Show 48: Mae Martins: Dope

Mae Martin’s a veteran of comedy, despite being only 30 at the time – she had started stand-up at 15. She’s had plenty of time to hone her voice and really get to grips with her life and her material, which made for a brilliant, brutally honest but thoughtfully and deceptively light show about her serious drug addiction.

Martins explains how she’s always had an obsessive personality, from an infatuation with Bette Midler, to almost staling the local stand-up comedy participants to, finally, consuming and dealing drugs.

This is a very candid show, akin to ‘The Darkness of Robins’ dealt with in a similarly emotionally intelligent, deft but assured manner that encourages empathy but not pity from the audience. She brings in basic neuroscience of addiction to rationalise human behaviours of addiction and lays bare the wreckage she left when her adolescence all went a bit off the rails. It’s a really important show about the risks of seeking short-lived short-term pleasures, human faults and how easily it can all collapse and how hard it can be to come back from the brink of self-destruction, all with generous helpings of jokes and witty self-deprecation along the way.

Score: 9/10

Venue: The City Café