Vanity Bites Back At The Tuxedo Cat – Adelaide Fringe Review

Tuxedo Cat @ The Coffee Pot, Sun Feb 22 Any show at the Coffee Pot acquires the status of ‘secret gig’, up a laneway, up some darkened stairs. Helen Duff’s extraordinary show deserves to shed the ‘secret’ status and be right out there. Her tinkling, cut glass Stepford wife, Jill, is a cooking show hostess, with the stunned doe-eyed look of a 1950s cake mix advert, all perfect brittle manners, and tremulous self control. She picked her way through the audience, offering compliments and invitations like a flamingo that had been to finishing school. Such intensity of good will was disconcerting, but with enough exaggeration that she’ was just this side of pantomime… ‘Jill’ flings about the fairy dust as she holds her practised smile and gushes about cheesecake. In the commercial breaks of her show she narrates her own story, moving from ditzy personal development to heart breaking survival. The performance succeeds in making you laugh and wince, rather like watching an Alan Bennett monologue. Helen Duff has the grace, control and strength of a ballet-dancer in a her physicality; her face betrays every subtle change of emotion, she evokes film heroines of a bygone era – Celia Johnson, Vivienne Leigh or Audrey Hepburn, if they’d all been passed through a clowning blender. It takes a strong character to show such vulnerability on stage. Despite the slapstick of gunging together a cheesecake and bravely getting amongst the audience in a teasing but never threatening manner, this tale will speak to many who struggle and strive to perfect themselves by the punishment of anorexia. It’s funny and heartfelt, a difficult combination to pull off, but Duff succeeds in this sensitive territory. Julia Chamberlain Vanity Bites Back continues at Tuxedo Cat @ The Coffee Pot from 7.15pm until Tue Feb 24 and then Producers Nook from 6pm until Sun Mar 15. Book at FringeTIX on 1300 261 255 or adelaidefringe.com.au/fringetix. Click HERE to purchase your tickets.