Donna and Damo: An Asexual Love Story
Live Review

Daniel Kitson is notable by his absence from this year’s festival – but have no fear, fans of quietly whimsical romances involving fragile, lost souls: Sarah Collins and Justin Kennedy have picked up the gauntlet to produce a two-hander so close to Kitson’s theatrical work, it’s almost a cover version. As if to underline the comparison, the boss in the call centre where Donna works is a Yorkshireman with a stutter.

Her job there is to sell photo sessions to rural folk, when they doll themselves up for some Vaseline-lensed portraits for posterity. She’s happy in her modest job and moderately content with her relationship with Trevor, an online film critic, even though he’s an insufferably arrogant tosser with all the charm of a USB stick, constantly doing her down.

Into this flawed relationship stumbles the nerdishly pedantic Damo, a shy weirdo who patrols the streets of Melbourne spellchecking signs and menus. He ends up taking Donna on a strictly platonic road trip – on his pushbike – into country Victoria, where they form a bond, awakening her to the dismal state of her relationship.

The sweetness of the idiosyncratic story is matched in the production, with the sets and the unfolding landscape all being portrayed via lo-fi projector and hand-drawn acetates; while both Collins and Kennedy bring dollops of charm to their performances which, in Kennedy’s case in particular, span several characters.

But this warmth only goes so far, and such fine intentions can’t quite inject Donna with quite enough believability, nor make Damo quite the endearing character he needs to be. So while you sympathise with them both, it’s hard to invest much emotion in their outcome, since their deliberate personality quirks always remind you this is a fiction. Nor is the script quite punchy enough to convert good nature into good laughs.

Aptly enough for a show about romance without sex, it doesn’t quite go all the way when it comes to delivering on its promise. But nonetheless, there’s enough heart in the story to leave you feeling nothing but goodwill towards it