There’s almost always a blurry line between fact and fiction in a comedy show. When a comedian talks about a funny thing that happened to them on the way to the gig that thing might have happened years ago. Or an incident that they say happened to them might have happened to a friend and it was so hilarious they just had to borrow it. Or maybe they just made something up and pretended it was real.

Australian stand-up Lou Wall’s show Breaking The Fifth Wall messes with your head but in a mind-bendingly funny way. You come out dazed but in a good way, going “what did I just see?”. This makes her sound like a magician but she is merely a magical storyteller, weaving together various incidents to tell a marvellously madcap account of recent events in her life.

It all started, she explains, when she decided to give away an unwanted bed frame on Facebook Marketplace. What should have been an easy transaction which helped someone out and saved Wall a trip to the dump in the process quickly turned into a mix of Franz Kafka and haggling in a street market. Wall recounts heated late night negotiations over a freebie with the aid of screengrabs of texts. Oh, and she sets it to music too.

From there things continues to spiral off, which apart from anything else, makes me vow never to use Facebook Marketplace again. To say too much would spoil the fun, but the fast-talking comic takes the audience down a very deep rabbit hole, a veritable rollercoaster ride exploring what is real and what is unreal. 

But it’s not just the story that keeps you laughing, it’s the way she tells it, switching skilfully between fast-paced multi-media Ted Talk lecture format and straight stand-up storytelling. We live in a world, she notes, where truth has become a malleable, mutable thing, from art to politics, and she has the graphs to illustrate it.

She might be self-mocking at times, but Wall is totally on top of things, skilfully pushing the story further and further. As she teasingly explains, she doesn’t just break the fourth wall, she breaks the fifth one too. And if there was a sixth one she'd probably smash that as well. 

Read more reviews here.

Until August 24. Tickets and info here.

****