Review: Jeromaia Detto – Giuseppe’s Love Quest at The Pleasure Garden
Jeromaia Detto – Giuseppe’s Love Quest at The Hat Trick at The Pleasure Garden
Friday, January 23, 2026
Packed tightly into the Hat Trick tent for an early show, Giuseppe’s Love Quest unfolded under rare Fringe conditions: a comfortably cool day without the usual stickiness that turns these tents feral. Bodies were close, exits were few, and intimacy was unavoidable—an ideal petri dish, as it turned out, for a show that thrived on proximity, eye contact, and the gentle dismantling of social defences.
The set was spartan to the point of near-absence: a scaffold rather than a scene. Its function became clear as soon as Jeromaia Detto entered without dialogue, letting his character Giuseppe do the heavy lifting. This was a show built not on spectacle but on presence—on improvisation, riffing, and the room itself. As Giuseppe drifted in with coy innocence, making deliberate eye contact with almost everyone before offering felt roses to lucky punters, the tone was established early: tender, ridiculous, and disarmingly sincere.
A tarantella-like tune—part Zorba the Greek bop, part mechanical wind-up—seemed to propel Giuseppe forward like a robot animated by music alone. It was subtle, charming, and crucially affectionate. The accent never tipped into parody; instead, it read as the familiar cadence of someone who had spent years around Italian uncles, absorbing their rhythms with warmth rather than mockery.
The central question—“What is love?”—was posed with awkward earnestness, and from there Detto’s improvisational chops became increasingly apparent. Responses varied wildly depending on how game the audience felt, but his restraint kept things sweet rather than clawing. The character was never too thick, never absurdist; the “real guy” hovered just beneath the surface, tiny cracks in the façade only deepening the charm. A throwaway gag about West Coast unfamiliarity with the thesaurus landed not as a jab, but as a tender nudge.
Throughout, Giuseppe’s quest opened onto many kinds of love: romantic, familial, and the simple human-to-human experience of being seen. Love-struck lighting cues and syrupy musical stings punctuated moments of faux revelation—“Put your head on my shoulder… but I feel nothing!”—playing the joke straight until it quietly stopped being a joke at all.
Physical comedy followed, with notable care. Touch was invited rather than assumed; consent was woven into the humour through requests to rub backs or offer hugs, even if one punter’s cheeky bum-grab briefly tested the boundary—artists, after all, are still humans entitled to consent. A baby skit slowed the momentum momentarily before being levied by the audience’s discovery of innuendo, blurring the line between PG clowning and minds warped by years of Fringe smut.
By the time Giuseppe finally declared, “I feel something!”, it felt earned. Dropping the accent to thank us, Detto revealed the contemporary flow beneath the character, his thick Aussie tone prompting laughter and confirming what we had suspected all along: the innocence was real.
Heartwarming without being saccharine, Giuseppe’s Love Quest is a show to bring your folks to—or your partner, unawares, before being asked to awkwardly explain how they know they love you.
CAT LANDRO