The oft-repeated warning that one should never sit in the front row at a comedy show was well-proven at Friday’s performance of Fountain Lakes in Lockdown, the Kath & Kim parody play that called for some particularly embarrassing audience participation.
Transplanting the iconic mother-daughter duo from their early 2000s television roots to a more contemporary setting – August 2021, in the depths of Melbourne’s notorious COVID lockdowns – comedian Thomas Jaspers brings to the stage a parody play that is uniquely Melbournian and a loving tribute to the original show.
Littered with fourth-wall breaks, hilariously specific regional gags, and wry commentary on intellectual property theft (“Gina and Jane, please don’t sue us”), the Melbourne Fringe show served as a reminder of a time we’d all rather forget, as well as an earnest attempt to process the trauma of a world under lockdown.
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The adage ‘if you don’t laugh, you cry’ was well-served here.
The loving continuation of the original show’s witty misuse of words, where entire episodes would stem from absentminded malapropisms, provided a rich vein of comedy throughout. Disdain of an emerging TikTok dance called “the Jab” forms an extended misunderstanding whereby Kath fears husband Kel is an anti-vaxxer, as does the appearance of a twenty-inch dildo and terrors of ‘taking one’ for the good of the community.
The tongue is very deeply lodged in the cheek, as one would expect from one half of the creative team behind Granny Bingo.
Well-observed comedy also presented itself in the ridiculing of lockdown trends ranging from obsessive sourdough baking, influencer culture, and the itchy-feet insanity of enforced isolation. A fever dream dance sequence including a prancing COVID-19 spore and body-popping Dan Andrews clones was about as good a representation of corona cabin fever as could be imagined.
And of course, it wouldn’t be a comedy show without audience participation. A running gag about Sharon’s practice for an Irish dancing competition was realised in the most amusingly toe-curling way: she needed dancers onstage to form a troupe.
Just my luck, then, at being parked in the front row and roped in with five other similarly flustered audience members and instructed to perform an Irish jig. If there was any need to make Fountain Lakes in Lockdown any more memorable, then that was the way to do it.
Find out more about the production here.
