The Adelaide Fringe Festival has returned to my City for 2017 and it's a great time to be around such vibrancy and good nature which this renowned festival instills in the community. Of the many Adelaide Fringe shows I've been looking forward to this year, the chance to see Alice Fraser on stage again, was at the top of my list.
I wrote about Alice last year, having caught her 2016 show "The Resistance" and become a regular listener of her podcast "Tea With Alice". Alice is at once an engaging personality who thinks deeply across a wide range of subjects and she quick witted - both in conversation and in the art of constructing a narrative replete with guerrilla comedic observations. As a performer therefore, Alice Fraser ticks all the boxes that one should tick in deciding who to see.
So, fresh from her run with the critically acclaimed "The Resistance" which she toured extensively throughout 2016, Alice Fraser has returned to this year's Fringe with her new one woman show "Empire".
Described as a reliably silly, unpredictably meaningful, narratively unorthodox, artful comedy show, Alice takes the stage with a more theatrical presence this time around. She proceeds to take her audience on a hour long journey through a frenetic and eclectic thought landscape where notions of traditional comedy are challenged by whimsical story telling, biting satire and heart warming, life affirming observations.
The subject matter Alice has chosen for "Empire" offers equal measure of comedy but, as she did with The Resistance, Alice has infused her narrative with moments of poignant insight that stop you short. They invite you to see facets of humanity in a way that you may not have considered before.
Audiences are sometimes brought into the fold to participate in a way that involves everyone in her performance. While it is at once hilarious to witness, Alice's way lends an intimacy that uplifts and that is rare for performance story telling of this kind.
As I left the venue, I witnessed the smiles of the audience and the babble of their conversation as they dissected the show and the meanings in it and I'm sure that those conversations went on long afterwards. It takes a considerable talent to achieve something so thought provoking.
Alice Fraser will be performing "Empire" at The Producer's Hotel throughout the Fringe until March 12th before taking it on the road to Melbourne, then Sydney, then Europe thereafter.
Book your tickets for Alice Fraser's "Empire" in Adelaide here.
Book your tickets for "Empire" in Melbourne here.
Book your tickets for "Empire" in Sydney here.
Visit Alice Fraser here.
Tweet with Alice Fraser here.
DFA.
Melbourne based comedian Alice Fraser first came to my attention in 2015 when she featured on Wil Anderson's Wilosophy podcast. Over the course of a couple of hours Wil and Alice explored her life growing up in a Buddhist household in Sydney and how the influence of her paternal Jewish and maternal Catholic family informed and shaped her as-yet-to-be-fully-explored philosophy on life and how she fits into it. I was immediately taken by how Alice recalled the important people in her life, not the least of which was her grandmother - a Holocaust survivor - and I was equally moved by her experience of growing up with a chronically ill mother (who had M.S. and later cancer) and how her family had journeyed through that experience.
Alice's appearance on Wilosophy lead me in the direction of her own podcast, "Tea With Alice", a weekly conversational in which Alice interviews her contemporaries, often in relaxed settings - be it her Melbourne flat, or a local cafe or even a back garden - the centerpiece of which is a nice cup of tea, of their own choosing. Each episode is a conversation about life and where each guest is in it. Sometimes comedic, often reflective and always satisfying, I always come away from an episode feeling as though I have learned something. Additionally, I find myself shedding previous orthodoxies of thought around beliefs and opinions I have held and I see things from different perspectives.
That, to me is a powerful thing.
Last night, I got to spend an hour watching Alice Fraser perform her new show "The Resistance" for the Adelaide Fringe. Going into the show, I had a little bit of an idea of what to expect from the conversations Alice has had around her comedy on her podcast but I didn't seek out her previous material because I wanted to watch her show with a fresh set of eyes.
The Resistance starts subtly, with a warm introduction that brings the audience into her sphere and encourages them to be a participant rather than an observer. Alice regaled the audience with song either played on a stubby little electric piano or strummed deftly on a banjo. And then Alice dropped an observation about the association between comedy and tragedy. It was a subtle one but it intrigued me.
Over the course of the first half of the show, Alice took us on a conversational walk through her growing up in Sydney. It centered around her Jewish grandmother - an apparently wonderful and horrible woman who owned a block of flats in Sydney and who referred to a group of locals with varying degrees of derision and affection. Alice recalls one instance where a group of gays found themselves homeless after a fire burnt their house down. Her grandmother observed that the faggots were now homeless, but I must make them a lasagna! She apparently proceeded to house them until they were able to get back on their feet.
Alice then recalls three key characters from the block of flats, a bi-polar Chilean gardener, an illiterate Hungarian woman who always wore a head scarf and twenty dresses and an Indian woman who donned luxurious, brightly colored dresses and espoused the need to make oneself attractive to men - but who always wore a veil to hide her face. How her grandmother and these three figures informed Alice's childhood and adolescence is hilariously sweet and breathtakingly inappropriate all at the same time and there wasn't a moment in that first half where the audience wasn't laughing or chuckling or appreciating the irony of these characters.
And then the show took a turn.
I'm unsure as to how much I should reveal here so, in respect to Alice, I'll keep it brief. The turn that came punched me in the gut.
Alice's grandmother. The Chilean gardener. The illiterate Hungarian woman. The Indian woman. All of them came to circle in each others orbit through circumstances that are achingly powerful and emotionally bitter sweet. All of them had resisted in some way and it is this Resistance that salvaged them from particularly dark experiences in their lives. At one point, you could have heard a pin drop from the audience as Alice Fraser revealed to us all the powerful notion that the link between comedy and tragedy is such a small one - and indeed, even within tragedy, there lies comedy. And sometimes comedy is the only thing that preserves our sanity.
At the conclusion, I felt privileged to be able to meet Alice briefly and thank her for such a wonderful performance and I left the theater feeling as though I'd learnt something about being human.
See. This. Show.
Alice Fraser is an award winning writer, broadcaster, performer and comedian.
She's also an ex academic, ex-corporate ex-Lawyer and terrible banjo player (her words - not mine!).
Alice returned from her debut Edinburgh Fringe run last year with her critically acclaimed solo show Savage, which received four and five star reviews, as well as packed out audiences in Edinburgh after a run at the Sydney Comedy Store. Her weekly podcast "Tea With Alice" welcomes an eclectic group of like minds, artists, comedians and writers to discuss life over a cup of tea. Alice also contributes regularly to SBS Comedy.
Book tickets to The Resistance here.
Visit Alice Fraser here.
Tweet with Alice Fraser here.
DFA.
