[Variety/Spoken Word ~ SA]
The Jade, Fri 28 Feb, 2025.
Tracey O’Callaghan has been a regular on the Adelaide spoken word poetry scene for seven years now. Jumping in the deep end, she was a South Australian State Slam finalist in her first year of performing. She achieved the same for five years running, which culminated in taking out the winning and runner-up spots, respectively, in 2021 and 2022, sending her on back-to-back trips to the national slam finals in Sydney. Along the way, a myriad of guest feature spots, competition success and open mic appearances have shaped her endearingly branded reputation as the ‘Queen of Sass’. She has worked steadily to build her craft, confidence and — if this sold-out Fringe debut is any indication — an enthusiastic crowd for her brand of passionately direct, personally informed and socially conscious poetry.
O’Callaghan is unfailingly self-assured on stage, walking in to greet her audience with Pat Benatar’s All Fired Up playing loud as she pauses, strikingly, to gather herself in preparation. This provides a foundation not just for essentially flawless delivery of her creative set but, also, a particularly engaging style of banter that does not simply fill space but expands substantively on the context and implications of each poem in humorous, pointed, revealing ways.
This is certainly “issue” poetry, a common feature of the slam and spoken word milieu that O’Callaghan has found her place within. Her opening piece — Broken Puppet Strings — speaks to the gendered double standards and social judgement experienced by women and girls in a culture still largely dominated by patriarchal norms and power dynamics. Narrative reflections on domestic violence — whether physical or not — feature heavily too. That trauma faced by women and, as O’Callaghan makes sure to note, men as well (indeed, it bears pointing out, by people of all genders) who are left ‘broken to the core’, cringing at the sound of ‘loud angry voices / Or the slamming of a door’.
Later on, a poem O’Callaghan calls her ‘baby’; and which she says has generated an especially positive reception (from older men) — Oh to be a boy or man — explicitly calls on mothers, daughters, sisters, friends and wives to hold out our hands / To our men, emphasising the Unrealistic expectations / Placed in [their] hands. It’s a noble sentiment and I imagine, in part, a gesture designed to head-off the tiresome charges of man hater that are still hurled at women with stridently or unapologetically feminist concerns. I wonder, though, if O’Callaghan is more generous or accommodating than necessary in framing this poem as the untouchable centre of her fiercely uncompromising set. The best of her poetic advocacy expresses an important reaching toward the fact that it is gendered binaries themselves — and the debilitating oppressions or expectations they simultaneously generate — which constrict us all, albeit in very different ways.
In any case, there is also a tonal variety in O’Callaghan’s work. These more sombre elements— by turns heart-wrenching or justifiably rage-induced and inducing — are balanced by a well-turned comic sensibility. There were plenty of audience laughs and gleeful appreciation for tales of sex and other sins, pushing back against barbed busybodies in broad, debriefing tones as if sharing raunchy jokes and social war stories with trusted confidantes.
This was a perfectly executed hour of charged, comedic, crowd-pleasing poetry. Anybody keen to observe the talent being tended in Adelaide’s vibrant slam and spoken word scene would do well to watch out for O’Callaghan’s next feature show.
4.5 stars
Ben Adams
#ADLFringe
#TheClothesline
The Clothesline Rating...
Ben Adams
This was a perfectly executed hour of charged, comedic, crowd-pleasing poetry.
