Cloud Girls Smudge
Jennifer Carnovale and Madeleine Culp @ Austral Hotel – The Bunka
6:30pm, Sun 20 Feb 2011
Unsure about the logistics of dragging myself in from my previous show, I had refrained from pre-purchasing a ticket for the Cloud Girls; hence, when my Fringe Buddy and I arrived with scant seconds to spare before the nominated start time, only to be greeted by a solidly closed Bunka door, I silently admonished myself: if there’s no walk-in punters, and I haven’t bought a ticket in advance, how can the performer possibly know that there’s an audience that wants to see their show?
After a minute or so of apprehensive waiting outside, another (slightly older) couple wanders towards us: “you here for the Cloud Girls?” they ask, and we get to chatting. The door opens, a man apologetically takes our money, and the four of us enter. Despite much goading, the other couple don’t join us up front, opting instead to sit one row back.
So – there’s a grand total of four people in the front two rows of The Bunka, which would comfortably hold fifty or sixty. It’s… a bit awkward, to say the least. But opener Shane Matheson gets some hearty early laughs, with a bit of gruff iPod DJing accompanying some genuinely funny material. Definitely someone to keep an eye on in the future.
And then the Sydney-based Cloud Girls amble onto the stage… and, from the get-go, they’re hilarious. Their awkward introductions reveal some perfect comedic timing, and their show is presented in a very sketch-oriented manner – they quickly flit between pieces, never allowing the laughs to subside, and there’s rarely a flat spot in the performance. The chemistry between the two Sydneysiders is intoxicating; there’s a real sense of understanding between them that manages – despite their impeccable timing – to appear haphazard, like the show is teetering on the edge of disaster… it’s very dynamic, very exciting. Mads projects a curious fragility, wide-eyed and innocent, where Jen comes across cooler, more calculating.
As for their material… the bit with Jen sitting in the audience, firing “dickhead” questions at Mads? Absolutely brilliant – and made all the more surreal by the small audience, with Mads scanning the ocean of empty seats for questions whilst Jen strained in her seat, arm waving in the air. The whale songs? Mads’ mental miming at the end of the show? Magnificent. The poetry? The unexpected puns? Perfect.
Look, I absolutely loved Cloud Girls Smudge – the Girls are sharp and funny and have a gloriously madcap delivery that manages to feel both polished and dangerous. And they’re lovely people, too – I kept bumping into them at the TuxCat (where they performed a chunk of their season after some kerfuffle with the Austral) and the Worldsend, and they were always up for a chat. But it’d be hard for me to separate the absolute joy of their performance from the slightly surreal environment in which I saw it – four people in a big room (and, as we later discovered, the other couple was Mads’ parents!) Having said that, I can’t wait to see the Cloud Girls again – and they absolutely deserve a much bigger audience.