For those of us old enough to remember, it’s hard to shake the sense of bereavement whenever you see one of the Doug Anthony All Stars (DAAS) performing on their own; it feels like reaching to scratch a missing limb. Tim has gone off to teach comedy, and Richard is a famous radio interviewer and author. Paul did recently host a quiz show on the ABC, but he seems a slightly sad and dishevelled creature up on the Malthouse Outdoor Stage, particularly when the rain starts falling.
Thankfully, he’s lost none of his aggressive charm nor his willingness to push an anecdote deep into the realms of bad taste, and his choirboy tenor – even with a slight gravelly quality that comes with age – is as lovely as ever. He was always the naughtiest of the three, the one who could be relied on to tilt the already anarchic DAAS shows into outright viciousness, and his new show leans on this dangerous quality regularly.
It is there at the very beginning, when he improvises about the weather, the lunacy of an outdoor stage in Melbourne, and the impenetrable hellishness of the ACCA walls surrounding us. It’s there in the little ditty he sings to hecklers, or anyone stupid enough to yell out during the show, entitled ‘I Love You (but Shut the Fuck Up)’. And it really takes wing when he lets loose on Scott Morrison and his recent litany of personal and policy failures. It seems Covid lockdowns have done nothing to blunt McDermott’s political rage.
There is a lot of material about the pandemic, which is both an obvious and a tough subject: we’ve all experienced it, and there is very little specificity in the way we’ve experienced it, so comedians need to push into the unexplored spaces if they are going to make the topic work. McDermott’s opening number, ‘Touch Screen’ – about the freakishness he feels when touching things other people have touched – feels almost historical, a long way from the immediacy comedy requires.
But McDermott is a smart enough performer to know when to get really freaky, and a very funny song about masturbation into a shoe is followed by the show’s highlight, a long and increasingly disgusting confession about his sexual dalliance with an elderly lady who subsequently dies – of the Covid he’s clearly given her. It’s appalling and perverse in the ways we’ve come to expect from him. I won’t get the image of “two deserts meeting in a desert”, nor the description of his ejaculate having the consistency of granulated sugar, out of my head for a while.
McDermott is a strong songwriter, accompanied here on guitar and vocals by a musician he is constantly about to introduce before claiming that “there isn’t enough time”, but who we eventually discover is named Glenn. The songs are catchy and lyrical, even if they do tend to blend into each other a little. One does stand out though, a lovely number about every city in the world resembling Canberra in the 70s, perhaps because it is clearly autobiographical.
Plus One is a welcome return to comedy from one of our beloved bad boys of yesteryear, but it’s also a touching nod to growing old; McDermott hasn’t so much mellowed as gotten angry about more important things. When the show was over on opening night, he jumped up on a table and gave those lucky enough to remain an impromptu encore, finishing with a song called 'When the War is Over'. A plaintive, heartfelt plea for the things that bind us as humans, it’s also a warning about the things that demean and divide us too. It sounded like something Billy Bragg could have written, soulful and provocative and achingly true. Certainly enough to stop us reaching for that phantom limb.