High school is an experience we all go through but it can differ wildly. Some peak there, for others, it is like being trapped in a chrysalis built of awkwardness and embarrassment and they won’t spread their wings until later in life. Stand up comedian remembers her time at high school with mixed emotion. “I wasn’t a loner, I was very social but I was very highly strung,” she recalls.
Although Kendall grew up in Australia, and began her stand up career here, she has spent the better part of her career performing in the UK. Kendall was last in Melbourne for the 2012 Comedy Festival, returning after an eight year absence with her show Persona. It marked a return to stand up, as she had taken a couple years off to have her first baby. She was absent at last year’s festival because she’d just had her second but she’s back this year with her most personal show yet.
No, it’s not about childbirth, babies or parenting. Called Touchdown, it’s an autobiographical tale about a couple of key events that took place during her own adolescence. “It’s about the first time I fell in love and the first time I had a massive bust up with my best friend and I think the first time I really genuinely had a kick in the teeth,” she says. “This particular year for me was a very emotional time in my life.”
Kendall is known for thoughtful, intelligent stand up but doesn’t usually talk with such candour on stage about personal emotional experiences, in the past she’s always tackled broader issues. The show, which is one long story, is set in 1992. It’s an engaging narrative, expertly balancing adolescent obsession with profanity against her adult insights looking back, creating a show that has a winning mix of both vulgarity and vulnerability. There are moving moments woven throughout the mirth and at its core, great humanity and compassion. Kendall is a comedian who wants this world to be a better place and uses her place on the stage to subtly implore us all to be kinder, while also having the performance chops to deliver a polished, well written comedy show that delivers the laughs. This is adult comedy in the most sophisticated sense.
Touchdown, she says, was a pleasure to write. “I certainly found that I look back a lot more than I used to, creatively,” she says. “I find writing anything about my teenage years, I love writing about it or I love doing material about it and I love discussing it on stage because I think it is a really fertile period of life. It’s really nice being an adult and being able to explore all those very raw emotions because everything is so intense during that stage in life. You basically have school and home, there’s no other arena – no professional arena, there’s no independence – it’s just home and school and it’s a real pressure cooker and I find that I love exploring that,” she says.
Kendall says this one of the easiest shows she’s written. “I found writing it, it just came. When you start putting together a show, you’re constantly sifting, doing material and trying to figure out what the show is about and it’s almost like I hit the rails with this. Once I started talking about this, the material just felt like it was pouring out of me,” she says.
It’s a true story, she says. “I’ll put it this way, anyone who was there would be able to figure out who the people were…but no one is going to sue me! It’s as true as I can be without getting in trouble”.
BY JOANNE BROOKFIELD
Venue: Melbourne Town Hall – The Old Met Shop, Cnr Swanston & Collins St, CBD
Dates: Currently playing until April 20 (except Mondays)
Times: 7.15pm (Sundays 6.15pm)
Tickets: $22-$28
