Concrete Playground

A few years ago Miles O’Neil came across a box of old Super 8 home movies at a Melbourne garage sale. In his first solo show, opening at the Old Fitz, this found footage acts as the backdrop to a selection of songs, impersonations and stories taken from Miles’ life.

Nostalgia, according to Mad Men’s Don Draper, is Greek for “the pain from an old wound” and this show captures that bittersweet feeling perfectly. Miles recounts and reenacts conversations he’s had with cabbies, couriers and mechanics about love, cars and the essentials of happiness (cheese is important, apparently)

It’s an excellent show but a hard one to describe. It would be tempting to call it a “gentle comedy”, because the whir of the super 8 projector dictates it’s own steady pace and the comedy is inclusive and warm as opposed to cruel. But “gentle comedy” has come to mean code for boring or bad. It is also technically musical comedy, a term which is even more fraught with bad connotations.

I would say that it is funny, beautifully written, heartfelt and masterful. When so many other comedians are drenched in irony it takes a certain type of tight rope walker to make a show this sincere and genuine without tipping over into being twee or embarrassingly earnest. It’s a comedy with a lot more depth than we’ve come to expect.