Review: The Distraction by the Umbilical Brothers at QPAC

Last night the Umbilical Brothers made QPAC's Playhouse theatre their comedy arena, armed with two green screens and an ginormous screen smack-bang in the middle of it. Combining the spectacle of cinema, live performance and physical humour, comedians Shane Dundas and David Collins show that technology shows no boundaries by performing a series of bits through green-screened live-streams; gluing our eyes to the screen up above whilst the performers are running up and down the stage with cameras and, more frequently or not a baby two.Although, it does make you wonder whether you watching a show through a screen whilst the comedians are acting it out underneath the screen is truly a live experience. That's some food for thought...

Oh yes. The show had a lot of babies - in space, pretending to be the shark in JAWS, being all sorts of things you kick or hit in sports in a recurring Baby Sports segment to a very mundane, cot setting in which a baby finally calls it's Dad (Collins) Daddy, but with an upward inflection. Truth be told, I ended up losing count of exactly how many baby bits there were. I'm sensing that one of the comedians may have a baby fetish...

The audience interaction was top notch, with the brothers doing some digital ventriloquism; projecting mouths onto the mouths of the audience members and moving them up and down as they pleased. Quite a few audience member's had their heads exploded by the end of the show and the entirety of the playhouse audience was featured many a times on the big screen.

Techie Doug is quite possibly the most talented guy I've ever seen in my life, as he made all of these fun, colourful and often quite catastrophic events happen on the screen all from his little nook on stage. A fan favourite, and by a fan favourite I mean my favourite, was the two comedians getting electrocuted multiple times while Circle of Life played in the background and the Lithuanian sequence in which multiple Shane's and David's were projected onto the screen doing synchronised movements.

The show is unlike any comedy show I've ever seen. It's brilliant, clever and very, very funny. Can't wait to see what the boys do next.

Rating: Five Stars

Tickets: https://www.qpac.com.au/event/umbilical_brothers_21/

Photography by Gavin D. Andrew

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