“The shed is full; I’m clearing it out; the shed will never be empty.
my mum was the best; my mum was the worst.”
A modern gothic tale of grief, tenderness and myth-making after loss.
A NEW SOLO CABARET WORK FROM DELIA OLAM
Fresh from the Adelaide Fringe festival, South Australian artist Delia Olam is an award-winning cabaret performer, musician, and theatre maker with another original tour-de-force solo show that is bound to thrill your ears, warm your heart, and move you (as always) to tears.
Saturday 25 October
6.30 pm
Kings Chapel
130 Bellarine Hwy, Newcomb
Performance: approx 60 min.
General Admission $25 (Concession $20)
Follow the link below to purchase tickets
Swedish Death Cleaning vs EVERYTHING (the shed) – Geelong
Artist’s comments
This play is tailored to village audiences from 9 to 99 – for all who are curious about the questions that arise from loss and the process of myth-making that occurs afterwards but perhaps especially resonant with anyone who has experienced the grief of loss – especially of a parent or grandparent, and/or for those who have begun to think about how they might arrange their own affairs for an inevitable end.
It was inspired by Delia’s personal experience over 3 years since her mum suddenly died – sorting through, on the one hand a literal shed FULL with a life’s worth of special interests and curiosities, and – on the other hand a more metaphorical ‘shed’ of memories and “every story ever told about my mum” – including the ones she told about herself (via diaries from different decades of her life) and trying to make sense of and reconcile how different people experienced her so wildly differently from each other and she experienced herself another way again entirely.
It became a kind of modern gothic tale in which it appears that Delia is endlessly sorting boxes yet the shed is still (and always will be) full and in which the strange privilege of choosing what her mum’s legacy will be, is shared with the audience (‘cast’ upon entry into the theatrical space, as “friends” who have come over to “help with sorting the shed”). The choosing is done via the radical ethos/device of Swedish Death Cleaning (“select only what is most essential or most meaningful, and let the rest move on”) and the use of Delia’s mum’s infinite collection of miniatures – used here as keepers of story.
There is spoken word poetry, live music (original and ‘popular’ – if you were a teen of the 70s) on guitar and dulcimer, immersive relaxed interaction between performer and audience and touching on themes of not only grief, loss and myth-making but also the generational trauma related to undiagnosed neurodivergence, how that affects identity and the stories a person believes of themselves, and what that means to the stories that are ultimately chosen to be kept and shared.
It’s a show that inspires tenderness and a desire to sit and yap afterwards and share and reflect; a show that “makes space” for grief, and feeling it, which – as it turns out – is a far too rare thing; and it does so in a way that is far less scary than most of us may think.
It’s one of those shows that manages to be incredibly personal about an experience that is truly universal and becomes a beautiful invitation to reflect upon and to cherish – life!
Media from 2025 Adelaide Fringe season
Article:
festmag.com Shedding Tears – Fest mag
Review:
list.co.uk Swedish Death Cleaning vs EVERYTHING (the shed.) theatre …
