Melbourne Fringe: Best of part 5

It’s Tuesday night at the Melbourne Fringe, which means cheap tickets for most shows. As always, take the risk and choose something you know nothing about, but today’s recommendations are shows that remind us that open access festivals are so important because they share all voices without fear or trepidation.

Black Faggot was an audience favourite and award-winner at the recent Auckland Fringe.

Sadly, their story is well known. Pacific Islanders are still blacks and gay men are still faggots and together the insult is magnified, especially when it also comes from within the Islander and gay communities. But this isn’t an angry work. There’s pain and regret, but it’s positive, heartfelt and achingly funny.

With impeccable timing and spot-on characterisations, Taofia Pelesasa and Iaheto Ah Hi perform a series of monologues and two-handers that tell stories from all around their communities. They tell familiar and often-told stories, but it’s wonderful to hear them told in a different voice and from a slightly different perspective. And these stories need to keep being told until the need to tell them doesn’t exist.

But the success of this show lies in it ultimately being a work about love. The love of lovers, friends, brothers and brothers, family, strangers, (a government that stood up and sang when the marriage equality bill was passed in New Zealand – this isn’t in the show, but we don’t have a government that even knows how to sing), and now the love of everyone who sees Black Faggot.

After Black Faggot, there’s time to walk around the corner to the Lithuanian Club where MKA are presenting Mark Wilson’s Unsex Me, which had to turn away as many people who were in Sunday night’s audience.

Resplendent with a full beard and an even fuller tartan frock, actress (and this is the only time I will ever use the ridiculous feminised version of actor) Mark Wilson is being interviewed about his recent Academy Award, his relationship with Australia’s best-looking actor dude, and what it’s like to play Lady Macbeth with your partner as Macbeth and your Aussie-legend dad as director.

And that’s all I can safely describe.

It is sexually explicit.

It is glorious.

It’s confronting and depraved and created with a mix of joy and pain that leaves you hurting from laughter because it’s so freaking funny and because it’s so cruel that it takes you beyond any sense of shock or empathy into a space where the only choice is laughter or burying your head in your hands and hoping to wake up safely in front of your TV in time for Packed to the Rafters.

Wilson equally thrills and horrifies as the line between self-mockery and soul-bearing truth is too hard to find, which leaves it as theatre that’s impossible to walk away from and forget.

But if you like your theatre nice, it might be best to see something else and leave room for the many who are making sure that the only bare seat seen at this show is Mark Wilson’s.