This show (and now this review) begins with Isabella Gilbert drunkenly making her way through the audience to the stage, swaying onto a stool and attempting to pull a sparkly silver cowgirl boot off her club-swollen feet. Having a hard time, she turns to the front row to ask for a hand. Unbeknownst to us, her boot had actually gotten stuck! What followed was six minutes (I know this because two full songs played) of audience participation tug-of-foot. This excruciating, hilarious opening accurately foreshadowed the rest of PUMP. This show encourages you to relate, laugh, and then asks you hard questions. Gilbert is unafraid to let the audience sit in a scene just that little bit longer, toeing the line between humour and being genuinely a little uncomfortable, tugging at the boot.

This part-play part-cabaret one-woman performance covers a post high-school coming of age through the lens of club culture. With its street names and boys’ names and ordering-Ubers-late-at-night-after-Maccas details – PUMP exudes this really happened, happened to me energy. The one-woman show suits Gilbert, who is a real triple threat, arresting in her ability to completely fill the stage leaving nothing wanting, a phenomenal actress and effortless singer with impressive physicality and dance. If nothing else, her performance of ‘drunk girl sitting down for the first time all night’ was so accurate that when she took her bows at the end of the night I couldn’t believe she was really sober.

Gilbert manages to walk the line between lyrical and relatable writing. Her monologues are tumbling run-on sentences rich with imagery that pull back just before cliché. Her writing combines with familiar green, purple strobe lighting, sparkling dresses, eyes closed arms up dance floor moves to evoke the glamour of clubbing, or perhaps the glamour of our memories of clubbing. Gilbert is then able to be honest and shameless in a way that undercuts this romantic veneer, encouraging us to relate to some aspects of clubbing that usually fall into the ‘what happens on a night out stays on a night out’ basket of collective amnesia – a necessary condition so that you can go do it all again the next weekend. Juxtaposing dance and music genres to move between the glamourous to the messy and scary, at times the play felt a little like a friend telling a series of stories. More enacting and less recounting of events would have mixed up the tone of the piece.

Although the structure of the play, jumping between coming-of-age club scenes and romantic ventures to audition tapes and rehearsal rooms, seemed simple, it created a lot of satisfying parallels. Jumping through time we are encouraged to notice the surprising similarities between the club floor and audition room. PUMP asks us to question our desire.  Why do we want the things we want, and how the world is (poorly) set up for us to go after them, whether that be a boy to kiss or a lead role in a musical. Do we want to be touched, or do we just want to feel desired? I wonder what it would be like to watch PUMP and not relate. Gilbert is to be congratulated in resisting a coming of age happily ever after ending. The great irony, and strength of this performance is, of course, that all this desire – to be sexy enough good enough, chosen, validated, seen, heard, understood – is what a play asks of its audience.

PUMP is written and performed by Isabella Gilbert & produced by Double Garage Productions.

4 Stars

Lilah Shapiro

PUMP continues at the Hymn Bar, Level 1, 73 Grenfell St, Adelaide at 10pm until Fri 28 Feb. Book at FringeTix or click HERE to purchase tickets.