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Hannah Gadsby hates walking. Anywhere. She’s slow, it's boring, and other walkers are plain annoying. Despite this, she chose to walk from one side of rainy England to the other, minus her antidepressants and wearing a pair of non-waterproof boots. Gadsby’s walk is every bit as eventful as it sounds, and her recount of it, in combination with her humorous introspection, is one that not only has the audience in near continuous laughter, but also takes them on quite a journey.

A great deal of Gadsby’s material is reflective of her own experiences and thoughts and her view of herself is as astute and blunt as it is of others. Her self-deprecation is also rather charming; one of only a very few reasons she could think of for doing this walk was that in doing something slightly remarkable, she would in turn become slightly remarkable. Unfortunately, she says, it doesn’t really work like that.

Despite being relatively young (she is in her thirties) Gadsby is an unlikely candidate for the trek. She’s a heavy drinker and smoker and she’s accident prone; too often she has smashed herself and her bicycle into parked cars and she once sprained her wrist whilst planting a small tree. Her body shape, she says, is for child bearing rather than walking, and certainly not for walking at a pace that is any faster than a shuffle. And so, tongue-in-cheek, she likens herself on this walk to Cliff Young – the sixty something year old potato farmer who twenty odd years ago, at a much slower pace than his fellow walkers, incredibly won the Ultra Marathon walking from Sydney to Melbourne.

For days on end Gadsby had nothing to do but walk, so The Cliff Young Shuffle is a show about what went on inside, and outside, of her head and body over this time. Within her there’s the talking voices and fibres, and a few of them are downright rude. There’s also the loneliness and her re-discovery of emotions, not to mention the sheer physical pain. However, what she finds most irritating, and painful, are the hikers she meets along the way. There are the seasoned hikers, the fit young families, the old men, and the physically disabled. They all pass her with ease, making unhelpful comments as they do so, and Gadsby has a less than nice name for every one of them.

Gadsby, and her style of delivery, is naughty and impolite, but above all, she is a wonderful storyteller. It’s one thing for a comedian to have their audience hanging on to every word in expectation of the punch line, but in this show, the audience is enthralled because they genuinely want to know what happens next, they actually care where Gadsby’s walk will take her. Along the way, Gadsby diverts from her main story only a few times, but each instance she recounts, primarily related to her struggle with depression and debilitating anxieties, reveals a little more about her. For all their funniness, they are saddening. Although Gadsby can think of so many reasons NOT to do the walk (she lists these with ease), it is these asides that reveal a few very important, very real reasons as to why she did.

There wasn’t a great deal of fuss made over Gadsby’s walk, but then that’s not her style. In fact, she didn’t even tell anyone she was doing it. Along the way however, she discovered that, unlike her feet, she is a hell of a lot tougher than she thinks. She may also have hated every moment on that walk, but for her audience, who in this show are taken with her, it is a walk that must be taken.


A Token Event
The Cliff Young Shuffle
Hannah Gadsby

Venue: Melbourne Town Hall, Cloak Room | Cnr Swanston & Collins Sts, Melbourne
Dates: 25 March - 18 April, 2010
Times: Tue - Sat 7pm, Sun 6pm
Duration: 60 minutes
Tickets: All Tix Sat $24.90, Full $24.90, Concession $21.90 (n/a Sat), Tightarse Tuesday $19.90
Bookings: Ticketmaster 1300 660 013 | at the door
Visit: www.hannahgadsby.com.au