Yoz waits at a train station, holding a sad phone screen reading ‘Pa’. This is our opening image for Yoz Mensch’s Adelaide Fringe’s transfer of ‘My Grandpa Doesn’t Follow Me On Instagram’. We follow Yoz’s real account of her trip with her grandpa up to the north of Scotland to see where her grandma’s ashes are scattered.
This work sits somewhere between autobiographical recount, travel guide and monologue. If you go into this show, do not expect your traditional theatre structure. There are no big reveals, no moments of revelation, no gotchas, no act 3 climaxes. Instead we are pulled in for a journey that can only be described as one hell of a ride.
As mentioned previously, what’s unique in particular about this work is the fact that it is real, well, mostly. Yoz’s story is accompanied by real images, videos and sound bites of her actual trip to Scotland. The script leans into this, it’s almost verbatim in this sense. When we step away from the verbatim recount of it all, Mensch’s comedy really shines. They slip between anecdotes with humour and keep the audience hooked. However, this is also where the show falls into lulls. We slip into the glovebox of the car for a bit of 1-1 with the audience which felt clunky at times and did disrupt the flow on several occasions. Jumping back and forth between anecdotes, car rides, glovebox can send your head spinning. There is no release of tension, no climax, no perfect ending and perhaps that’s the beauty of the work. That we’re not an audience but friends of Yoz listening to her recount her memories, the videos and images keeping us grounded. When I said it’s a ride, I really did mean it. These lulls were easy to look past as Yoz drags the audience into a new anecdote without time to waste.
