Why Rose’s win is a big deal
Make no mistake, Rose Matafeo’s win for Best Comedy Show at this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe is a big deal.
It’s a cultural achievement up there with Keri Hulme’s The
Bone People winning the Man Booker Prize in 1985 and Whale
Rider taking home the audience award at the 2002 Toronto Film Festival.
Edinburgh attracts the cream of the stand-up world to the ‘‘northern Dunedin’’ every August and the past winners of the award (first given out in 1981) place Matafeo in some very illustrious company.
There’s Russell Kane, Tim Key, Dylan Moran, Al Murray, Rich Hall, Frank Skinner, as well as British acting heavyweights Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie and Emma Thompson, who were part of the Cambridge Footlights team that won the inaugural title.
The 26-year-old Matafeo, only the fifth woman to take out the award, received her $19,200 prize from another former winner Steve Coogan at the weekend’s ceremony.
‘‘I just wanted to do a fun, daft show,’’ Matafeo said of her show
Horndog. ‘‘I make comedy for women like me, in their 20s and looking for fun, and the response to the show has been amazing. I think a lot of women were going: ‘yeah, that’s me’.
‘‘They haven’t seen a lot of comedy like that before, and I think a lot have felt that comedy clubs were not very welcoming spaces for them. But I think that’s changing now.’’
Before her win, the show which debuted at the New Zealand International Comedy Festival in May, had received plenty of plaudits from the British press.
Writing for The Guardian, which has championed Matafeo’s comedy credentials in the past couple of years, Brian Logan described it as ‘‘another cracking show from a born comedian, a high-energy, highanxiety New Zealander whose party-comedy mixes emotional intimacy and uproarious good fun with a thread of unshowy feminism’’.
It was a sentiment echoed by the Edinburgh Festival’s awards director Nica Burns, who thought the ‘‘utterly original show’’ was ‘‘a totally hilarious spoof with a completely unexpected ending’’.
But while New Zealand can bask in this fabulous achievement by the performer with Samoan and ScottishCroatian heritage, it will probably result in us seeing even less of her on these shores.
Matafeo is likely to be in even higher demand, with the likes of the BBC no doubt keen to cash in on her increased cachet by commissioning a TV or radio series, a la the Flight of the Conchords or Wilson Dixon.
Then there’s America. While Kiwis have often struggled to break into the US market (Conchords aside), one only needs to look at the success of last year’s Comedy Award winner, Hannah Gadsby, whose Netflix special Nanette has become one of the most talked about shows on the streaming service this year.
But watch out Gadsby, because 2019 might just be when Matafeo goes global.
‘‘I think a lot of women were going: ‘yeah, that’s me’. They haven’t seen a lot of comedy like that before.’’ Rose Matafeo