Fringe review: Culture Reporter
Sweeney Preston brings a comical crossover of his public works as a journalist and his private exploits with past lovers to Arthur Arthouse. ★★★★1/2
If you live in Adelaide, your name is Grace, and you’ve dated Sweeney Preston, this show might be an emotional minefield, or the closure you never asked for. For everyone else, it is a hilariously raw and painfully all-too-familiar deep dive into loving and learning as a young person in your 20s.
Culture Reporter (A Story of Breaking News & Broken Hearts) centres around the intersection of Preston’s early career working for a pop culture news publication as a relationships and dating columnist and his tumultuous dating life throughout his self-described “fuccboi era”.
Preston takes the audience through his dating anthology while sprinkling in snippets of the publicly available pieces of hard-hitting journalism he was releasing at the time. Walkey-worthy gems like ‘Airport Crush TikToks Are Viral AF So Why Do We Romanticise Meeting The Perfect Stranger There?’ take on an almost prophetic irony when one is sitting in an Adelaide Airport lounge, sipping on a soy latte, fresh from a breakup with Grace from Adelaide.
Preston may have single-handedly exposed the news industry’s descent into churnalism as he reveals he was writing hot-topic dating advice pieces whilst his own love life was “in the toilet”; from Preston, we not only learn that Capricorns and Geminis are supposedly not compatible, but that journalism is one-third confidence, one-third having a platform, and one-third hoping no one asks you for your personal credentials. Preston reflects that as a journalist, he was “selling the dream, living the reality”. It’s honest revelations like this one, paired with biting irony, that make this show so captivating.
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The three by four metre theatre-masquerading Zoltan box at the Arthur Arthouse provides a fitting venue for the debut solo hour where Preston encapsulates a tried and tested Fringe adage: if you can’t cry about it, you might as well laugh. A strength of the material is Preston’s willingness to divulge — the saucy, the sad, and the sex — with an intimate group of total strangers. Even when collectively lured into a space of vulnerability and solemn reflection, Preston artfully brings the audience back to a punchline, never allowing the self-pity of a heartbreak to overshadow this cathartic comedy.
We can only speculate as to why Preston’s relationships haven’t worked out because, at least in the hour we spent with him, he was effortlessly charming and magnetic. His brazen wit and personable honesty commanded the room, making audience members feel more like close confidants. Preston’s instinctive comedy pacing, coupled with his engrossing storytelling, culminated in a performance that felt both polished and off-the-cuff — a significant achievement for a debut solo show. If a man like Preston is struggling to date in the digital age, then I fear for the rest of us.
Culture Reporter (A Story of Breaking News & Broken Hearts) continues at Arthur Arthouse until March 23
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