Astor Theatre
June 22, 2012
She’s a darlin’ girl,
Camille O’Sullivan, but I wouldn’t share a house with her. The lounge room
floor littered with discarded clothes, booze stashed everywhere, tables covered
in knick-knacks, those meows and shrieks she comes out with, and that
unsettling way of hers, part Nigella Lawson part Jane Horrocks.
She’d have a crackin’ record
collection, mind.
Both sides of O’Sullivan,
the nightmare housemate and the brilliant musical auteur, were on display at
the Astor Theatre last Thursday during a flying visit to Perth after a stint at the Adlelaide Cabaret Festival.
The somewhat ramshackle
first half suffered from a misplaced sound mix and O’Sullivan’s mannered
eccentricities. They fit her mixed-up, shook-up Irish-French persona, but they
do little for the songs she interprets. And, really, the eight numbers before
interval didn’t need zany embellishment. A couple of less-travelled Nick Caves
(Oh My Lord and The One I’ve Been Waiting For), Tom Waits’s The Briar and the
Rose, and a brace of carnal women’s songs (Bessie Smith’s Sugar in My Bowl and
Kirsty MacColl’s In These Shoes) were mighty. Best of all was her unaccompanied
howl of Jacques Brel’s The Port of Amsterdam, stripped of its
Gauloises-and-accordionated charm and dumped, semen-stained and bloody, in an
alley behind the docks.
