details that create a complex and intelligent world that supports the naïve hope of her character and spills into the hearts of her audience creating the kind of laughter that tickles your heart and feels as good as a cup of tea and a homemade lamington.
As seems to afflict many first night performers, Telia also needs to trust that her character is adorable enough to sustain the show, because glimpses of the artist behind the character take too long to recover from
While I’m Away is only here for a week, so there’s not many tours left. As it’s less than an hour, it’s a perfect accompaniment to anything else you are seeing at the North Melbourne Fringe hub. (And stay in the same venue to see Welcome to the Jungle directly after.)
More 2009 Fringe reviews.
This review originally appeared on AussieTheatre.com.
Photo by Jon Arnold
