Fringe review: Tracy Crisp – Who Killed Gough Whitlam?
Adelaide writer and performer Tracy Crisp dips into the worlds of cosy crime and podcasting for her latest Fringe monologue. ★★★★
Gough Whitlam has been kidnapped. No, this isn’t a headline from some alternative history. This Gough Whitlam is a Bichon Frisé, a breed of dog so cute it’s commonly referred to as a ‘toy’ dog – which makes the act all the more difficult to swallow. Or maybe all the more difficult not to chuckle, as the term ‘Bichon Frisé is repeated over and over.
The stage is set with a large desk holding some computer equipment, which we soon learn is for podcasting. ‘Who Killed Gough Whitlam’ is what we’re all here to find out. And so the tale begins.
One morning, Crisp tells her listeners, the ‘Stitch and Bitch’ crew begin their daily emails. (They were once the ‘Thread Zeppelins’ and have also labelled themselves as the ‘Flushing, Not Blushing’ group.) The messages come through, one after the other, with a Happy Birthday to Gough theme – Gough being the dog Tracy inherited when her best friend Miranda went missing. Gough’s birthday party will be complete with a piñata, it is decided, because it’s more about the menopausal adults involved then it is about their dogs (whose names are Anthony Albanese and Julie Bishop – clearly they’re a very political sewing and embroidery bunch), meaning it really is best if you can, “thump the shit out of something, then stuff yourself with lollies.” But no piñata is going to fix Tracy’s rut. Gough’s birthday coincides with hers, so why is no one wishing her a happy birthday?
Tracy Crisp has made a name for herself as a notable Fringe performer and presenter. Her first show, Pearls, debuted in 2018, and set the stage for a series of something one might refer to as cosy monologues. The series dug into memory with a quiet confidence and decidedly Gen X timeframe. Family was important, as was comedy and grief, and last year she performed all six plays (Pearls, Stitches, Where to From Here, The Forgettory, I Made an Adult, An Evening with the Vegetarian Librarian), garnering a Frank Ford Award, a Spirit of the Fringe, a best theatre weekly award and an Artform Shaker Award. Not a bad effort. This year’s Fringe entry is the first of her Women of a Certain Rage Mysteries, brought to the stage by what she calls the Stitch and B*tch group.
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This new format sees Crisp exploring fiction – crime fiction – so now the cosy monologue slides into the ‘cosy crime’ genre, Crisp expanding her repertoire while sticking close to what she knows.
With her past performances, Crisp moved between present tense and memory in a poignant shift that kept the narrative exciting and somehow balanced. In the case of Who Killed Gough Whitlam, she switches between podcaster and confidant, slipping out of the main story to give us some context or insight. What’s fantastic about this trope is that when she moves away from her recording space and steps up to the standing-up mic closer to the audience, we get these amazing details that seem incredibly unimportant and are such a treat. Like the drive that took her to Gough’s birthday party and gifted her and her companion with all the green lights until they got to Greenhill Road and hit the reds, which was ironic and… who cares? But these details are moments when Crisp, who is a truly gifted storyteller, shows off her writing skills, tangents being the tiny gems of her tale. She’s clever throughout, and her delivery is that of a confident professional, but when she nudges the audience off-the-record and goes off-track, we get a real feel of what a comedic performer she is. It’s close to stand-up comedy, but more contained.
As with Crisp’s previous Fringe performances, this one, too, will help form a series, and it’s the first that will lead us to finding out what did happen to Gough Whitlam, the Bichon Frisé. Now that her last series has become a published memoir in book form (Pearls, just out this month with Pink Shorts Press), it’s unsurprising that she aims for this series to become a novel. How many creative people straddling the fence of stage and page have managed to do such a thing? I haven’t any numbers but I’d say only the best are even capable, and Tracy Crisp is one of the best.
Tracy Crisp: Who Killed Gough Whitlam? is playing at Goodwood Theatre from February 21 – March 15
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