Review: Gillian Cosgriff at The Rechabite

Gillian Cosgriff – Fresh New Worries at Goodwill Club at The Rechabite
Thursday, February 13, 2025

Akin to a favoured perennial, comedian Gillian Cosgriff returned to Perth Fringe World with her brand new show, Fresh New Worries. Surrounded by a packed and boisterous crowd within the warmish depths of The Rechabite, Cosgriff very assuredly unpacked a literal Pandora’s Box of concerns and fears, some of which were contributed to by the audience themselves.

Cosgriff brought her previous comedy show, Actually, Good, to Fringe last year and asked her showgoers to write the good stuff. This year, feeling less optimistic, she requested their deepest worries instead. Cosgriff readily admitted that she wasn’t yet sure how best to fold this variety of audience interaction into the wider piece, but it was certainly as entertaining as the rest of the evening to see that being worked on and processed, live on stage.

With the polarisation of opinions, both political and cultural, that has accelerated all too quickly this past decade, Cosgriff brought people together on some of the big topics. This included the greatest snack food always being hot chips, and which Spice Girl was the best actual singer—woe betide anyone that suggested Posh.

Cosgriff related how her underlying anxiety had morphed from a sometimes threat to, on occasion, the very core of her being. She noted how she worried about worrying so much that it became an endlessly frustrating hamster wheel of perpetual motion. Cosgriff also revealed that the multiple meditation apps on her phone had the wrong voice and that she couldn’t relax to anyone other than a gruff authority figure.

A sold-out Thursday session evidenced that Melburnian Cosgriff has put in the hard yards over the past decade and a half to grow her interstate audience, and she certainly knew them well. Multiple calls and responses throughout the hour on various pop culture moments, usually nineties-based, were met with any combination of self-satisfied, slightly smug, or softly sardonic murmurs of agreement. Not to say there was ever any sense of meanness or punching down in the material, simply more so a conversational, relaxed tone in a safe place, with people who also shared a softly sardonic view of the world.

Cosgriff’s skill in how she mixed the comedy, the music, and the lyrics to the music was on full display. Also possessing a fabulous singing voice, she was very comfortable in all these spaces and came across as very relatable, both in the topics discussed and her stage persona overall.

Fresh New Worries was another delightful entry in Cosgriff’s extensive performance history and continued the high standard her fans readily expect. Whatever she brings across the Nullarbor for next year’s Fringe World is already a surefire, high-quality, near-automatic selection.

PAUL MEEK