Words: Trudy Lynn
Image: Alex Brenner

3 Stars 

Gabi Flares is clearly a talented performer. She has musicality, her movement skills are astounding, she can carry a one-woman show through pain and an unnerving smile. The show has two main analogies of grief – a ladder restricting her which she carries and water dripping in her home. There’s also a plethora of jam jars to represent the ex-partner.  

The tech and the venue work perfectly to present the water leaking and to create various jam-filled/water-flooded atmospheres. Flares plays with a loop pedal, her voice and keyboard to create soundscapes of grief. And she shows off her clowning talent particularly using the ladder.  

However, the show lacks either relatability or weight. Grief is isolating and reduces connection, so perhaps the disconnect from the audience is intentional. The participation is truly uncomfortable and perhaps is designed to show how hard it is to react to someone in such pain. But the show also shies away from heavy life-ending loss and therefore doesn’t deliver on the pathos either. Not to minimise heartbreak, which can feel so encompassing, but all the stories including losing pets and losing most of your ovaries, (forms of legitimate grief of course) take the focus away from losing a close loved one. Even in the story about the woman who lost her brother, the focus was on a broken toy she kept of his.  

It’s billed as a comedy so perhaps Deluge is a satire about women going mad when abandoned because they believe so whole-heartedly in this vision of fated love and negating themselves to make relationships work. Perhaps therefore framing a show on grief around heartbreak is a poignant statement about our society’s priorities. If so, it’s clever but it might be too subtle. 

Deluge
Big Belly at Underbelly 
15:30 
5 August – 30 August (not 18)