REVIEW | Head Set, Victoria Melody

Reviews

8 Oct

Written by Katie.

*Disclaimer: Gifted tickets in return for an honest review

Victoria Melody has built her artistry on the principles of embedding herself in Britain’s subcultures. She has previously become a pigeon fancier, beauty queen, championship dog show handler and funeral director, documenting from the inside and creating relatable experiences and storytelling in her shows. This time, she has jumped headfirst into comedy.

This show can’t be put into a regular box of theatre or comedy. It sits somewhere in the realm of performance art and follows the equation of a typical Fringe show, with “a strong narrative component and an inevitable ‘sad bit’” as The Guardian once told us. It is a comedy show locked inside a theatre show.

Victoria is personable, relatable, charming, and unquestionably an epic storyteller. She framed the show as if still in her comedy school class, banging a drum to signal the transformation into her pretentious teacher and providing a self-deprecating commentary on each bit of her work. As we move through her journey learning to be a comic, we unearth some intimate truths about coming to terms with an ADHD diagnosis as an adult. Victoria is now ‘self-medicating’ with comedy. A dopamine hit. The EEG (Electroencephalography- Google it!) headset itself, we discover, is a method to measure the effect of the comedy on her ADHD brain, exposing levels of relaxation, engagement, excitement and stress during her onstage act.

Victoria has a wonderful way of connecting with her audiences and being unapologetically herself. It had an emotion at its core as if she was talking to a friend, yet she managed to maintain that humour that had its audience (however small we were!) chuckling along with empathy. She deals with the matter of neurodiverse brains delicately and with a sense of empowerment, and the audio of her mum talking about Victoria's childhood was a lovely way of connecting us back to being real and human and not just a gimmick for a show.

A celebration of being your authentic self, Head Set comes to a beautiful and apt conclusion as Vic tells us “I went looking for success and found me”. This comedy experience has been transformative for her and I am desperate to see how her other shows have compared in the past.

Melody has managed to present a fascinating scientific study in the most endearing of ways. The combination of witty anecdotes, sharp technical timings and conversational script came together to create a joyful chaos that was reflective of her brain and charmed us all. Although some moments could have had a touch more depth, this show is somewhat of a love letter to neurodiverse brains everywhere and deserves great praise.

This show is definitely more suited to a fringe audience so I am anxious to see how well it performs for the rest of the tour, which is heading across UK until November 11th.