Comedy Festival 2018: Natalie Palamides all she’s cracked up to be in Laid ★★★½

MOTHER egg repeatedly lays baby eggs. Existential crisis, messy stage and some hilarity ensue with Natalie Palamides.

IT’S early to call, but Laid will likely be one of the stranger offerings of this year’s festival. Last year it won Best Newcomer at the Edinburgh Comedy Awards for creator and solo performer, Natalie Palamides, an American voice-over artist and emerging comedian/clown.

Dozens of raw eggs are just one of the sticky substances that Palamides manages to use in this chaotic, somewhat dark clowning show that meditates on the conflicting emotions of motherhood, fertility and child raising. Laid has a slowly evolving structure, a theatrical arc, and a whole lot of concepts, some of which rely on a sympathetic audience to make them work.

Nat Palamides in Laid.

Palamides hatches from a giant orange egg (a stretchy, bean bag-like costume) and proceeds to birth more eggs in a groundhog-esque cycle that each time has her questioning whether to raise or eat her new baby.

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It’s an accumulating existential crisis that gets more and more messy as mother egg repeats her morning shaving and tooth brushing, cooks (for real, on a hot plate) her babies in ever-more elaborate breakfasts, mourns their deaths and reads her soggy newspaper. The stage becomes an increasingly motley collection of domestic paraphernalia, crumbling food and liquids of various consistencies.

Heavily dependent on audience members playing along as characters — newspaper boy, teacher, bully, paedophile — Laid is a curious mix of solo show and interactive improvisational theatre. Even as skilled an improviser as Palamides is, Sunday night still had its hiccups when her chosen volunteers didn’t play along to her liking.

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Palamides’s character is a mix of American southern belle sweetness and potty-mouth. Like the feel of the show itself, she’s a bit all over the place, tottering across thoughtful and frantic in both over-the-top caricature and straighter dialogue. Between the slapstick and the darker themes, the physical clowning and the more emotional laments, it’s hard to pinpoint an overall driving tone of Laid.

Regardless, it’s still a brave and risky undertaking in a sea of more mainstream offerings, with each night producing a slightly different result, depending on what peeps enter the nest.

Natalie Palamides, Laid

Arts Centre Melbourne, Playhouse Rehearsal Room, until 22 April.

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