Show reviewed:16/03/26

Show rated: 4.5 stars

Sweeney Preston has claimed and inconclusively proven himself to be Australia’s Worst Journalist at this Adelaide Fringe Festival. Last night, he claimed to me that he has created a more modern version of slam poetry – also inconclusively. While there is poetry by Sweeney in this show, it definitely isn’t slam poetry let alone by a single man. A poetry slam is a much maligned competitive poetry event that is often high energy and deals with what I think of as poetic anthems across a diverse range of subjects from personal, social and political themes.

It is often scored by random judges (Spoken Word SA throws chocolate at people to judge at ours!) Slams are frequently mocked as the pastime of old punk beat poets and woke university students. I confess I am a spoken word poet but I don’t compete in the arena of slam poetry because I’ve inflicted enough of my T-Swift, white girl crying flavour word-crimes on Adelaide at the monthly at open mics (Ask me how!)

What Sweeney’s production in One Man Stand Up Comedy Slam Poetry Supershow is a wonderfully witty comedy set that relies on clever wordplay and a sense of fun with the English language. Preston was much more relaxed as he recounts his poems among the comedic anecdotes from his life and I prefer this less polished version of him than when I reviewed him for his show, Australia’s Worst Journalist. 

The audience definitely enjoyed themselves and a highlight for me is that Sweeney actually used extant poetry forms in his parodies of poems such as On the Ning Nang Nong by Spike Milligan, explained the concept of found poems and clearly had definitely studied it during his final year of university (I did too but I absolutely hated it back then!) This is a work in development that I hope comes back in some form to Adelaide in future festivals and that Sweeney engages the local poetry community and book worms as audiences because they would eat him up.