Melbourne comedy festival review by Steve Bennett

We are a small and unresponsive audience. I’d put it down to the typical reticence of Monday night punters, especially at the end of the long Easter weekend, but Craig Quartermaine sees it otherwise. ‘Feel the tension? He asks of the silence.

But then he’s had 36 years of experiencing things differently from the white guy, and of experiencing a tension because of his aboriginal heritage, so he’d be the one to know. 

Whatever the cause of the apathy, he’s on the back foot tonight, editing on the fly as he adjusts his material to try to make a breakthrough. This is most likely the reason this performance of The Quarterblood Prince doesn’t hang together neatly, and feels less than the sum of its parts. 

But Quartermaine has plenty of strong material, even if his confidence in it is waning in tonight’a quiet room. He is also torn about being solely defined as an indigenous comedian, with all the baggage that entails, even though race plays such a major part of his experiences. The problem, he surmises, is that a predominantly liberal white festival audience ‘treat this like a TED talk’, while he just wants to get on with the comedy.

Plenty of his material does both, combining insight with great gags, such as the story about witnessing how cops treated fellow comic Brendon Burns when he punked them at a roadside breath test, which vividly highlights the gulf between how black and white Australians are treated. 

There’s historical detail about how the traditional custodians of Australia were treated by the white invaders – there’s always some new awfulness to learn about colonialism – but he’ll also mischievously tease liberal whites for their self-congratulatory support for indigenous rights.

His show loses its sense of purpose a little when he speaks of going to the Edinburgh Fringe to perform a double act with Burns – a man from the same place geographically but worlds apart socio-economically. Quartermaine gets a bit bogged down in the detail of the festival, down to being the answer in a trivia quiz for a small subset of performers, without giving his travel tales a wider resonance for those with little interest.

But he strides back with strong anecdotes about the likes of wine-tasting (‘the whitest thing I could have done) and being a coach of a girls’ footie team.

Quartermaine – a broadcast journalist by day job – has a keen sense of social iniquity, demonstrated in by a neat comparison of the old-school-tie network and being in a gang. And his fears of being seen as something of a spokesman for aboriginal people are negated by his dark sense of humour and sense of mischief, tweaking the nose of political correctness.

With the dynamic tonight, this was never going be his hour. But there’s more than enough in this playful, revelatory, charming, devilish and sometimes pointed show to earmark Quartermaine as witty and relevant comic voice.

Review date: 3 Apr 2018
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett