Fiona O'Loughlin in Don't Get Me Started

Don't get her started, 'cause once she does you'll never want her to stop.

Fiona O'Loughlin has always been a storyteller, but only when the time is right for the stories she wants to tell. Despite the public ups and downs of her life she's not always comfortable handling some of the difficult stuff, making her comedy all the more poignant when she does pull out some stories of her darker periods.

This particular performance begins on a note quite out of touch with her life, as the introduction to Don't Get Me Started is given by Greg Fleet, an old friend of hers forced to cover for Fiona while she's in the loo. He tells a story of the way they met, which sets the tone for the show (a toned-down extravaganza on Fiona's life) perfectly.

When the lady star of the show finally arrives onstage she launches into a defensive tirade on the fact that she really does love her kids, despite once accidentally leaving her baby at Liquorland. She then branches out into more worldly observations of kids in general and introduces us to her friend 'Crazy Jasmine'. Jasmine is Fiona's rough-as-guts childhood friend from Tennant Creek, who protected her all through boarding school with her no-nonsense attitude and then passed all that onto her children, culminating in Fiona's story of Jasmine's child shouting a few choice words at a doctor trying to examine him.

Within Fiona's story about boarding school and Jasmine, she comes to the realisation that from thirteen years of education she's learned only two things, neither of which are useful. She's learned more outside of school that she ever learned in it, for example she can recite the entirety of a speech from Princess Diana's funeral, which unsurprisingly is useful never.

From boarding school she moves onto stories about living with alcoholism, and abusing relationships with other women in rehab just for cigarettes (then accidentally abusing them with the mobile phone she doesn't know how to use). Mentions of her alcoholism come up frequently, but only the ones she's comfortable enough to tell, which shows both how much she's moved on from the lows of her life and how much they continue to follow her.

After this she moves onto living in general, reusing old jokes about watching Oprah and Doctor Phil as counterpoint to the few times she actually got up off the couch and did things with her husband. Fiona's increasingly erratic delivery of a bland conversation between Oprah and one of her guests ("So you wrote a book?" "I wrote a book, Oprah!") contrasts perfectly with the mental image of Fiona's husband dressing in drag just so Fiona would have a female friend after she moved to the Northern Territory.

Overall Fiona's performance flows throughout her life and her observations on the world brilliantly, always coming close to hitting the lowest of her lows, but bringing everything right back up and ending on a blinding high.