Named best newcomer at this year's Melbourne international comedy festival, and one part of Australian cult troupe Pig Island, Claudia O'Doherty is part of comedy's whimsical generation of twentysomethings who put playschool props and winsomeness where jokes used to be. Her show Monsters of the Deep 3D is characteristic: it tells a kooky story with oodles of charm, but does so in a wilfully infantile fashion. Imagine a 12-year-old giving a presentation about the lost land of Atlantis and you won't be far away.
The conceit is that O'Doherty is the last survivor of Aquaplex, an undersea community created by the world's governments in 1978 and destroyed in an explosion 30 years later. The city's designer introduces his architectural model and gets irritated (very amusingly) by the failure of his requested dramatic music to arrive on cue. Then O'Doherty details the city's culture. Those selected to live undersea – "the perfect combination of brainiacs and hunks", she tells us – ate whale meat, frolicked on submersible sea bikes and worshipped a giant jellyfish called Blimblam.
This is good stuff, as far as it goes: one wants to know more about this utopianism on the ocean floor. But O'Doherty's imagined world feels like it was dreamed up in five minutes. The carol she sings to mark Aquaplex's Christmas-equivalent, Emotionas, is just a waffly collection of words – as if to actually write something good would betray the conventions of this faux-naive school of comedy. There's a hint later that O'Doherty's character is close to a breakdown, but again she pulls back – for fear, perhaps, of encountering something too grown-up. I like naive charm as much as anyone: when O'Doherty distributes handmade "dream helmet" headsets through which we watch her show's denouement, it's very winning. But here, "childlike" risks being an excuse for "underdeveloped".
