Geraldine Hickey is having a strange gig.

 

The one time Melbourne Comedy Award winner has lost her voice and is reduced to talking in a whisper.

 

The Assembly venue known as the Box is so hot a woman almost faints in the second row.

 

And there’s an oddly timed walk out during Hickey’s whispered recap of the reality television show Say Yes to the Dress.

 

It’s one of those days.

 

Hickey’s show is the story of her wedding – which was a big deal in Australia because it followed the legalisation of gay marriage and featured a line-up of well-known comics and cabaret stars.

 

But without the emotional underpinning of the highly toxic gay marriage debate, it becomes rather an anodyne story about a nice day out.

 

A lot of Hickey’s material loses its impact when performed in front of a UK audience. The lockdown experience in Victoria, which is also part of her story, played out differently than it did here – where ten times as many people died.

 

Opening the show by saying she owns three houses puts Hickey on the wrong foot right at the start. She seems like a good egg and it’s great that she’s doing well but we’re just not invested enough in her to celebrate her success.

 

Even the birds Hickey talks about in the birdwatching segment of the show are not the ones we have.

 

Having said that, she is an assured and confident performer. She talks as if she is sharing secrets and she is great at conjuring up the atmospheres of the places in her story.

 

Hickey tries her best to work around the bafflement elicited by a lot of her material. And she’s solicitous and concerned when the woman in the second row almost collapses in the heat.

 

She’s great on the joys of country life.  There are horses, birds and a snake in her story and she brings them all to life with a sense of wonder and delight.

 

She takes us into her innermost thoughts – how it felt to cut the grass before her wedding – and letting us experience how it feels to put on a suit that has been made to measure, just for you.

 

The finale of her story is a beautiful flourish – a shining celebration of a woman finding her place in the world.

 

It’s a lovely story and she tells it beautifully.  But it loses something in translation.