Alice Fraser's latest show, Empire, expands on the themes explored in Savage and The Resistance: family, her strange upbringing, and the moral complexity of contemporary life.
As she told us in 2015, “How do you get someone to stare for an hour into the abyss? You pack it full of punchlines, get enough laughs per minute that they feel good about it, and call it a comedy show.”
Seems to be working.
Fraser, who famously ditched law for stand-up, had her breakthrough in 2015 with her show Savage, about the death of her mum. Having honed Savage over the previous 18 months around Australian festivals, she took it to Edinburgh and had the chief comedy reviewer at the Scotsman raving about “a truly extraordinary show” with “wonderful chunks of musical surrealism, feminism, religious philosophy and tragedy.”
She has one of the smartest perspectives on comedy in Australia.