Angus Gordon’s The Mole is not a show about a mole. In fact, you may forget completely about the fact that it is about a mole until Angus mentions it, more than halfway through the show, after a series of rambling monologues about his witch sister, agricultural crime, and the defecating habits of homeless Melburnians.
Mole or no mole, this is not stand-up one would go into expecting a consistent theme, narrative, or morale. Nothing remains constant in The Mole but Angus’ flat-line poker face, as he glares at the audience with a gaze that reads somewhere between steely ennui and lifeless despair. Angus slides from one alarming shower thought to another, segueing off offbeat anecdotes into in-depth asides, intermittently berating the audience for feedback. His crowd work, at its best, is subdued savagery – during the show this reviewer went to, audience inattention is aptly punished; a noisy, late arrival is given the appropriate evisceration. Pity to the man on whom Angus rests his sour gaze.
Angus’ whimsical nihilism is seamlessly organic in his almost unceasing deadpan, and the show plays mostly like a conversation with a particularly witty friend. The flow, however, lags a little when Angus begins reading from his printed material – a handful of crumpled A4 pages on which he has written a few bizzare stories, which he reads out like a bored high school history teacher – which falls a little flat considering Angus’ dangerously soporific voice.
But Angus’ flashes of horror, surrealism, and tragedy, with which he treats with wonderfully flippant apathy, keeps the 50-minute set crackling. And the part with the mole, when it comes, is ludicrous and superb.