Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

Moving to the UK soon with his boyfriend, Eli Matthewson is upbeat but worries that with being financially secure for the first time, there's a chance he might turn conservative.

The couple have been burgled four times in their current home, a run that could turn anyone into a flog 'em and hang 'em advocate. Yet with the ‘easy come, easy go’ casualness of a freelancer who was recently fired from his morning radio job, the affable Kiwi prefers to see these robberies as redistribution of wealth, a tax that the fortunate pay for being part of society and owning such striking ornamental flamingoes.

Matthewson is no right-winger in waiting. As a gay man who can see the superiority of the female anatomy for entertaining the human penis, he's progressive about the shape of modern relationships and the guilt his generation will one day feel in holding them back with their judgment.

Even before he's settled here too, he baldly admonishes Keir Starmer for using the prospect of Palestinian statehood as a bargaining chip in negotiations. And on his first visit to the Fringe in 2013, he claims he effectively offed Margaret Thatcher with nothing more than the power of fan fiction.

Matthewson's working-class roots and sudden affluence perhaps explain his rush to fill his home with gauche trappings such as a television that disguises itself as a painting. Yet he's shorn himself of the Christian guilt that found him censoring his treasured Vengaboys CD as a teenager. And he's secure enough in his nine-year relationship to be just about OK with the fact that he has a hotter doppelgänger achieving infamy online.

However, anyone would pause to reflect after their partner tried to kill them. Though by some way the most dramatic incident in this hour, Matthewson immediately strips it of its peril and emphasises the inexplicability of the situation, drawing the implications of it for their relationship and what their respective reactions say about them both.

His brush with death prompts the lapsed Christian to explore the motivational aspects of heaven if viewed through the lens of his useless security camera system.

And the droll, good company, endlessly self-mocking Matthewson is a long-lapsed heterosexual too, offering straights the benefit of his acquired wisdom on oral sex in his epilogue, a dubious take-home that's at least a memorable visual.

Review date: 18 Aug 2025
Reviewed by: Jay Richardson
Reviewed at: Underbelly George Square