FRINGE WORLD FESTIVAL REVIEW: WILLING PARTICIPANT : ROB CARLTON – 25 Jan 2025

Shane | 30 January 2025 | Reply

FRINGE WORLD FESTIVAL REVIEW: WILLING PARTICIPANT : ROB CARLTON – 25 Jan 2025
State Theatre Centre, Northbridge, Perth, Western Australia
Reviewed by Shane Pinnegar

95%

Rob Carlton is a Logie Award-winning actor and a masterful raconteur, delivering four engaging human stories from his life over the course of one immensely entertaining hour.

It’s not a chatty show as such – these stories are presented as soliloquies, masterfully acted, and contain all the emotion of a feature film along the way – sure, it’s ostensibly a comedy show – but in addition to being truly funny it’s also heartfelt, sad, moving, tender.

In fact, these four true stories are consummately delivered – the cousins who get it on the Christmas Grandma is dying; the movie which hired him as continuity expert despite him having no clue what that meant; the one about visiting his formative years’ locations with his late Dad’s ashes; another about auditioning terribly for a major musical theatre production – collectively covering most human emotions in a wonderful celebration of what it is to be human, to be alive and feeling all the feels.

Sensationally life affirming.