Melbourne International Comedy Festival review

There’s so much going on in Lara Ricote’s Inkling that you won’t catch all of it – a fact that’s hardwired into the many knowing layers of this thrillingly ambitious hour.

That we start with the three Delphic maxims talks to the smartness of the writing, but the show is just as silly too. Ricote identifies as a clown –  as if you couldn’t tell from the way she makes taking a sip of water into a ridiculous pantomime – but that sits with philosophising about the nature of existence that’s both thought-provoking and hilarious.

Her show fizzes with animated performance, both physically and verbally. The Mexican-American comic has got so much to tell us that her over-excited monologue becomes a babble of messy urgency. In its extreme, it even becomes reduced to mere noise that somehow carries sense in its nonsense.

She leaps between three microphones and acts out her scenarios with vim. She can be wonderfully subtle – a therapist’s judgement captured in a single glance - or ridiculously over-the-top, as demonstrated by her arm-flailing impersonation of a man who’d split his tongue for extreme cosmetic reasons. Her silly impression of Noo Yawk City is a mini-masterpiece. 

While she exudes an adorably ditzy, screwball vibe, her show is more seriously about messages. She believes everyone she encounters has one for her, if only she could hear them – both metaphorically and literally, given that she’s hard of hearing.

Ricote feels that missing parts of conversation often leaves her out of the loop – so now it’s our turn to know how she feels as we try to keep up as she unloads the dizzying contents of her febrile mind. 

In the swirl of ideas we get, among so much more, a withering routine about atheists; a Buddhist boating-based parable, acted out with typical passion; a commentary on the nature of stand-up itself; and the division of people into free-spirited ‘naked babies’ and more restrained clothed ones.

That idea comes from the book How Should a Person Be? by the Canadian writer Sheila Heti, which has been described as ‘an engaging mashup of memoir, fiction and philosophy’. The same is true of Inkling, which takes its autobiographical  cues from the end of Ricote’s relatively long-term relationship and a doubly frustrating encounter with a mumbling Englishman in a London art gallery. 

But you will never have seen a breakup show quite like this before. Or possibly a show of any kind. The deep thinking is tempered with a sparkling surrealism, the freedom of the clowning anchored to the precise, intelligent meta-commentary that underpins the plentiful food for thought she serves up.

Inkling is a show you could see two, three, four times and take something different away on each viewing. Ricote certainly has a message for us, if only we could hear it.

• Lara Ricote: INKLING is at ACMI at 9.10pm until April 12 (8.10pm Sunday; no show Monday). She will be performing it at Monkey Barrel during the Edinburgh Fringe.

Review date: 1 Apr 2026
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett