Melbourne comedy festival review by Steve Bennett

Miss Terry Pratchett? Well, you’ll probably miss him even more after seeing Melbourne comedian Duff’s take on fantasy comedy fall well short of the late master.

Spongemonk is one of those epic genre tales full of needlessly gothic language, where characters have names like Flortz Mooncloth and you do not walk somewhere when you can ‘traverse the lands’.

Mooncloth is the protagonist of this tall tale, a farmer who wants to free his property from its 16 curses, including the troublesome spiders that rain down every Friday. So he seeks the advice of Spongemonk, who lives in the Forest Of Dreams And Nightmares But Mainly Nightmares. Yes, some of this could be straight out of a children’s book…

The quest sparks an hour of surrealism, rather too straightforward in its episodic format and with characters too thinly draw to engage the listener. A few of his flights of fancy capture witty ideas and set them soaring, but many more don’t go beyond odd for odd’s sake. 

Satirical elements feel especially laboured. Flortz gets along by having a bank account full of ‘blind hope’ from which he can make withdrawals. As with Pratchett, the mystical fable is mixed with the mundane – Mooncloth has to catch the bus or cope with sloppy workmen who hold their blueprints the wrong way round when they dig their holes – yet the contrast no longer feels special.

However, you certainly can’t fault the atmospheric performance. Illuminated only by fairy lights, Duff narrates from the gloom in rags and green facepaint beneath a mop of wild hair – a strong image that well suits his fantastical yarn, which he tells with suitable theatrical melodrama. But for a show about the extraordinary, the writing is too often ordinary, and the imagination never really sparkles.

Review date: 14 Apr 2016
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett