Michael Workman is drinking whiskey on a rooftop bar in Swanston Street. So living the life of a comedian during festival? “Yeah, or not during festival, just anytime for a comedian, really,” he says down the phone.
Workman is a week into his Melbourne International Comedy Festival run when he chats with Beat. Sydney, or more precisely Oxford Street – “one of the most magical streets in the world” – is usually home for Workman, but Melbourne comedy audience’s have embraced his genre-defying comedy, which inspires reviewers to pull out words like “saturnine” to describe him.
In his first six months he had already won the national RAW Comedy competition and been flown to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival to perform. His first solo show, Humans are Beautiful, won the Best Newcomer Award in 2011. The following year saw him saw him explore a less obvious choice for comedy – the cruelty of a totalitarian regimes inhumanity – in his show Mercy. Then last year, he received a Barry Award nomination for his dark show Ave Loretta, which was about music, art and the war against banality.
He’s tackling a different war in this new show. “It’s an analogy and the war in the show is being covered by a reporter who is a drug addict and so his perception of the war and being in the middle of that battlefield is skewed by his own warped sense of reality and that sense of reality is being projected to TVs onto the general public, who are all getting this warped sense of what the war is and what it means. So, clarifying that is the point of the show,” he says.
Told in prose, with “big chunks of stand up in there”, Workman says he is “partly a narrator and I’m also partly in the show, so a lot of what I’m saying is about my life and what my life is like in the war and seeing the war second hand,” he says. It’s a more surreal and more fantastical show than his previous ones, he says. “It’s still extremely dark but it’s more of a exploration of why we’re here and what it means to be conscious rather than a misery inspiring trip into the death of a young woman, which was last year,” he says, referring to Ave Loretta. “This is more of an introspective look at what it means to be human,” says Workman, who studied philosophy, English and theology in Perth. (“All of those things tie together quite nicely in performance”).
The show is also his comment on contemporary media. “I think I’m really talking about Murdoch media and how things are skewed so badly in one direction or another and how that ripple effect influences culture and if we were to be exposed to the real truth, what that would do to change the way that we live and treat each other,” he says.
For Workman, there wasn’t one event that inspired this show, but the culmination of many significant events. “It’s Snowden, it’s Manning, it’s Iraq, it’s September 11, it’s the Ukraine, it’s everything. It’s just the lies and the deception that have gotten so thick and sinister that somebody has to say things. Heaps of people are saying things and I’m really just contributing my own voice to a very strong movement for transparency in our leadership,” he says.
BY JOANNE BROOKFIELD
Venue: Melbourne Town Hall – Regent Room, Cnr Swanston & Collins St, CBD
Dates: Currently playing until April 20 (except Mondays)
Times: 9.45pm (Sundays 8.45pm)
Tickets: $20-$25
