Edinburgh Fringe Festival preview: Felicity Ward: The Hedgehog Dilemma

By CLAIRE SMITH
Published on 04/08/2012 04:58

AUSTRALIAN stand-up Felicity Ward tells Claire Smith how her new show has drawn heavily on exposing her vulnerabilities

FELICITY Ward is very nervous about how I’m going to describe her show. “It is not a break-up show,” she says, “although I talk about a break-up. And it is not a sobriety show – although I talk about giving up drinking.”

The show is called The Hedgehog Dilemma, and it’s at the Fringe fresh from a tour of her native Australia which ended with a nomination for a Barry, the leading comedy award, named after Barry Humphries.

I caught it at the Adelaide Comedy Festival, and can tell you that it’s a riotous hour of confessional comedy in which Ward talks about leaving her fiancé, giving up drinking and going back to live with her mum.

It’s true the show isn’t confessional in a “learning and hugging” kind of way. And rather than getting in touch with one’s higher self, it is more about staying in touch with one’s inner idiot. But Ward has drawn deeply from her own experience and – kooky as she is – her ability to expose her vulnerabilities is a key part of what she does.

The show opens with Ward wearing the wedding dress she was really going to get married in back in 2007. “I was going to sell it on eBay, But I’m a bit of a Luddite and I couldn’t work out how to do eBay, so I put it away,” she says.

“When I started writing the show I had a script editor who suggested I started with a strong image. I said, ‘I’m going to start with the wedding dress.’ He said, ‘Wow – do you still have it?’ So that all came out of being a hoarder.

“This is the first emotional story I have done. I was very worried. But you can do comedy with emotion. Daniel Kitson does if very well, Celia Pacquola, a good friend, does it very well.

“Usually, the show is about me. But because I talk about my fiancé, there is another person involved. That was a tricky situation.”

Ward spent her teenage years in a very beautiful but very dull part of Eastern Australia. “It’s the Central Coast, north of Sydney. It is a really beautiful area, but when you are in a beautiful area surrounded by national parks and you get to 15 years old, there’s nothing to do. There was a 
lot of drinking and a bit of petty crime.” She stopped drinking, she says, 
around about the time she discovered stand-up.

“When I look at the moment my life got better, it was when I stopped drinking. I had a lot of fun drinking. But I just felt guilty all the time, and I was constantly paranoid.”

After trying and failing to get ahead as an actor, Ward ended up working on a late-night TV sketch show called The Ronnie Johns. “The times were always being changed,” she recalls. “We were just children really – I was 25.”

It was Adam Hills who first encouraged Ward to find her own comic voice. The two were at the same table drinking with a group of friends. Ward, as usual, was acting up and playing the fool. Hills offered her a drink, and was amazed to discover she hadn’t been drinking.

“He said to me, if you can be this funny sober I should get you on my show.” Ward became a regular guest on Hills’s Spicks and Specks – a kind of Australian answer to Mock the Week. “I slowly started to realise I didn’t have to be a character to be funny. I could just be myself.”

She did her first stand-up performance a year later at the Melbourne Comedy Festival, where she was working as a stage manager. “I’d got into the habit, when I was in The Ronnie Johns, of writing down everything funny I ever thought – so I just started going through that. My first set was 12 minutes long, and I did my first full-length show 11 months later. It was hard.”

She describes her own humour as puerile. “There’s a lot of dick jokes. I’ve got this filthy sailor’s mouth. And I still find fights funny. When will that stop?”

She’s been delighted by the reaction to The Hedgehog Dilemma. “I’m surprised how much it affects the audience. It is the biggest story of my life. And it is emotional. But if it is emotional, it needs to be very funny. Your job as a comedian is to write the jokes – so I’ve tried to cram as many jokes into it as I can.”

•  Felicity Ward: The Hedgehog Dilemma, Underbelly Bristo Square, until 27 August. Today, 10pm. Ward will compère the Scotsman Best of the Fest show at Assembly George Square, on Monday.