“It’s only going to get darker from here.” Mathew Kenneally warned early on in his show Mathew Kenneally’s Ill Thought Through Plan for the World. While he wasn’t exactly right, there was a healthy edge of cynicism that permeated the entire performance. Almost a sequel to last year’s Fringe Festival’s Most Outstanding Comedy-award winning show Mathew Kenneally for Parliament? but with even grander ambitions, the comic outlines his ten-step plan for all the world’s problems (“and maybe the crisis in Darfur…if we have time.”) As each problem is solved, he takes out the solution on a small card and hands it to a member of the audience, giving each of them a task to take care of on the way to a better world. The solutions are often bizarrely anti-intuitive, such as mining the steps of Flinder’s Street station to promote land mine use (and incidentally show emos the real meaning of pain); poisoning one in every thousand Mars bars to combat obesity; and committing more crimes in order to make sure that everyone’s fear of crime is concomitant with the reality.
Keneally himself comes across as confident of his material, and apparently just as happy to receive “ooohs” of condemnation from the audience for some of his darker and more politically incorrect material as he was to illicit laughter. He covers each of his ten points with speed and aplomb, meaning that he can jump from topic to topic at will, and as an audience member if you don’t care for one line of humour, another will be quickly be presented to you. Be warned, however, that this is satire which doesn’t care who or what it offends, and that if you’re not prepared to check your umbrage at the door, you might want to give this a miss. But if you’re happy to go along Keneally’s dark, slightly vicious, slightly absurdist, but nonetheless completely aware and often funny take on the world, this show comes well recommended.
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