There are many angles one could adopt for a comically inflected narrative about share housing. Playing for laughs based on those viscerally absurd or embarrassing moments that crop up amid the human chaos of drunken parties, thin walls, or mismatched personality types is an obvious choice. Another rich vein is satire and social commentary: the politics of economic precarity, dodgy landlords and what it means to live renting below the property ladder’s first rung.
And then, there are those ways in which share house memories provide perfect templates for exploring nostalgia. How the webs of social connection we weave between us become stories that circle back and forth, through beginnings and ends, without ever really finishing.
Nick Robertson’s Everything That Happened at Number 68 makes use of all these elements, although its overriding focus is on the nostalgic experience of looking back and retelling a “tapestry of vignettes” that become part of us, even as we must inevitably encounter new beginnings. What follows is a kind of contemporary update on the hard-edged mania of John Birmingham’s Gen X touchstone He Died with a Falafel in His Hand, here channelled through a more openly vulnerable, zillennial reflection on letting other people, and oneself, be “misfits” in their own way.
Robertson is a Melbourne-based performer and photographer, originally from regional Queensland by way of Brisbane, who makes a point of describing himself as both comedian and storyteller. While he makes effectively self-deprecating fun of this potentially opportunistic ‘hedge’ (“if you laugh tonight, I’m a comedian, but if you don’t laugh, I’m a storyteller”) the real significance in this role as teller of stories, not simply jokes, is that it allows space for a more affecting thematic and emotional palette. There is a modernist sensibility of fragmentary moments that nevertheless cohere into meaningful wholes, which runs through Robertson’s many creative and professional interests — his love of music and the way albums are structured, band and portrait photography, along with his merging of stand-up and storytelling.
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This is a writerly show, filled with beautifully poetic rhetorical motifs and, yes, some gags and puns as well, that emerge from the “boiling, bubbling water” of those remembered years to swirl around each other as Robertson’s tale moves through its interwoven chronology.
Some of the anecdotes he recounts are unbelievably relatable. The idea, for example, that those plumbing issues which plague rundown rental properties must be the result of irresponsible girls “clogging the pipes with tampons” rather than tree roots strangling ancient pipes, appears to be a myth universally adhered to by certain kinds of sexist, fix-it-themselves landlords and landladies.
Performing such a taut, coherently structured, and captivating monologue over fifty minutes is a challenging task. But despite occasional glitches in delivery, Robertson kept the audience engaged throughout — his warm, conversational style well suited to such an intimately furnished but fully packed venue. He hopes to offer a sense of “this extraordinarily mundane feeling of being at home in a house with yourself” and others, the world — well, everything, maybe — and by the end, he succeeds.
Nick Robertson: Everything That Happened At Number 68 is at The Library at Ayers House until March 1
Read more 2025 Adelaide Fringe coverage here on InReview