OBSERVER: Down The Back Of The Couch
Liz Skitch becomes a latter-day Pam Ayres in her Fringe Festival routine, Down the Back of the Couch.
The poems that form the core of her performance have a comic quality in their depiction of the mundane in life with associated imagery that is amusing.
But Skitch takes things a little further with emotional reflections on cancer and death giving an arc to the performance that takes in love, marriage, children, domesticity and the hereafter.
Her stagecraft is also disarming. Skitch has no trouble adopting a new persona for a poem, the exuberance of her performance extending to inviting audience members on stage or providing them with the tools to generate atmosphere.
Mine was a device to create the sound of a thunderstorm. Stepping in and out of character is Skitch’s talent where the nonsense of the moment when organising trinkets for the audience gives way to the sentimentality or pathos within the written word.
Maude Davey’s direction may have assisted here but Skitch is completely at ease given her comedic background. The poetry has given her a new means of expression which she has taken to heartily.
Performed as part of the Melbourne Fringe Festival.
Review by David McLean