Review – Coco The Time-Travelling Tart

The Yurt at The Courtyard of Curiosities at the Migration Museum

6/3/2026
 
I walked out of Coco the Time-Travelling Tart dazed, exhilarated, and a little wet. Then I was handed a loyalty card. It read: Attend five Coco Experiences and get the sixth FREE!
It’s the cleanest gag in a drag show that is otherwise irreverent and aggressively juvenile, where the line between performer and audience is gleefully skewered. 

Its success depends on how game the audience is. If stage fright is a problem, consider a gin and tonic before entering. I was glad I did. 

Make no mistake - you are the show, and anyone who attends six performances will have earned their free admission.

Coco, the alter ego of UK comedian Max Norman, is seven feet tall in stilettoes. The energy in the room shifts the moment she claps onto the stage in the dark. Clad in a blonde pixie-cut wig and a form-fitting black dress, she is a soft-spoken Brit who dispenses darlings as neatly as Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany's. 

She explains that she is a time traveller. We’ll soon discover that she is also a nymphomaniac and an alcoholic. With her as our guide, we are transported, via a series of ludicrously cheap props, to various times and places throughout history.

As we dart from the French Revolution to World War II London, the small audience cloistered inside The Yurt at the Migration Museum is arranged around Coco like an AA group ripe for the picking. No one is safe. One member of the audience is selected as her ‘slave boy’, another as her ‘driver’.

I was asked to improvise dialogue, mimic a dance, and plant a kiss. Another audience member ended up with Coco’s face buried in her crotch. At one point, a cunnilingus-performing pirate skeleton appears, and the entire audience is sprayed with vaginal ejaculate (it is actually a water gun).

This might all sound mortifying (and it is), but there is something disarming about Max Norman as an artist. An undercurrent of sweetness undercuts the vulgarity. There is a sense that Coco likes you, and because the jokes never come at your expense, it is easy to join in the fun.

Coco is at her funniest in the unscripted moments when she riffs off the audience. The show itself lacks narrative drive, throwing out one bizarre gag after another without taking us anywhere. But even once the time-travelling gimmick begins to wear thin and the show grows aimless, Coco the character remains an amusing spectacle. 

The audience I was with laughed uproariously, and by evening’s end we had become friends.

3 stars

Luke Kane
for Adelaide Review Team