Response to My First and Last Solo Show by Natalie Rose

Respected arts commentator Dee Jefferson attended the world premiere of My First and Last Solo Show by Natalie Rose and was commissioned to write a response to the production. The work, in development since 2022, was presented at Campbelltown Arts Centre in September 2026 and received critical acclaim and enthusiastic audience responses. Read on for Dee’s response.

MY FIRST AND LAST SOLO SHOW

When her daughter Mabelle was 12, Nat Rose decided she wanted to make a show. Three years later, standing on stage performing that show alongside Mabelle, Nat tells the audience: “I remember looking at her and realising how little a 12-year-old is.”

Something, perhaps, was triggered in Nat when her daughter reached that age. Memories of her parents’ relationship ending when she was 12, and her dad moving out. “I had to take on a huge amount of responsibility in my family. Home life became dangerous,” she says. She stopped remembering what had happened before that pivotal moment – the good, the bad, the banal; her childhood.

My First and Last Solo Show is about trauma, memory, mothers and daughters and grandmothers and granddaughters. It’s very funny; occasionally excruciatingly raw; incredibly tender – and equally irreverent. It’s packaged in an anarchic mix of monologue, interactive theatre, dance routines, deadpan humour and verbatim text that will be familiar to anyone who knows Nat as one third of legendary Sydney performance collective POST.

On a stage hung with gauzy peach-coloured scrims, Nat and Mabelle re-enact conversations – word- and rhythm-perfect – that took place during car rides and Maccas drive-thru runs, about fashion, teen embarrassments and regrets; attempts at motherly advice. They break the fourth wall to address the audience. They dance. They put us through our paces, mid show, with a quiz about what we’ve seen.

The purpose of her not-so-solo show, Nat tells us near the top, is to both safeguard and create some happy childhood memories for Mabelle; a gift from mother to daughter. Like memory itself, this is only partly accurate.

Somewhere in between conceiving the show three years ago and now, Nat’s mum was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and there’s a current of anxiety thrumming under the work: the sense that Nat, 45, is creating a bulwark against her own future forgetting. What started as a solo show, then became a duet between mother and daughter, finally became a series of conversations between the respective pairings of mother and daughter, with Nat’s mum represented on stage in her own words – spoken by Mabelle, or via recorded audio.

In the conversations between Nat and her mum, and in Nat’s monologues, there’s a sense of the performer scratching through the rubble of memory to find gleaming fragments from her childhood – the good, the bad, the banal. Watching her mum teach physical culture in the living room and work the make-up counter at Clarins in Roselands. Remembering her grandparents’ home in Lugarno. A childhood tantrum about a restaurant. Phone calls from an unknown man, for her mother, on the family phone line. A man who looked like Slash, having sex with someone in the bathroom during a NYE party at the family home.

There’s another thread of anxiety running through the show, too: how to be a good mum. How to be a better mum than your own. How to not repeat the failures of the past.

These undercurrents reveal themselves gradually (though the pile of broken plaster ceiling and wall mouldings front-right of stage is a foreboding sign). Nat’s special skill as a performer is to so thoroughly disarm the audience – with her deadpan affect, endearing mix of irreverence and earnestness, and lack of pretension – that you don’t see the punch till it’s landed in your guts.

Mabelle, who got her start at Shopfront Arts Co-op in Carlton (where Nat is artistic director) and made her professional debut with the critically acclaimed docu-theatre show POV, is a charismatic and comedic performer in her own right. There’s something captivatingly authentic in her slightly affectless stream-of-consciousness delivery of the in-car dialogue, including diatribes about her 12 year old self (a “cringe little weird kid”) and teenage fashion (how “Nike techs” fits are the “ugliest thing in the world”).

Switching gears, Mabelle stands in for her own grandmother in re-enactments of conversations between her and Nat, uncannily replicating the odd rhythms, verbal loops and tics, and incomplete phrasings that are characteristic of Alzheimer’s.

The sense that we are watching a teen partnering and supporting her mother in reenacting this emotionally fraught material is incredibly moving. Here and elsewhere in the show, the idea of a parent-child hierarchy is destabilised.

More than this, the whole show feels like an act of destabilisation: of the hierarchy between theatre and reality, performer and audience, memory and truth.

The result is generous towards its audience, and empowering. A porous, collective experience that invites us to not only witness this act of rememory, but bring our own experiences into conversation with Nat’s and Mabelle’s, and ponder our own wounds. A show that wraps those tender investigations in laughter and joy and daggy dancing, and a cheesy cover of Icehouse’s Electric Blue.

And a show that says everyday moments and conversations between teen girls, middle-aged mums and older women, and the ordinary details of their lives, have every bit as much claim on the spotlight as anything on our mainstages.

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Dee Jefferson is a writer, editor, arts journalist and critic living and working on Cammeraygal and Gadigal country.