Adelaide Fringe 2014
Alexis Dubus – Cars and Girls
Alexis Dubus
Genre: Spoken Word
Venue: Tuxedo Cat @ Raj House (Room 1)
Festival: Adelaide Fringe
Low Down
Alexis Dubus tells his story, the eternal story…The one about a boy, and a girl…A cleverly touching tale, woven through the years of a young man’s life as he ventures forth from England to see the world and learn about love.
Review
Room 1 at the Tuxedo Cat is an intimate space, with comfy arm chairs and a shallow raised stage. The feeling is casual, intimate, and safe as we get settled. There is a giant passport on the stage, its pages littered with stamps from Morocco, Peru, France, and many other destinations. It’s going to be a travel chat. Alexis Dubus has done an absolute sh’load of comedy gigs all around the world, but this is his first spoken word show.
He’s causal when he enters, fun and easy breezy, though he is rhyming, something he’ll keep up (for the most part) throughout the show. More on that later. There is the sense that he’s not always one hundred percent comfortable in his skin, but this could be due to the fact that it’s not a very large house, and we’re a fairly intense audience. Still, Dubus plows on with a wry smile, and we get on the proverbial road.
The stories are engaging and just ever so slightly titillating, but at times the rhyming gets just a bit in the way and we can feel Dubus stretching to make it all work. Still, his manner is disarming and the journey he’s taking us on is an intensely personal one, and we can’t help liking this self-proclaimed innocent from drizzly, rainy Southeast England. Solo storytelling is hard work, but Dubus keeps the energy up. There are pictorial aids, the occasional pun, and a number of close scrapes as he carries us from the South of England, through Western Europe and Africa before whisking us across the sea to South America and the United States.
It’s a troubled journey with a fair few bumps, but in the end…well, we’ll let him tell you.
