Dear Stalker, by award-winning comedian Harriet Moir and staged at Te Whare O Rutukia, has a sellout season for good reason.
From her first sidling into the limelight, Moir had the audience in the palm of her hand. No notes, no water bottles, no need to hijack the audience into mirth but plenty of interaction.
Punchlines are swift and often appear without warning. The show is risque, but perimenopausal women can and do say what they like with impunity. After all, we have the perfect get-out-of-jail-free card.
Men are warned to buckle up for the ride. Candour in retelling instances real and imagined of her life, the ins and outs of dating, from pre-adolescent innocence to the wisdom of years and parenthood, the brutal honesty of daughters, masculine naivety and the reasons for wanting a partner for putting out the rubbish or cleaning the allegorical spouting.
We are reminded that passing the anti-stalking Bill is this government’s extraordinary act of goodwill. More extraordinary, we are reminded, is that many of those powerful people fit the stalker profile: deaf, persistently popping up with ingratiating diversions.
Moir is all about how love swivels from Bridgerton to the proverbial, how thrush is every woman’s Munchausen Syndrome, and how we expect to have to put out to get picked up, how we so determinedly throw ourselves under the bus to get a leg over. How we are expected to think of several reasons to leave, when one is enough. It’s all so true we could wet our pants.
Moir is also about acknowledging vulnerability, that life throws curve balls and importantly that humour, honesty and letting go of those persistently narcissistic weirdos out there helps us relearn independence.
They just need to pay us right. Right?
Review by Marian Poole
