'Remarkable': The Netflix special everyone is talking about

If you were lucky enough to see Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby live last year, you'll know exactly what to expect from Nanette (Netflix). This is a live recording of the show with which she won the Barry Award at the Melbourne Comedy Festival and the best comedy show award in Edinburgh (shared with English comic John Robins).

And if you didn't see it live, you're in for a treat.

Well, maybe treat is the wrong word. What you're actually in for is a harangue, a confession, an accusation, a treatise on art history, an interrogation of the dynamics and limitations of stand-up comedy and, finally, a kind of catharsis. It's brilliant and exhausting and when it's all over you'll probably feel the need for a Bex and a good lie down.

I don't want to reveal too much of the narrative – for this is a story rather than a string of jokes, as Gadsby herself reminds us more than once – but it takes us from her difficult childhood in rural Tasmania to her decision, allegedly genuine (we will see), to quit stand-up comedy because of the psychological damage it does her.

It's just Hannah Gadsby, a microphone and a glass of water in Nanette.Credit: ben king

Gadsby offers a simple definition of comedy: tension, release. But she's tired of the tension, and she's tired of the release, of letting us – the audience, but especially men, and especially-especially straight white men – off the hook.

As a straight white man (sorry; not sorry) I confess I felt affronted and confronted by quite a lot of her material. Which is precisely her intent. "To the men in the room who feel I may have been persecuting you this evening – well spotted," she says near the end of her set. "But this is theatre, fellas. I've given you an hour, a taste."

Her point is that as a "not-normal" (a lesbian, a woman who does not look stereotypically womanly, who grew up in a community that taught her to hate what she was) she has been persecuted her whole life. By letting us know what that feels like, maybe we'll be prodded into a little more empathy, decency. It's certainly worth a shot.

Gadsby showed on Adam Hills Tonight that she is a likeable if slightly oddball presence, and she showed on Josh Thomas's Please Like Me that she is a more-than-decent actor unafraid to mine her vulnerabilities. Both those aspects of her craft are on display in abundance here.

The Netflix special captures a performance of the show at the Sydney Opera House last year.Credit: ben king

So too is her background as a scholar of art history (and despite her claim that she is doing herself out of any chance of a gallery job, Gadsby has in fact presented a series of lectures at the National Gallery of Victoria). Here she focuses her lens, and her vitriol, on Pablo Picasso – not because she dislikes his work, but because he suffered a dreadful mental illness that worsened as he aged. Misogyny.

"Each time I leave a woman I should burn her," she quotes the artist saying, and it's hard not to share her conclusion about his vile attitudes to the opposite sex. "Destroy the woman, you destroy the past she represents."

She derides his cubism as "putting a kaleidoscope filter on your dick; painting flesh vases for your dick flowers".

It's fierce stuff, but I confess I didn't find all of it terribly funny. Smart, yes, but not often laugh-out-loud. But I'm OK with that because, rather than conventional stand-up comedy, Nanette is a brilliantly wrought piece of self-referential theatre.

It's a meta-performance, if you will, in which the subject is the performance itself. More than that, the subject is the performer, and the emotional and psychological toll of playing that role.

Gadsby invites us in, pushes us back. She reveals and withdraws and then finally, devastatingly, reveals so much that the pain and anger seeps from the screen. It is remarkable.

"There is nothing stronger than a broken woman who has rebuilt herself," she says near the end. And on this showing, there's nothing more impressive either.

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