Yogambling
If you’re keen for a laugh and a heart-warming story about overcoming addiction, Yogambling is the play for you this Fringe.
It’s a classic buddy comedy about two room-mates learning to live together and getting through an uncertain period of their lives. Following the neat IT engineer, played by CeeJay Singh, and the cheese obsessed slob, played by Timothy Piggot, as they slowly become friends.
Yogambling is short, but sweet. With many hilarious and heartfelt moments brought on by a talented cast. From their hilarious attempts to seduce women, to a sassy Google voice assistant and the certainty that Yoga is the main way to cure a gambling addiction, the play hardly has a dull moment.
This is the third show this Fringe written and produced by Singh and holds a key role in showcasing local and upcoming talent. Yogambling is Alicia Hage’s debut Adelaide Fringe performance, and she plays her various roles well in the show, alongside the rest of the cast.
The core message of the play is in helping friends overcome gambling addictions and out of rough patches. With yoga and gambling taking opposing roles, and showing the long journey of ups and downs that comes with bettering oneself.
Yogambling is showing at Star Theatres on their smaller stage, which does mean space is quite limited for the cast. They worked well with their set pieces to create a simple living room, which they added and detracted from with each scene change.
The lighting helped each location and moment feel like individual settings as well, changing the colours and warmth of the light for different places and flashbacks.
However, Yogambling does have a lot of scene changes throughout it, with flashbacks, location changes, and time skips being the main cause. They are easy enough to follow, but some scenes could benefit by being merged or extended as these frequent changes pull you out of the play at times.
Overall, Yogambling is a fun and simple local theatre production with an important message at its core.