This review is from the 2023 Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
‘Actually, Good’ took home the top award at this year’s Melbourne International Comedy Festival, so the stakes were already high enough for Gillian Cosgriff’s ruthlessly cheery interactive hour. The show is also all about finding happiness in the mundane – which is a hard enough mission at the best of times.
The Aussie performer structures her performance around a game she vox-pops to the (very willing) audience, where you’re asked to come up with a ranking of ten things you ‘like’, before she writes them down in her ‘Book of Good’. Often, these will be as simple as ‘wearing a wireless bra’ or ‘getting a USB in the socket for the first time’ – or, in Cosgriff’s case, ‘bus drivers waving at each other’.
Cosgriff’s manic nods of approval at people’s ‘likes’ occasionally feel disingenuous, especially when it came to some of the more bland responses. But, overall, the optimism is endearing. The real humour came in with her various flashback stories and musical numbers she weaved throughout the game with a zesty flair and considerable pace. (A hilarious longer sketch of an unfortunate phone meeting with a councillor is especially good). There is also a darker undercurrent, which functions to counter the stickier sweet shell and remind us that with good, there is always bad, and with life, there is always death (yes, she is really blunt).
Her game could have quickly become tired or cringe – or risk sounding like a particularly tragic ‘my simple pleasures’ Hinge prompt. But Cosgriff has a natural way of doing away with any over-romanticising and bringing things back down to earth as soon as they start to float away. It was less ‘live, laugh, love’ and more ‘what can make the crap parts of life a little less crap?’