I love Ele McKenzie’s poster for her show. Based on the 1965 Bob Dylan album cover for Bringing It All Back Home, it features Ele, lounging in bohemian splendour, in the place previously occupied by Sally Grossman.

 

Ele herself takes the stage peering from behind octagonal glasses, between curtains of long dark hair and begins her introduction.

 

With a measured droning voice, she tells us she’s thrilled to be here at the Fringe, doing her debut show. Unfortunately, she says, she has very little life experience on which to base her debut hour. In fact she rarely leaves her own house.

 

Ele kicks off with some outrageously mundane observations about herself – beginning with some inconvenient, but non-life-threatening medical conditions. She has OCD, which she claims has led to an obsession with the processed meat Spam. Is this a hidden Monty Python reference? I think it might be – Ele is messing with us.

 

I kept looking at the face of a woman in the audience, who had a look of appalled horror as Ele ran through her observational stuff about skin conditions and digestive habits. Where on earth is this strange long-haired girl on stage going with this?

 

Ele has a brief scan of her relationship history, which has been uneventful, before moving on seamlessly to her masturbatory habits – and building her pace.

 

Fixing on an unfortunate man in the front row Ele announces a ‘fingering renaissance’. And she tells us, she has a thing about older men.

 

These two solid facts about Ele are the kick off point for a hilarious flight of fantasy – which sees Ele attempt to become the most popular member of her own family, displacing her mother and her brother to be the star of her own domestic life.

 

On the way we learn a little about her mother – who is Ele’s nemesis – and her twin brother – who is materially successful.

 

Ele has come up with a plan which will make her family notice her – and she’s basing it all on the power she already has at her own fingertips.

 

Her masturbatory fantasy takes flight, with research drawn from American novelist Carson McCullers and references to the 1967 Dylan documentary Don’t Look Back.   Occasionally she’s distracted from her mission by the thought of a Japanese animation or by the music of YouTube videos floating from behind her mother’s closed bedroom door.

 

Ele’s detailed and graphic descriptions of her own body and outlandish ideas of how to become a success in life are outrageously funny – with screams of laughter as she builds her story to its climax. The story all ties up with a reference to Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home – leaving us with an unexpectedly and surprisingly adorable revelation of why and how she really made her show.  

 

She’s taken us all on a wild, wild ride. And it’s been a blast. Ele McKenzie is daring, original and very very funny. By the end of the show the woman in the audience who initially looked appalled is laughing her head off – and I am actually crying with laughter.

 

 

 

 

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