Direct from Wellington, millennial visionaries Alice May Connolly and Eamonn Marra bring their particular model of relatable, genius-in-its-simplicity storytelling platform to the marvellous Montecristo room, committed champion of local and trans-Tasman up-and-coming comedy.  Connolly introduces herself and the basic concept: invited local comedy guests share their personal peculiar obsessions to a live audience, which is recorded and later uploaded to their website (link below).

 She briefly shares an example from her own repertoire of predilections, which I didn’t note down and regret I now fail to recall after the ensuing treasure-trove of personal proclivities; with any luck it will be listed in their online podcast.  She then calls on her down-the-line partner-in-crime Eamonn Mara who offers his own sample of irrational excitement for Bob Marley culture, including his prized Bob-themed earphones and underwear.

The first special guest is Nick Sampson who one could believe has spent his career working up to this opportunity, to declare to a room of strangers and the internet just how much he is captivated and perversely inspired by Bad Shakespeare.  Illustrating his affection with numerous personal experiences with some spectacularly pretentious and/or incompetent theatrical renditions of the Auld Bard, Sampson evokes a genuine sense of the glory of failure.

Rose Matafeo takes the stage next to tell us what she weighs, as a confessional kind of lead-in to her abiding life-long love for food.  Not so much actual food for eating – she hates cooking in fact – but more the mental preoccupation with the idea of comestible-based distractions, such as the majority of her childhood toys being food-based.  Or that the thing she remembers most from her favourite movies is what the characters ate.

Matafeo is followed by 18 year-old Natasha Hoyland, disclosing her addiction to online quizzes whereby she can never not do one when they invariably pop up in her Facebook timeline.  To her credit, she maintains some degree of control inasmuch as she’ll freely repeat a quiz when she doesn’t agree with its result, even repeatedly until it returns one she does.  However, I partly suspect her chosen topic may merely be a convenient excuse to express her deeper obsession with Kit Harrington.

Guy Montgomery rounds out the evening’s eclectic enthusiasms with a last-minute change in subject matter.  He doesn’t even say what he had been going to discuss since the nature of the preceding anecdotes somehow brought to mind someone he knew since intermediate school, whom for narrative purposes he calls Warren (not his real name).

The peculiarity of his particular fascination is that he has only been a tangential associate, but Montgomery secretly and fanatically follows his every post, pic and tweet online with incredulous awe.  He leaves us with the sobering notion that not only do we each likely have an unwitting associate we stalk online, but we are each also probably the subject of someone else’s surreptitious shadowing.

The genius of What We Talk About is in the infinite possibilities contained within a brief that could not be simpler.  From the same starting point of ‘what obsesses me’, each unique offering shows us a new and original perspective on the human condition.  Whether or not we relate personally to any given disclosure, we can’t help but recognise their psychological and emotional bases.  

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