THEY don’t call this the city of festivals for nothing. The Melbourne International Arts Festival launches this week but there are still a couple of days to catch a few pearls from Fringe Festival.

Comfort Zone by Cosmic Players is one such work. Produced by play writes Darren Brealey and Stuart Pursell this fringe piece has the local theatre scene firmly in it’s sights and it pulls no punches. Funding bodies, egomaniacally artistic directors, green playwrights all get a good ribbing.

The play itself was born out of frustration of Brealey and Pursell in gaining support from the theatre industry. One slap in the face too many and they’ve put it all in a play. The end result is a thespian take in the manner of Mark Latham diaries.

The farce unfolds in the admin office of a local theatre company on the eve of news of the latest funding round. Artistic director Deirdre James is ropable to learn her sexual favours for arts funding have backfired. Not only is the Arts Minister not coming to the swish pre season launch, but also there will be no money.

The great strength of the Melbourne Fringe Festival is in giving performance space to new, untried works. It is difficult to imagine a play like Comfort Zone gaining a season, let alone an appreciative audience, at another time. Don’t expect gay soapbox theatre from these playwrights. Comfort Zone is rampantly heterosexual and that’s one of its strengths. It comes across as a bitter drag queen take on the whole incestuous theatre world. Double-ended dildos in the filing cabinet, ejaculate dressing on hot dogs, weak bladders, post coital cigarettes every 5 min.

The humour is pitch black and if you needed an argument for ‘gay sensitivity’ in the arts, here it is. All the performers have a ball, hamming up their respective roles. Alexis Beebe as Deirdre James is a standout, playing the over sexed artistic director like a frisky she goat in pursuit of a horny mate. As the struggling playwright, Izeqiel McCoy definitely has the X factor.

In Comfort Zone, Cosmic Players have delivered a rare gem in the hit and miss festival game – a piece of new theatre that is hilariously self-referential and thematically bold.

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