All a-bawd for games

STRAP in for a “fun night on the booze playing naughty games” in a 19th century pub with Ryk Goddard’s comedy musical, The Sailor and the Bawd.

Described as the “darkest, most bent, most depraved dive into Hobart’s musical entertainment history”, writer and director Goddard said the show would be “massively entertaining and fun”.

“It’s like you’ve turned up for a night at the pub run by the sailor and the bawd and they’re going to make sure you have a great time and spend lots of money on the period cocktails we are creating,” he said.

The show features authentic songs and parlour games people would sing and play for entertainment in the port of Hobart in the 1800s.

“All these parlour games are ways people were allowed to publicly touch each other, and then if you imagine that that’s how respectable people did games, you can imagine people who didn’t care would take those games a lot further. “So we do that a little bit in our show.” The show is set in one of Australia’s oldest pubs, Hobart’s Hope and Anchor Tavern, and is part of Festival of Voices.

The cast includes Kristian Byrne as a man who has run away from being press-ganged to join the circus as a bearded lady, Anna Kidd as a woman dressed as a man who has run away to sea, and Oliver Cassidy as the accompanist and kangaroo skin-clad bushranger.

“They are incredible talents,’’ Goddard said. “What they have never had is a licence to cause this much trouble directly with and to an audience.”

He said the show “gets a bit deep” considering different perspectives of Australia’s history, “but mainly it’s about f---ing and singing”.

“It’s just really rude and fun and you will sing and you will play games,” Goddard said.

The Sailor and the Bawd runs at Hope and Anchor Tavern from today until Saturday, then from July 9-11.

Tickets are $39 from festivalofvoices.com.