Review: The Iron 'Ores
COMEDY REVIEW DAVID ZAMPATTI
The Iron ‘Ores
Casus Circus
Presented by the Flag Sisters
with Igor Sas and Damien O’Doherty
0 stars
This misguided show masquerades as a spoof on all things WA mining boom. It also imagines that it's provocative, wickedly politically incorrect and scandalous.
What it is, instead, is clumsy, underprepared, dreadfully old-fashioned and deeply unfunny. It's also a sad waste of the talents of Igor Sas and Damien O'Doherty, two very fine performers who, somehow, have landed in this thing.
To be fair to O'Doherty, she's something of a FIFO worker here. She has flown in with a couple of routines - her much-loved and laughed-at Rose Hancock act, a new character called Colin Hairnet whose awfulness is at least passably amusing, and her latest foray into the House of Lang, his daughter Gina. Unfortunately, this is where the Hancock motherlode runs out for O'Doherty because, whatever else Mrs Rinehart might be, and unlike her former stepmother, she's just not viable comedy material.
Sas can't escape so easily. As a character called Sticky Woodlands (yes, Twiggy, I'm afraid that's you) and the show's MC, he's lumbered with some of the most excruciating lines I've ever heard. His last monologue - some offensive garbage about a Sri Lankan public servant - was dug up from the time before comedy existed.
Then there are the Flag Sisters, the drag act of Neil Hansen and Ronnie van den Bergh, augmented by Owen Dennison, who become the Iron 'Ores of the title.
Great drag can at least keep mediocre material afloat (witness Jinkx Monsoon in the Fringe's The Vaudevillians).
These sisters only drag this unforgiveable affair even deeper.
