The evening air in Marrickville had that crisp Autumn bite as I approached the Factory Theatre for the Sydney Comedy Festival. After snapping a quick selfie and a pic of the hovering ‘HA HA HA’ bunting above the brewing evening crowd, I headed into the intimate matchbox theatre room, ready for Rohan Arneil’s new show, You Wouldn’t Have Cut Me Off If I Wasn’t So Sunburnt.
The night kicked off with cracker opening act Billy Darcy, who set a high bar with his own brand of high-energy, relatable humour. Billy warmed me up with a fast-paced oomph before Rohan took me on his looping journey through the life of a modern tradie.
Rohan’s show was so jam-donut packed out that a couple sat on the theatre floor. Arneil doesn’t perform like a typical polished comedian. I felt like I was on a job-site with a mate telling stories during smoko. I sat mid-front row, right in the line of fire. Arneil leant over the front row and checked in on us "front Roh-ans". He wasn’t just doing crowd-work. He was building genuine, albeit temporary, camaraderie. Quick to single me out, possibly due to the raucous laughter being emitted mid-front row, Rohan realised I was alone. He took a crack at guessing my profession and was impressively close, nearly pinning me as a mental health worker. It wasn’t a scripted bit. He was reading the room. He built a rare kind of interaction where I wasn’t being picked on, I was just part of the story. A story that wasn’t ‘written’, but lived.
The title ‘You Wouldn’t Have Cut Me Off If I Wasn’t So Sunburnt’ had originally reminded me of my pasty days of still a-wishing I could afford the skin to tan brown under this Aussie sun. Days spent lying on the beach, to only afford a moon tan, or days at first year high school camp in the pouring rain to be the only one to get proper lobster-like burnt in the besides the albino, who laughed in my glowering red face.
Rohan’s observational humour about manual labour is relatable, even for this ‘social worker’. Rohan is using real-world experiences from working trades like a garbo to supervising apprentices to gift a masterclass in modern labour efficiency. Instead of using brute force like naive younger workers, an ‘old man’ onsite will use a low-energy system of his own. For example, ‘The Rocking Motion’ - Instead of violently lifting any dirt, the old man will strategically wiggle and rock the shovel side-to-side to break the soil's suction, before sweeping a slow pivot to move the earth.
Is he looking busy, or is he actually working?
I can just see it – this old man's pace, so calculatedly slow that he never breaks a sweat, never twinges his spine, and manages to spend the majority of the time leaning against that shovel handle, gasbagging-ly giving advice to apprentices… And yet always without reprimand
During the show, I found that the tiny absurdities in this world appeared colossal. Because aren’t they? When you are working long days, dealing with job hierarchies and relationship dynamics? The show wasn't just a series of punchlines. It was an unhurried, conversational flow that drew me into minor frustrations that become seemingly major in my mind.
Just like a true tradie, when the whistle blew, Rohan dropped his tools and disappeared before I could even holler for a photo – leaving his ‘front Roh-an’ with nothing but a great story and a massive grin.
Reviewed by: Odette McCarthy