A comedy about the only thing more devastating than death; love.
International Emmy Award Winner, Shoshana McCallum, aims to make you laugh at the loss of a loved one. An unflinching, hilarious, yet deeply compassionate examination of what happens when we try to avoid grief, Merely Beloved invites us all along to the catastrophe that is not death itself but every single day you wake up without your person. It’s got country music, it’s got terrible dancing, it’s got thousands of cardboard bananas.
A darkly comedic, one woman show, Merely Beloved is about Elaine who has just lost her beloved husband, Joe, to a heart attack which she may have accidentally caused. She’d be devastated, maybe even a little guilty, if she could just get over the fact he’s now in heaven with his first wife, Jenny. As Elaine finds herself obsessively investigating her husband’s possible cheating, (as much as one can from one realm to another), she successfully manages to avoid reality, and the grief that comes along with it.
While this is her first foray into the Melbourne Fringe Festival, writer and actress Shoshana McCallum, usually spends her time writing, acting and producing work for television back home in New Zealand. Preferring projects that deal with rich, confronting and nuanced themes, that subvert our accepted wider social conditioning, Shosh loves to create layered characters that hold contradictory beliefs and complex internal worlds. With a firm focus on flawed female characters, tormented by inner conflict, who ask simple yet unanswerable questions, her character Elaine fits perfectly into this raging, screaming abyss.
Having lost her best friend in a car accident when she was ten years old, and subsequently suffering severe emotional and existential fall out for the better part of her life – death’s relationship with love, and vice versa, have been a massive preoccupation for Shoshana. With Merely Beloved she explores this relationship, both in hopes of making sense of her own dysfunctional attachments, and tackling one of the most important questions in the universe; where does love go when we die?
“Merely Beloved has the heart of my own story – a woman rejecting love in hopes of avoiding sadness, while simultaneously obsessively fixating on where her love has gone.”
Shoshana has written and produced television and theatre, to wide acclaim for more than a decade. Most notably she won an International Emmy for her series INSiDE in 2021. Her brand spanking new show Madam, (which she co-created, showrun, and wrote), starring Rachel Griffiths, just picked up Best New Creation at the 2024 Monte-Carlo Television Festival, and Best Comedy at the 2024 Berlin International Television Festival. It’s been received in New Zealand to glowing reviews, and is coming soon to Australia.
October 16 – 20
