Happy-Go-Wrong at Forty Five Downstairs Melbourne

Review by Susanne Dahn

Reality can bite, it can catch you off guard, it can leave you with nothing. Lives, as we know, can change in an instant.

But if you’re happy-go-lucky and touched by an angel, there can be such a thing as a happy accident.

Instead of staying wrapped up in devastation when the sewer sickness strikes, if you’re lucky you possess the ability to hear the pink panther call to the soul, to turn the tragic into magic and to grab the second chance to find the happy in the wrong.

The stunningly skilful physical, dramatic and vocal performer Andi Snelling has brought a 9th season of her powerhouse autobiographical and much lauded show Happy-Go-Wrong to Melbourne’s Forty Five Downstairs.

Conceived in 2018 and premiered in 2019 at Melbourne Fringe, this is the show that just won’t slot quietly into the archive. It is as if, in creating the show, Snelling has created something that is separately alive with a life force that cannot be extinguished.

This show is not only a story of the tick bite that brings on a chronic illness against which its unlucky victim must battle to achieve a second chance at life, it is a story about the profound transformative power of telling and re-telling that story.

Like mirrors reflecting mirrors, story-telling and theatre-making that celebrate human potential and the human spirit can be endowed with organic life. The sprout keeps becoming the bean.

Snelling employs a battery of stagecraft skills from acrobatics, burlesque, clowning, mime, dance and song to both revel in the glory of what the body is capable of and to remind us that able-bodied-ness can never be taken for granted.

Snelling’s set design is spare but inspired and the costuming is brilliant and innovative.

A masterful charm and comic timing are abundant in this show, but Snelling’s work is at its most impressive at the moments of deep poignancy such as the a capella I Am Alive and the challenging and confronting scene of running commentary that those suffering from health crisis are so often subjected to.

In this show, with all its rawness and vulnerability, Snelling takes her audience to the porous borderline between bravery and fear, between defeat and defiance, to stop and see what they may not have seen before.

Happy-Go-Wrong is deeply and essentially human and hopeful. Like it’s angel this show may be wholly unexpected, but it’s a necessary antidote against despair just when we need it the most.

At Forty Five Downstairs until 29 June .

Image Supplied