Come Back Festival Week 2. Goodwood Theatre and Studios. Danielle Lim and Sam Lau // Zero Theatre Collective. 21 Aug 2026

 

Two brilliant comedies. Totally different themes and takes.

 

Bang On The Nerve was written by famed, infamous, however you see her Australian columnist, TV host and author Van Badham. Badham worked with performers Danielle Lim and Sam Lau to adapt it from its original UK setting to Adelaide, Australia.

 

It’s an extraordinarily sharp, incisive and wickedly biting, revealing comedy of Asian Australian social mores surrounding being Asian, living in a white world, and navigating relationships.

 

Elle (Danielle Lim) and Louis (Sam Lau) are forever friends living between two worlds, their Asian culture bestowed by birth and the Australian one they grew up in.

They’re a support network.

 

Elle arrives at Sam’s mightily pissed off after a day of teaching shit little kids, one who threw a jar of jam at her that missed, smashed, and sprayed her with jam.

Sam? He responds with a funny off-the-cuff song on his guitar. His life is shit too. He cosplays at a restaurant and his girlfriend has dumped him. The stuff everywhere all over Sam’s one bedroom place says single Asian male sads.

Herein lies a brilliantly paced, dark, yet joyously wicked journey into their lives.

 

Lim and Lau work this production with exceptional comic and dramatic timing. The chemistry is dynamite, interlaced with comic sad boy guitar songs.

Elle and Sam are at odds with so many things in their long friendship, their good, not so good, not happening relationships with white partners.

 

They draw us into a world of Asian cultural insecurities and Australian cultural expectations like it was something we all do. That’s the magic of their perfectly executed devil may care approach. You don’t, wonderfully, differentiate. You actually get it!

 

They fight over it all and each other. It’s hysterically funny yet simultaneously eye opening. You start to properly see what the dualities in their lives are and can cost, or rightly, enhance. No ending spoilers! It’s worth it.

 

Have Sex With Me, Please should be a long touring comedy classic.

Eddie Morrison has the best reputation for sharp, inspiring, couth/uncouth aware comedy writing in Adelaide. This production is a reprise of the ’24 Fringe Season at Prompt Creative.

It’s a snappy, very intelligent two-part structured work if you’re paying attention.

Wham! We’re whipped into a loud and fabulous intro to sex and the rules of cool sexy behaviour, all that delivered with microphone loud voices and mega video back drop projections. Man, it’s so Sexpo full on!

 

That gently segues into a quieter section of the work, as Eddie and Nate get into the serious business of revealing how to get sex. Well. There’s a sex computer involved and sex science that apparently, Nate has studied!

 

So ensues an enthused and proud of Nate Eddie, giving expression to Nate’s sex expert Doctors advice (based on his YouTube research Eddie isn’t aware of.)

Herein lies the absolute comic and thematic genius of this work. Try following the absurd advice of YouTube idiots, utilising mannequins as side props to be sexy!

Eddie certainly does! It’s surprising he’s alive, let alone human after the attempt! Plus, you must be at least 31!

 

The raucous, outrageous extremes this work goes to are entirely logical after the event. It was so funny for one person the night before this writer attended, they laughed so hard they had an asthma attack.

There’s a nice moral at the end!

 

David O’Brien

 

Where: Goodwood Theatre and Studios

When: 13 to 30 Aug

Bookings: goodwoodtheatreandstudios.com.au