Half Steam Ahead! by Con Coutis, April MICF, 21 April 2022 ***1/2

COMEDY

Part of Melbourne International Comedy Festival 2022

At Butterfly Club from 4 to 20 April 2022 (Season finished)

Reviewer: Kate Herbert This review of recorded show from season

Stars: 3***1/2

 This review published only on this blog. KH

Con Coutis in Half Steam Ahead!

Full Steam Ahead! is Con Coutis’s clever, solo, comedy show that takes the piss out of cruise ships and lots of other topics.

 

Coutis vividly creates the environment of a cruise ship on which he is the resident stand-up comedian and constructs a loose through line by interspersing short, snappy snatches of a stand-up routine amongst a bunch of quirky sketches and character bits.

 

This is a cunning way to break up the gags and highlight Coutis’s comic character work, theatrical physicality and sketch technique.

 

Coutis establishes the cruise by peopling the stage with a parade of demented, shipboard characters –passengers and cruise staff – and creates atmosphere with sound effects and voice overs of other cruise characters and his own inner voice.

 

He scampers around the small stage, inhabiting various characters, some of whom seem sane, such as the barman, and others that are loonies, including the captain, cruise director and various bogan passengers.

 

At one point, Coutis replaces himself, Con the comedian, on the cruise ship stage by bringing on another entertaining character, Dr Brian Boswell, ‘one of Australia’s authors’. Coutis plays Boswell as a ponderous, smug pedant who plays with meaning, ambiguity and goofy spoonerisms, and is intermittently creepy and threatening.

 

We meet more characters, all played cunningly by Coutis, but then the cruise goes horribly wrong. No, it’s not a Covid outbreak (But why would you be working a cruise ship when your health is at risk?), but the attack of a monster being called Karthulu (or something like that!) from another world.

 

Coutis ends up the hero of the trip when, armed only with his jokes, he saves the cruise, its passengers and crew from certain death by monster.

 

Half Steam Ahead! is a smart idea that avoids being yet another stand-up show or sketch comedy gig by combining the two forms into an entertaining package.

 

by Kate Herbert