Tania Lacy’s standup show, Catch a Falling Star, is performed to an empty room and available on demand throughout the Edinburgh fringe. That’s a Covid measure, of course, but the absent audience is appropriate to the story Lacy has to tell: of the former “naughty child of Australian television” whose fame has long since abandoned her. Now “a postmenopausal straight white woman with a Facebook page”, Lacy takes to the stage to recall a career that found her choreographing and starring in Kylie’s Locomotion video, and co-hosting an anarchic pop music show with another Neighbours alumnus, Mark Little. Both were fired after staging an on-air strike.
Lacy’s show seethes with the injustices inflicted on her for being a funny and outspoken woman ahead of her time. The industry, it seems, exploited her then cast her out. Heroin addiction followed. In the early stages of the show, this all sounds a bit self-justifying, as Lacy sings her own praises with minimal self-irony. That isn’t redeemed, as celebrity memoirs often are, by any nostalgic pleasure of our own; few British viewers will have seen any of the telly Lacy is talking about. Nor do the jokes compensate: from the anthropomorphic drugs roleplay to the confused aside about Louis CK, they are not Lacy’s strong suit.
What rescues the show, finally, is our host’s refusal to parrot the usual cliches about fame. You’d expect her have moved on and matured, but Lacy still appears to long for the love of strangers and the leeway it affords to be as crazy as she pleases. I found that a bracingly honest and off-message conclusion, albeit to a show that is bigger on self-projection than laughs.
