Woof! review – Hannah Gadsby refuses to toe the line

Hannah Gadsby doesn’t like being told what to do.

The first time they tell us this during Woof!, their new show at Sydney’s Roslyn Packer theatre, the audience laughter is immediate, warm and knowing. This is the brain behind Nanette – of course it’s a mind comfortable with the act of refusal. But Gadsby is “vibing on a whole new level of dissonance than Nanette”, and if anyone can find new ways to refuse to do what is expected, it’s them.

After all, Gadsby is a comic who is consistently curious about the space between the proverbial rock and a hard place. Resistance – often polite, frequently stubborn – has shaped the arc of their work since they started making it, placing themselves in opposition to flimsy social rituals and trends they just can’t get on board with. They have, for nearly 20 years, charmingly built routines around opting out of rules, rituals, and suggestions made by family, friends, communities or broader social structures.

Woof! is built from this same refusal, which Gadsby considers differently when paired with their diagnosis of pathological demand avoidance; they are wired to resist.

It’s there from the first minute; they walk onstage and tell us they had a show planned, but – now that doing the show has become a ‘must’ – they don’t want it any more. Briefly, tantalisingly, they suggest a version of the show that’s just letters to Barbra Streisand (she comes up more than once) and suggest they may not have been ready to address fresh ideas around grief.

They also don’t want to come thematically close to Nanette – another instance of resistance. They were advised to lean into those ideas and chase more fame; they emphatically refused. “I don’t want to get bigger,” they tell us, “I want to get weirder.” The minute someone pointed out that their glasses were part of their brand identity (consider the cover of their memoir, Ten Steps to Nanette, which is all glasses), they underwent laser eye surgery. Gadsby will not be hemmed in by a definition they did not create for themselves.

Besides, something happened to them recently, and they really want to talk about it.

On their way from Adelaide to Sydney for this show, on a brief stay in a small town, Gadsby had a panic attack. They briefly indulge the structure of a true crime narrative; if we walk back and examine all their worries on the drive leading to the panic attack, can we find the source of it? Can we sift through panicked thoughts and find which ones, if any, they should really be worried about?

Ultimately powering this show – at least in its current form – is this: can anyone decide, in a sea of contemporary anxieties, problems and disasters, where to put their attention? What should we actually worry about?

What follows is a loose list still building its rhythm but humming with the promise of something sharper: There’s the worry about how they have been changed by fame. There’s worry about war, though Gadsby refuses to say anything about that except naming it. There’s worry about how well we all know our faces and how much plastic we exist alongside (the question “Where did all the Cabbage Patch Kids go?” has never been so haunting).

They worry that they “don’t know how to love Taylor Swift” despite really wanting to love her. They also worry this is what will get them cancelled, or if they’ll be cancelled by feminists (“That’ll be an interesting moment for the movement”), but there’s no time to dwell on it when we could also be worrying about transphobia, Terfs, or if electricity will be the death of us all. And there’s the story of this panic attack.

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There are moments in this show that soar. Gadsby says being in a small town is “only hearing one sound at a time,” and a world of specificity – and delight in that specificity – opens up. They consider the intersections of astrology, autism, and prayer with a twinkle in their eye. They laughingly reclaim the identifier “stupid white bastard” in a moment of solidarity with Sam Kerr (the audience roared).

Woof! is a mixed experience, partly because Gadsby is chasing their new topic of interest and working out bits onstage; there’s even standard comedy gear still waiting for their Gadsbian spin; at one point, they actually do compare their recent misfortunes to a country song. Gadsby’s shows are typically written to tight narrative complication and subversion, seeding setups for punchlines an hour later, and that keen narrative structure and craft isn’t fully developed here.

But maybe that’s the point. For a show built on resistance and refusal, there’s a surprising amount of openness to form, structure, and play. They’ve been microdosing testosterone, and their voice has changed; we’re seeing them find new ways to experiment with tenor and tone and cadence. And for a show about worry, there are clear attempts to combat the gloom. Gadsby tries an extended period of crowd-work, which they’ve typically avoided, and seems to be surprised by how much they enjoy it. More than once, charmingly, they make themselves laugh.

Woof! is still growing, but it might be on its way to an excavation: behind the noise and preoccupation of anxieties – some of which matter, some of which we might be able to throw out – there could still be joy underneath.