Naomi van den Broek reviews Wobbly, created and performed by Emma Newborn, designed by Nick Zwart, and directed by Tessa Waters, at Little Andromeda, Friday 22 November, 2024.
Emma Newborn’s first showing of her one woman show, Wobbly, is a riotously funny lambasting of our relationships with our bodies, wellness culture, and how it feels to come of age in 90s New Zealand. The capacity opening night crowd are on the edge of their seats throughout the performance, responding to every emotional state Newborn takes them through, and enthusiastically jumping to their feet for a well deserved ovation.
Wobbly is part stand-up, part clown, part absurdist physical theatre and part confessional. Newborn is a very experienced and clever performer who knows how to take an audience on a journey. She, knows how to poke fun without being mean, and she really knows how to land a good joke. The show consists of different vignettes in varying styles, linked together by through the overarching motif of her relationship with her body. There are characters, songs, memoir-style stories, physical and prop- based comedy, all of which culminate in a heartfelt and moving monologue delivered directly to the audience.
We enter Little Andromeda with Newborn already in the space, using various microphone set ups to thwack piles of green jelly, her upper arms, and her lips. The show begins with her blowing up balloons and inserting them as boobs and butt into her beige bodysuit. It’s a pretty clear statement of intent for the audience: tonight is going to be silly and fun!
For the next hour Newborn masterfully works the space, with fantastic staging and movement, excellent and hilarious costumes, a banging soundtrack and clever lighting. Both the big picture and the details are considered and delightful – hat tip to director Tessa Waters. The only technical issue I have is with sound. Little Andromeda is not naturally reverberant, and the times when Newborn is performing off mic with music in the background, or exploring more intimate vocal qualities, I lose the odd word or phrase. I wonder if, for a work this physical and diverse, a headset radio mic would be a helpful technical addition. It would still allow for the other exciting aspects of the sound design to be realised without compromising on delivery of text.
There is a lot to love about Wobbly. A particular highlight is the are the character of the wellness coach, and the delightful interplay and audience participation thatwhich occur during this scene. Another is; Newborn’s fantastically embodied physical comedy. And the brilliant final moment of the show – which I won’t reveal (#spoilers) – but which is the pitch perfect representation of the show’s central theme and possibly one of the most delightfully absurd things I’ve seen on stage in a long time!
Newborn is clearly an ideas machine. And I imagine in the process of developing Wobbly there’s an entire shoebox of ideas that didn’t make the cut. I think as this work grows it would be great to see a bit more cohesion in way the various elements connect, a bit more connective tissue between the glorious buffet of styles included, and perhaps – just perhaps – a way of including some of the clown or absurdist elements in the work’s climactic monologue.
Regardless, seeing this sort of exciting and wonderfully strange hybrid style of performance being developed and staged in Ōtautahi is utterly wonderful! Wobbly is a triumph, and we are so lucky to have performers of Newborn’s calibre living and working here.
Wobbly has one more show in Ōtautahi on Saturday 23 November.
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