★★★★
Diana Nguyen. Spiegel Zelt. 5 Mar 2024
Bodily functions (of various permutations) are easy pickings and grist to the mill for comedians and Diana Nguyen serves up a variety of them, with ovulating and snoring her primary targets.
Nguyen has an easy, unforced manner, and the audience warms to her immediately as she invites them into her life. The title of this show reflects her (or perhaps more rightly her mother’s) interest in her reproductive capacity. At 38, she is still single, and childless. We’re given a backstory on her most recent liaison, including her love of foetus duck eggs (just don’t) and how they featured in the relationship she likened to ‘Survivor’. Having successfully voted her erstwhile partner out of her life-show, she decides to recalibrate by walking 300km of the Camino de Santiago.
It is here that she describes the symphony of snoring that backgrounded her nights in Albergues along the way, sharing huge dormitories with up to 100 other pilgrims. With great aplomb, she conducted the ‘Symphony of Snore’ guiding the self-confessed snorers in the audience through a rousing rendition of Strauss’s Blue Danube. It’s an easy get but still very funny.
The upshot of Nguyen’s sabbatical (with a trip to Italy added on, replete with aging Italian would-be lovers) was that she decided to listen to her mother and her clanging body clock, and have her eggs harvested and frozen. Just in case.
Nguyen’s portrayal of her mother is hilarious and bar the Vietnamese accent, she’s just like mothers everywhere who are waiting fruitlessly (see what I did there?) for grandchildren to be produced by aging daughters. She takes us through the process of medical retrieval (she preferred the term ‘scoop’ in regard to her precious eggs) and is now just waiting for the right fertiliser to turn up.
Just in case we’ve forgotten anything, Nguyen recites a condensed version of the entire show, only this time she plays her ukulele (the cutest green Kala soprano) to the tune of Taylor Swift’s Love Song and manages to cram the whole lot in!
Diana Nguyen is a charming character, a bit crude, a bit prissy, a bit tragic and a bit joyful. And very, very funny.
Arna Eyers-White
When: 5 to 10 Mar
Where: Spiegel Zelt
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
