Review: Whiplash

Scott Wings, a Melbourne-based spoken word performer, has won awards for his previous show Icarus Falling. And it is easy to see why – he uses no props, and his show is entirely without ornament save for some musical interludes and basic lighting changes. Yet for much of his show he has the audience transfixed.

He delivers the material with a Jim Carrey-esque knack for physical comedy. Given his extreme physicality as a performer, it makes sense that in the first portion of the show he takes a look at the body and its processes. Each body part is its own character. Think Disney and Pixar's Inside Out if the protagonist was a 35-year-old man haunted by bad relationships and life choices. A segment towards the end of the show, in which Wings takes aim at the deluge of pointless information on social media, is another highlight.

Wings’ rich use of language and his raucously foul comedic sensibility gives balance to his self-help-style material. Material that could, in other hands, be a load of saccharine new-age codswallop laden with well-worn platitudes about finding yourself and following your heart, ad nauseam. But here it manages to be raw and irreverently funny – a rare treat for the genre.