Show reviewed: 03/03/26

Show rating: Roam if you want to, 5 stars!

Rachel Tunaley has created a deceptively upbeat story about finding out who you are and where home is through milestones of your young adulthood. Travelling has become a right of passage in particular for most Australian young adults in their mid-twenties and while Bali is a popular destination for many, Rachel Tunaley chose Western Europe like me. People travel for many reasons, but again like me, Rachel (and the Doctor) was running away from home the long way ‘round and all that she believes what coming from a small town limits her from experiencing. This is a fully sick trip.

However the plot-twist takes us to a dark place with Rachel, because the catalyst for her journey to Europe comes crashing down when she writes off her car, loses her job and is diagnosed with sleep apnea, a condition that impairs her breathing when she sleeps. She blithely says to the sleep specialist that she doesn’t need to take her breathing mask with her to Europe and the doctor points out she might want to have reliable friends around her then.

PSA Time: A sleep apnea sufferer’s breathing repeatedly stops and starts during sleep, causing low oxygen levels and fragmented rest can lead to things like excessive daytime fatigue; in fact, roughly 20-30% of all fatal crashes fatigue is a cause and just under a quarter of Australian drivers have experience fatigue while driving. Microsleeps are a phenomenon that can occur as brief, involuntary episodes of sleep or drowsiness lasting from a fraction of a second up to 30 seconds. Blanking out, starring into space, excessive blinking, head snapping, or not remembering the last few minutes are all signs of a micro sleep. A four second microsleep at 100 km/h means traveling 111 metres uncontrolled. This is not a journey meant to be taken alone and Rachel brings us along.

Back to Rachel, she takes her audience on a trip around the world with a wide variety of music parodied, and she keeps up an impressive pace of this energetic buzzing travel diary. As a production, Rachel engineered the backing track music herself, she moves with a joi de vivre, creating a narrative with both moments of levity and moments of pathos in her self deprecating sense of humour Al style. This was quite the cabaret treat as Tunaley is clever in characterisations, she has a beautiful voice and her she is a light in the world that she finds not in the friends that you make along the way, but the ones that welcome you at home.