By Chenoah Eljan
It’s in the name but it bears repeating: YOU are Sarah Keyworth’s show at this year’s Melbourne International Comedy Festival. An hour of crowd work turns a great deal on the crowd and their willingness to participate. Lucky for Keyworth (not luck at all: the result of a lot of great work and critical acclaim) they sell out the 200 seat Powder Room at Melbourne Town Hall. It’s a diverse crowd, underscoring Keyworth’s universal appeal and the increasingly rare ability to avoid getting trapped in topical trends.
The show has a structure. Keyworth uses fears, coincidences, superstitions and luck as jumping off points. They could have done more to set up and sign post that structure at the outset, which would have assisted the audience to better understand the journey they were on and made the ending more impactful. But what they have works, and is enough, because the real comedy is in Keyworth’s quick and delightful repartee with the audience. What is perhaps the most unique is Keyworth’s ability to get the whole room roaring without ever once punching down. They never take the easy shot, instead Keyworth approaches their audience with genuine curiosity and delight. Even when Joy, married to Steve for 35 years, answers every question Keyworth asks her with “That’s none of your business.”
A crowd work show is not for everyone. It was probably not for Joy. But Keyworth is a professional and has enough up their sleeve at all times to keep the show moving and the audience eating out of their hand. They confess to having told a lie about their brother on Live at the Apollo. Keyworth talks a great deal about their brother, with love and emotion that cuts through. It’s not been an easy year for that family and Keyworth does not shy away from that. They don’t, however, ask for one of the more than one hundred four leaf clovers audience member Sophie has found and pressed into resin for friends and family. Including her friend Alex who accompanied her to the show, and had been in more than six car accidents in her short life.
Keyworth arrives in Melbourne with serious credentials: winner of the festival’s Most Outstanding Show in 2024 and a nominee for the Edinburgh Comedy Awards, with TV spots on shows like Live at the Apollo and 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown. It’s Keyworth’s reputation that gets 200 bums in seats each night, but it’s their skill and craft that keeps the audience engaged, laughing and begging for more for an hour.
Nonetheless it is a curious show, crowd work for an hour is ambitious, particularly with Keyworth’s commitment to passing up the cheap shots. The show feels more like research than presentation, with Keyworth mining her audience for material for future shows. There is little doubt that next time Keyworth is performing on Live at the Apollo they won’t be telling lies about their brother, they’ll be telling lies about Joy, Sophie and Alex. This is a show worth seeing, but what comes out of it for next year’s festival or beyond is going to be the real gold.
