Up to this evening, I had been under the misapprehension that the Penguin Classics – that global bookshelf of iconic titles in cheap-as-chips paperbacks – were written by people.
Not so. A short documentary clip aired during this performance put me straight: they’re not written by people, but by penguins. Emperor penguins, to be precise. And Garry Starr is … kinda … one of them; a French-accented, top-hat-and-frock-coat-wearing (but otherwise butt-naked) penguin on a last-ditch mission to convince humankind of the value of “leet-ter-raa-tura”.
Garry Starr. Photo Matt Crockett
A hit in Edinburgh in 2024 (it’s heading back there this year) and winner of the Best Show gong at the Melbourne Comedy Festival in 2025, Garry Starr: Classic Penguins is low comedy for high brows, using some of the great novels of the past 200 years as a springboard into an hour of brilliantly orchestrated stunt-comic mayhem.
Sometimes a book’s title inspires a throwaway line or stunt; at other times, it inspires more complex routines (Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, for example) that draw audience members onstage for chaotic scenes blending improv with gross-out comedy. Kudos to those who volunteered to be “fed” mushed-up grapes by Starr’s mama penguin, strip naked for a riff on Kipling’s The Jungle Book, or don a surgical glove to retrieve Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, missing since the beginning of the show.
Seating around 500 in this configuration, Bay 17 is a big room for a solo performer, but Warren-Smith has it completely under his control. He is a master of obtaining audience consent, at one point orchestrating a nude crowd-surf, and though his stunts are pretty full-on at times, they feel neither exploitative nor gratuitous.
Starr, by the way, is the comedy alter ego of actor, writer and clown Damien Warren-Smith, one of many notable Australian graduates of the feared and revered École Philippe Gaulier in Paris – where clowning is rooted in the philosophy that comedy begins with the pleasure of being ridiculous rather than merely telling jokes.
Expressive and strikingly athletic, Warren-Smith’s pleasure in the form is palpable. There’s genuine joy in his work, and his enthusiasm quickly infects his audience to the point where we all feel involved and committed to Starr’s gloriously ridiculous literary mission.
Garry Starr: Classic Penguins plays at Carriageworks, Eveleigh, Sydney until 5 July.
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