Review: Willing Participant at State Theatre Centre of WA

Willing Participant at Middar Room at State Theatre Centre of WA
Saturday, January 25, 2025

Rob Carlton is a Logie Award-winning actor and a sensational raconteur, delivering four engaging human stories from his life over the course of one immensely entertaining hour.

It’s not a chatty show as such—these stories are presented as soliloquies, masterfully acted, and contain all the emotion of a feature film along the way. Sure, it’s ostensibly a comedy show, but in addition to being truly funny, it’s also heartfelt, sad, moving and tender.

In fact, these four true stories are consummately delivered—the cousins who get it on the Christmas Grandma is dying; the movie that hired him as continuity expert despite him having no clue what that meant; the one about visiting his formative years’ locations with his late dad’s ashes; and another about auditioning terribly for a major musical theatre production—collectively covering most human emotions in a wonderful celebration of what it is to be human, to be alive, and feeling all the feels.

Sensationally life-affirming.

SHANE PINNEGAR