An Interview with Sarah Lamshed
Tell me about your Festival show “Four People And One Lamington”.
Our comedy festival show is called Four People and One Lamington and stars four very different and unique characters. The show has been a collaborative effort of the four girls involved – Sarah Lamshed, Sharonne Zaks, Rachel Leary and Diana Wolfe who all met at Nelly Thomas and Tanya Losanno’s Character Comedy Workshop in the Melbourne Fringe 2005. The show includes a Lamington as a centrepiece to help provide a tie between each of our routines. We’ll each be performing 10-15 mins of solo material including some reference to how the Lamington is important for our characters. I’d love to give you the details but that’d be giving away the secrets of the small rectangular sponge so you’ll have to come and see the show to find out!
The show involves four performers (and obviously a lamington), have you guys collaborated on all aspects of this show?
The show has definitely been a collaborative effort to piece together all aspects including each of us helping with production, direction, advertising and promotion. There will be some cross over between characters but pretty much only as transition’s so our characters won’t actually be meeting each other on stage. Each of us have developed our own material to perform with the added guidance and direction of each other at our own workshop sessions.
It’s fair to say that the show is more theatre/cabaret based than straight stand-up. We like to refer to it as Character Comedy which is developing as a genre of it’s own. The show is definitely funny but is not based around the traditional premise of gags that form the basis of stand-up. Much of the humour in character comedy is because of the character itself, the way they move, talk and behave. From my experience stand-up is less about the performance which is why I guess you could say that our show is more like theatre. The characters we’re performing are NANCY – Avid Scone Baker and Story-teller (Rachel Leary), ELLA KOGOBOINGOMINOV – Nudist Trampolining Team Captain (Sharonne Zaks), CANDY HOLE – LA Rock Punk Chick With Lurid Past (Diana Wolfe) and VICKY TOOGOOD – Very Important Senior Government Manager (Sarah Lamshed).
You are all performing characters, does this mean that the piece is going to be theate based or is it more straight stand up?
Rachel, Diana and Sharonne are all new to comedy but all are performers. Diana is a musician in the band The Wolfe Gang, Rachel is a street performer and writer and Sharonne plays piano, trumpet and drums although she’s taking a short break at the moment from her band. And I’ve been doing stand-up as a hobby since October 2004. Each of us work outside of comedy with me in a full-time role at Melbourne Water managing the rivers and creeks in and around Melbourne, Sharonne is a full-time dentist and practices in East St Kilda, Diana runs her own PR business from her home in Kensington and Rachel is studying Professional Writing at RMIT in addition to working as a street performer.
For More Details see Four People and One Lamington