Fringe review: Puss Puss
Brave and relentlessly silly, Puss Puss breaks glasses and smacks your hand when you try to get her into the bath for an uproarious hour. ★★★★
Natalia Sledz is an Adelaide-reared performer who, like many, took the plunge into the eastern states for greater opportunity, and was met with the Covid pandemic shutting doors and briefly stopping all live art. With her playful new work Puss Puss, which debuted at Melbourne Fringe last year, Sledz returns to the stage by meticulously exploring the life of our feline companions – who were probably just as annoyed as us with being forced to stay at home the whole time.
Clown and physical comedy often thrives on simple concepts, and Sledz has bravely sought to depict all typical behaviours of a domestic house-cat within a late night slot at the Courtyard of Curiosities. There’s a ball of wool, a bath that requires her extensive coercion to place her in, and an extensive cat-nip fuelled trip that verges on a Tom and Jerry kaleidoscope.
The audience is a critical part of this jovial exploration of feline behaviour; so much so that in its current iteration, it may rely too much on theatre-savvy viewers or already skilled performers to understand her cues to take part in the sequences and progress the show. However, despite one or two moments that may not reach the frenzied energy that Sledz aims for, she is constant in her generosity to give her audience the limelight, and make herself the bigger fool.
The one exception is the quite adult sequence set to My Neck, My Back, where the audience participants serve as… scratching posts to the character’s ‘itches’. However, it comes after a good forty minutes of Sledz’s breathless athletics – jumping between clown turns, audience members, and costumes – so perhaps, to best portray our regal pets, she needs a bit of worship. But this is only for a moment, after which this reviewer, directed by a condemning voice from the sky, chased Sledz through the audience to sanction her character by fitting the “Collar of Shame” around her neck.
It’s a humorous sidebar about the animal urges we humans are also subject to, and the social pressures that judge us for enacting them; not unlike a disciplining pet owner might with a spray bottle.
Though it has a few clunky moments of audience puzzlement, is maybe too reliant on backing tracks, and perhaps could interrogate fewer examples of feline behaviour at a deeper level, Natalia Sledz’s energetic and idiosyncratic one-woman creation is a classic Fringe crowd pleaser and a must-see for those who are de facto servants to their furry carnivorous housemates.
Puss Puss played from March 3 – March 8 at the Chapel at the Courtyard of Curiosities. It will be presented at the Motley Wherehaus during the Melbourne International Comedy Festival from April 6 – 12
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