Melbourne comedy festival review by Steve Bennett

These two inventive comedians give themselves an opportunity to stretch themselves creatively with this interesting, if slightly patchy, collaboration

Xavier Michelides, a respected festival stalwart yet to make his big breakthrough, and Ben Russell, who won plaudits for last year’s fast-paced one-man character piece The Tokyo Hotel, are a new comedic double act playing a well-established comedic double act – apparently in the old-school vaudevillian style, if their opening sassy backchat is the indicator.

The premise is not that they have no show, but that the audience is a no-show. It wouldn’t bother Ben, who in a Pythonesque scene suggests he dreams of being a city slicker businessman anyway, but fragile Xavier must be protected from the truth, lest it ‘break his little heart’. So they perform their routines as normal, while the backstage ‘show within a show’ reveals the farcical efforts to hide the truth.

Their humour therefore works on two levels. There are silly visual gags, imaginative sketches such as the ‘ghost date’, and dumb toilet humour sitting alongside a more knowing commentary –  deconstructing lazy crowd work, for example, mulling their artistic merit or making long-range callbacks to the obscurity of a particular reference. 

It sometimes gets a bit indulgent or over-complicated – and as a farce it should really crescendo to a finale that doesn’t happen – but the strike rate is pretty good, especially for an experimental concept. And while the writing is solid, matching original set-ups with decent punchlines, their biggest asset is their combined performance skills, able even to wring laughs even out of an apparently straight rendition of Big Yellow Taxi. Russell is certainly the more versatile actor – and he looks as if he’s just stepped off the set of a silent comedy classic – but he has a good comic foil in Michelides.

This could be the start of a very fruitful partnership…

Review date: 4 Apr 2016
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett