Garbage Monster
Alice Tovey
Hot Mess Productions and The Butterfly Club
18 April 2019
The Butterfly Club
to 21 April
comedyfestival.com.au
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| Alice Tovey |
One day, singer and feminist super hero Alice Tovey and her music director feminist super hero Ned Dixon will have to move to huge theatres. But this weekend they are still in the kitsch heaven of The Butterfly Club where you can see the stage and have a cocktail.
Garbage Monster is about what we don't put in the bin, what we keep next to the bin, what we recycle and what we leave festering at the bottom because we don't use plastic bin bags to get the slimy gross stuff out of our lives.
Alice begins her bin dive with an outfit made from bright-orange plastic temporary safety-fencing, but this is far from a safe show.
First to be dropped are some of those celebrities – mostly men, but this is a genuinely equal show – whose repulsive behaviour and ideas have ruined some of our favourite films and tv shows*. IN THE BIN they go.
Then she makes room for the people who think they know her and somehow think that their opinion of her matters. They may STFU and get IN THE BIN as Alice sings about the "lies" women tell and how, maybe, performers really do perform on stage.
But that's just the beginning. It's easy to dump people we don't know. It's harder to squish down the rubbish and make room for people we know, even if they treat us like they found us in a bin. We all know someone who has stayed in a damaging relationship. Alice has. I have. And we're certainly not the only ones. Getting them in the bin is the first step. Then comes the work or keeping them in there and making sure that bin goes out on bin night.
And that's before we rubbish ourselves. We may claim to be totally ok with our bodies but still spend far too much of our time trying to change things that will never change and wearing a '"shame bra" that's too far too tight. It really feels great to stop apologising for everything, wear comfy underwear and know that there's room in the bin for anything that belongs there.
Alice has a voice that should echo in the souls of anyone who rubbish others. And Garbage Monster's mix of theme, personal story and zeitgeist anger is the perfect mix to make the kind of compost that's guaranteed to turn shit into stuff that makes everything thrive.
*And theatre. The famous actor isn't alone in the bin.
