This a great show: 2016 Sydney Fringe SYNZ Award and Best Circus and Physical Theatre, 2016 Adelaide Fringe Weekly Award Highly Commended. And you can clearly see why.

Catherine Wait’s performance is outstanding. This is a musing, amusing, dance, physical theatre, exploration, drama of our love affair with coffee and how it becomes an emotion and a colour in our lives. The narrative is snapshots, glimmers and small vignettes showing the craving, the over-caffeination, the relaxing moment when you smell your first morning coffee.

Wait is dressed in a simple acrobatic suit that is reminiscent of a coffee seed and drink in one (yes, my friends, they are not beans at all): a beautiful coppery, brown number with darker panels and a sparkly décolletage suggestive of the foam at the top of your cappachino, set off by a marvellous head of red hair. This is almost a 1940s kind of styling and adds a dream like quality to her appearance. To one side a table, chair and elbow lamp wait with a single white mug and spread around the stage, the ring, pole and silk are waiting to be used. 

Sitting at the desk Waits’ impish glances at the audience bring us into her world and we are hers for the duration. She moves us through the line-waiting-for-coffee with humorous ease and recognisable characters as she lists off styles and orders.

Her work on the pole is breath-taking and lithe. How she does what she does with her cup, on top of the work of the routine, is extraordinary. Like all of her work we see no effort just the simple and beautiful graceful artistry of telling a story.

Apart from one section of text, all her movements are accompanied by music that evokes and interacts with the performance and performer, from dreamy strings to a pushing beat and the delight of the French accordion which cannot help but bring to mind Amelie. Waits has a similar impish and fun quality. Even when she’s hurling herself around the floor as she responds to the need for caffeine, we are enchanted.

This Fringe show may be more mainstream in its production and quality, but I’m very grateful it’s here. Well done to BATS for the surprise of rigging points in the Heyday Dome, and also for the pack-in. At one point, Waits lies on her back and the Ring is the perfect distance above for her to reach with her toes. A simple thing, but it shows the care and articulation from all aspects of this show, the depth of talent, artistry and care taken with all aspects. As aesthetically pleasing as it is perfectly produced.

Director Emma Sargent and Catherine Waits have created a stunning piece of work that is a must for the Fringe.

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