Melbourne International Comedy Festival review

In Shayna and Beverley – two ladies of leisure sunning themselves on adjacent beach loungers – Alex Hines and Sarah Stafford have created a pair of outrageous grotesques.

Both are in vertiginous wings, their faces layered with make-up, and wearing matching bohemian kaftans. Shayna is an heiress, countess and serial fiancée  who’s just had to cremate her entire family following a blimp tragedy; Beverley, a negligent mother of far too many kids and wife to an emotionally and physically distant man.

They strike up a conversation after Shayna’s falcon poops on her neighbour.  If you want to know why there’s a falcon here, this is not the show for you, as Birds revels in a heightened, absurd version of reality. 

Though both high-status women are self-centred, they forge a connection through a shared vacuity, exemplified by their mutual love of a mystery noise phone-in on commercial radio. Haughtily superior,  they often deliver lines very theatrically, with the occasional Wildean putdown such as as: ‘I do despise a woman with a hobby’ as if it were an incontrovertible truth, just because they said so.

As they plough through cigarettes, prescription pills and margaritas, the unforgiving sun takes its toll. Despite their frequent reapplication of sunscreen, their faces turn crimson, their skin peels yukkily. 

Hines and Stafford’s performances are compelling, fully embracing these over-the-top caricatures and adding laughs with their ridiculous physical comedy and over-the-top delivery. Hines giving Shayna a laugh like a kookaburra is a particularly effective touch. There’s also a looseness to their work, which offers a welcome crack in the atmosphere which comes increasingly repressive, but never too much to derail the narrative.

The true inhuman awfulness of both women becomes apparent through some grim, blackly funny, anecdotes, such as Shayna recalling a particularly horrific car accident or Beverley losing one of her children in real time. Not that they really care about any of it, so blissfully self-absorbed are they.

Nor do they notice that the world around them is literally burning as the underlying message of Birds makes itself known. The increasingly searing sun makes them increasingly delirious and nonsensical, but no more aware of their surroundings or their own awful behaviour.

There are more directly funny shows at the festival, but Hines and Stafford have excelled in creating a surreal alternative reality occupied by cartoonish villains and make it credible, however warped things become. 

• Alex Hines & Sarah Stafford: Birds will be on at Assembly George Square during the Edinburgh Fringe

Review date: 19 Apr 2026
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Melbourne International Comedy Festival