★★★★★

Adelaide Fringe. CRAM. The Mill. 20 Feb 2026

 

There are people out there right now who are dealing with the impending loss of a parent, friend, partner, or child from an incurable disease. For some that journey is still happening. For some it is over, but their next stage of life without has begun.

 

Melissa Pullinger’s Meteors tackles her experience of losing her Mother to cancer. Her solo performance is a tremendously intelligent, very considered observation of what she and her family experienced, of what life becomes when something terminal comes to stay. Of what the ‘end’ really began.

 

Pullinger’s writing is so brilliantly measured, laced with humour dark and light, of understanding gained, of seeing where confusion was. She delivers it in performance with an aware honesty empowered by emotional honouring truth of moments remembered without schmalz, or false sentimentality.

 

Director, Connor Reidy paces the production perfectly in partnership with Will Spartalis’s deft sound score. With just one chair, two steps and careful light management, the world of Pullinger’s experience is perfectly presented.

 

The over arcing motif for the work is meteor showers, eclipses. Pullinger is fascinated by them. Her tales of sharing them out in Tea Tree Gully and the hilarious tale of scoring cheap eclipse glasses set a mood that’s inviting. That experience is ground point of her connection to her Mother after death. Of us all, carbon formed creatures we are.

 

What really gives a great sense of the journey’s length and depth at shows start is meeting a strange guy, not a serial killer looking type at The Exeter. It‘s a cracking scene, in which telling this guy her mother has died sends him into tears over the memory of his cat’s death. The ‘I know how you feel’ story. At that moment, she’s in control. Comforting him.

Before getting there, it was entering a new world, a different life. Filled with being seen differently. Hiding in the dark as new treatments turned her Mother’s skin to that of a vampire fearing light. Of cancer becoming not even noticed.

 

Dealing with the aftermath is core to this tale. The Dany DeVito look alike counsellor, the problematic seven stages of grieving theorem, getting on with life, whatever that is now.

It’s here Meteors really powers up as an explication of understanding and sharp comedy.

 

In many ways, living with her Mother’s impending loss became normal life, as bizarre as it actually was. A sense of ease within it is expressed.

The aftermath is being thrown out of the dark into sharp light. Confusing, frightening, unbearable. How to manage? How, very genuinely, to breathe again?

 

The best advice comes in the last lines of the work. An understanding gained. A simple one

against the complexity of the experience and journey.

 

David O’Brien

 

When: 19 Feb to 17 Mar

Where: The Breakout, The Mill

Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au