Review: Icky – throwing shade, trauma-dumping, and the joys of tartare sauce

Erin Harrington reviews Icky, written by Viki Moananu and directed by Lizzy Burton-Wood as Oh That Theatre Company!, staged at Little Andromeda, Friday 22 March 2024.

For much of the big-hearted dramedy Icky, its titular character (Viki Moananu) circles literally and figurately around a freestanding, empty wooden door frame that dominates the centre of the small stage. Icky is young, Samoan, queer, fat, gentle, sharp, anxious, and really, really funny – and he’s also avoiding something big. Comic stories and vignettes about family, university, queerness, identity, good and bad friends, good and bad parents, terrible tattoos and growing up are all written and delivered with the well-paced patter of self-deprecating stand up. They are also interspersed by increasingly insistent and dread-inducing knocking. Is the frame a door? A full-length mirror? A threshold? Whatever the case, we soon clock that Icky’s salty, diverting and increasingly frantic disclosures are masking an escalating emotional crisis that expands well beyond his immediate need to deal with a sudden, unexpected death.

Moananu is a warm and engaging performer – a talented storyteller who immediately connects with the audience. I could watch him throw shade all night. He carefully balances the character’s pathos and sharp wit, although as Icky’s crisis builds, there is scope to exercise more vocal and physical control over the characterisation.

Moananu is joined by director Lizzy Burton-Wood, who sits on stage in an oversized armchair wearing sunglasses and a giant, ridiculous bespoke tartare sauce costume as we come in, grooving as if waiting for poolside cocktails to arrive. Later, in blacks, Burton-Wood sits at the rear of the stage with a microphone, providing acoustic music, sound effects, and dialogue. She’s both an external force and the deadpan voice in Icky’s head.

It’s a neat conceit that fits the production’s extremely lo-fi presentation, and it offers a droll sense of tone that helps to temper the show’s self-described ‘trauma dumping’ without diminishing its emotional impact. We’re in the middle of a cultural and creative moment in which telling all, as messily as possible, has become valorised for its own sake. I don’t think this makes for good art; it isn’t a nuanced way of understanding our complexities as human beings.

Icky, though, is smart and empathetic enough to recognise how one person’s specific crises, their personal traumas, can be big and small, relatable and unique, world-shattering and hopefully manageable all at once. It’s a play that loves its main character, and acknowledges the outsized impacts of small kindnesses and small pleasures (including, and not limited to, tartare sauce). It reminds me a little of Rebecca K Reilly’s terrific book Greta and Valdin, a serio-comic novel that similarly recognises messiness and crisis and all the acts we’re required to undertake to get through. Life can be really shitty – so what small pleasures, or unexpected gestures, might make is easier?

Moananu and Burton-Wood hold us carefully in their hands. Icky’s unexpected closing sequence, and its final, almost throwaway line make my heart stick in my throat. I can see why this work won Best Pasifika Play for the Adams NZ Play Award 2023, and why Moananu has been a recent Emerging Pasifika Writer in Residence at the International Institute of Modern Letters. The pair has talent to burn.

But even acknowledging this production’s stripped back nature, and the fact that I like (and maybe prefer?) shows where you can see the seams, there are some rough edges that perhaps speak to the challenges of touring with limited resources. This includes a pretty messy and overly complicated lighting design, and blocking that might work much better on a stage with more breathing space. I’m mindful that the show’s recent Wellington season was staged in the traverse, which makes more sense, especially in physicalising Icky’s isolation. Perhaps there are ways of tidying things up without spending money that frankly no one in the arts has.

I do appreciate though that this show has made it south, and I would like to see Ōtautahi audiences throw more support behind works like this. I can see this being one of my favourite shows of the year; the character and the production are flawed, but that doesn’t stop me from loving them both.

Icky played at Little Andromeda from 21-23 March, 2024.