Adelaide Fringe 2014
Sex with Animals
Ryan and Ryan Productions
Genre: Storytelling
Venue: The Garden of Unearthly Delights (Spare Room),
Festival: Adelaide Fringe
Low Down
Sex with Animals is a frolicsome romp through the sex lives of animals (human and otherwise) with Ryan Good in the starring role as Ryan the Bisexual Lion. Featuring touching anecdotes, fearlessly frank confessions, sight gags and internet fun, this is not your average fringe comedy show.
***WARNING*** Your world view may be challenged and even altered by this show.
Review
Ryan Good is tall, blonde, and absolutely charming in his full-body gold lycra lion suit as he capers around the cheerful, packed space of the Spare Room in the Garden of Unearthly Delights. It’s a sell-out show, and the audience are well up for it, jammed in tight as Good starts off with a silly strip-tease.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen Ryan’s act – in Edinburgh last year he played the top floor of a bus as part of the Laughing Horse programme, and it was just as packed then. Maybe it’s the title, maybe it’s the revealing photo on the poster, or maybe there are just a lot of people interested in sex with animals out there, but this is a show that consistently sells out theatres and crams its audiences full of laughs.
The material could be controversial; off-putting, even, if the host weren’t so disarming, his costume so fabulous as it is, and his cohorts weren’t so loveable as they are. We’re talking about gay sex, polyamory (love with multiple partners), and analingus. Nothing’s off the table. But the reaction of the audience, far from being judgmental, is delight, interest, and self-identification (honestly, how many of you have tried to gratify yourself orally?). Good is able to take a massive number of people (there are more than sixty people in the house for tonight’s showing alone) with him on this bizarre journey without a sign of outrage.
Not just a funny man, Good’s stories are vivid, identifiable, moving expressions of a lost generation – a whole world of Lonesome Georges looking in vain for our mates in all the wrong places. Bumping our shins and noses and funny bones (and other bones) in the dark; Good shines a light on it all – catches us out in our ridiculous beauty as the creatures that we are, desperate to connect with one another. He volunteers to step up and reveal his own vulnerability, and peering at it, we may see ourselves a little better.
