★★★★★
Adelaide Fringe. Tracy Crisp. Goodwood Theatre and Studios. 4 Mar 2026
Tracy Crisp has her fans, with very good reason. Her memoir monologues are hugely successful. Theres’a book of them you can buy. Crisp has carved out a unique niche in story telling employing sophisticated deadpan humour and insight, in which the fantastical and mundane is all rolled up together, resulting in tales transcending as much as they celebrate the ordinary. Audiences love it. The audience is growing.
This work is important given it is her last monologue, but as a pilot episode of a new mystery series. Essentially, Crisp wants to play around with the TV serial genre as if it was a podcast as well as a live reading, as Charles Dickens used to do.
It goes off a treat.
Who Killed Gough Whitlam? is more than a tale of a well named white Bichon Frisé dog, whose whereabouts becomes the subject of conjecture as the title implies. Said dog’s image graces the stage near a large recording device and microphone before the show commences.
Those fans knowledgable of the Stitch and Bitch Club frequenting Crisp’s previous work will immediately recognise names. Unseen characters of a certain age and history embracing the politics and era of the 70s - 80s. These are fierce women. Flawed women. Very funny women. The one most important here is Marianne, who by vote of her friends has entrusted Gough Whitlam to Tracy. She then disappears to Paris.
Gough too, seems to disappear. What happens here? Did Tracy lose her best friend’s dog, or was he kidnapped?
Out of this essential plot construct, Crisp creates a world of inane domesticity, rivalry neediness, worry, and self absorption worthy of any TV soapie.
Crisp tells it with a crafty, gentle story tellers delight. She peppers her tale with places, streets and foibles of Adelaide behaviour that is comically recognisable.
Here is a tale filled with back stories and present moments of stress, as Tracy struggles to have her day, her Birthday, which happens to also be Gough Whitlam’s birthday – nobody seems to remember it’s Tracy’s! Yet where is Gough? The finding of Gough and the significance of a birthday are meaty soap opera material.
Crisp, as story-teller and writer, has this extraordinary knack of melding history, cliché and ordinary life into something magical. Something that opens an awareness of life we often miss because we don’t stop to think about it, or chance a slower look at life too see it another way.
Tracy Crisp is a gold star experience. Do not miss her work.
David O’Brien
When: 21 Feb to 15 Mar
Where: Goodwood Theatre and Studios
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
