A star is torn, Adelaide fringe Festival, The Arch at Holden St Theatres, 4-18 March

 

Greg Fleet is a stand-up of some 30 years standing who has recently been turning his skills to playwrighting of a more or less autobiographical nature. This show has the same undercurrent of autobiography while also imposing the much-filmed "star is born" narrative, with a rising female performer eclipsing the fading male star - this time not in a romantic relationship, but the other stations of the cross are familiar... her meeting him on a bender, helping launch her career and then seeing himself left behind to a pitiable end. 

The autobiography is obvious, for those who know Fleet's career, his appearance on Neighbours gets a mention along with a thinly disguised Stewart Lee quote about him - but this never quite cuts quite as deep as you might hope. It starts perhaps with Fleet declaring his character is 48 (I'm 49 and am well aware Fleet is a good decade my senior) and continues with him never quite being as confessional about his own flaws as he might be- there are some well-documented ones which are never honestly dealt with here, so it still feels very much like he's being fully honest with his audience, so much as wallowing in self-pity a little. Also, technically, as a writer the short scenes often have flat endings, fading away into a blackout, and key details start to go missing - we see the two start to build a podcast together but then we hear nothing of it until suddenly we're told they haven't produced an episode in a few months - what happened to keep them away from it?

As the female standup on the rise, Krutika Halale has charm and assertiveness but the script is inevitably built on her letting this man into her life far more than is sensible, and the removal of the romantic subtext of other versions of this story hasn't really been replaced by anything else that could explain why she agrees to take this much pity on him. I'd happily keep an eye out for her if she does a standup solo show at some point but here there's too much of the familiar narrative here for her to really get a chance to build a strong storyline on her own. 

In short, this falls somewhere between the two stools - not original enough to really be a good original drama, not funny enough to be a parody, and not honest enough to be a confessional. It's a disappointment from two performers who clearly have skills but also haven't found the right vehicle to explore them.