Zoe Coombs Marr has a background in performance art and experimental theatre – and her early comedy shows were as meta as they come.

 

The Aussie comic created work that was a riot of stunts, props and metaphor – often featuring her male comedian alter ego – Dave.

 

But this is Coombs Marr in pure stand up mode.  OK.   Pure stand up with a bit of powerpoint and some fancy spreadsheets.

 

Coombs is an older generation lesbian now. Which gives her a wry, affectionate perspective on the new generation, with their neurodiversity, their non-binary- ness, and their willingness to throuple.

 

She’s brilliant on mental health, rolling her eyes in exasperation at the ubiquity of the current fashion for confessional comedy, while at the same time deftly revealing her own, rather serious issues.

 

This show was born in a Covid-period breakdown, when she started compiling lists of everything that had ever happened to her in an attempt to figure out whether life was worth living.

 

The result is a huge cross-referenced graph of stories, jokes and experience which, with the help of her power point spreadsheets, she can dip into at random.

 

The comic bends and stretches the material of her entire life, using cross-referenced memories to switch perspectives and look at life from various different angles.   Nothing is fixed, everything is mutable, and everything can change completely, depending on your point of view.

 

Coombs Marr is light, playful, direct and completely in command of her material.   There are parts of the story she has redacted and will never share – but there is plenty here – the silly, the personal, the embarrassing and the human.  There’s even a very Australian tale of a frog in a toilet – which is one of her earliest memories and is weird and funny and metaphorical as can be.

 

There are excellently crafted gags and laughs galore, but this is also a brilliant exposition of the nature of mind.  Zoe Coombs Marr gives her work layers and layers and layers of meaning – and you will keep thinking about her graphs, her powerpoints and her mind bending analogies for days to come.

 

 

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