Olga Koch has turned 30, and – per the opening moments of her show Prawn Cocktail – she loves it. Sassy and sex-positive, it’s all swaggering talk about STIs, threesomes and bisexual broadmindedness. Such is the settled sense of self that comes with early middle age, you might think. But Koch travels a long way in the ensuing 55 minutes, to New Zealand and back (twice) and towards a more complex picture of her self-assertion and the delights of hookup culture. So much the better for audiences, as Koch underpins this tale of a transnational tryst with front-foot jokes and bright ideas in just the right dosage.
You’re in the hands, from the off, of a comic in full control of her material. Koch is such an authoritative figure here, her show expertly assembled to get the most out of a story that combines casual sex, her recent master’s on parasocial relationships – and a post-Hannah Gadsby pivot into comedy as a trauma displacement mechanism.
There’s a choice quip too about her mother’s pregnancy aged 44, and some crowd-pleasing material on the Magic Mike strip-show. But the show’s main strand builds up to an assignation Koch made after one-off sex with a stranger on the other side of the world. For three months, she and Freddie plan their carnal reunion in a Tokyo hotel room – albeit that, for our logistics-loving host, the admin ends up more erotic than the execution.
If Japan ends up sub-orgasmic, it hits the comic G-spot in Koch’s telling: in this mini-masterpiece of awks, she keeps finding more lurid ways to characterise Freddie’s banality. Processing the experience, she then loops the show back towards an earlier riff on social media “reply guys” and the culture of synthetic intimacy on the internet. Where do real relationships end and imaginary relationships begin?
Pick at those threads, and swaggering self-confidence can be hard to sustain. That’s the journey Koch goes on in Prawn Cocktail – and if the Gadsby-alike coda about comedy and mental health is imperfectly integrated, this remains an impressive show, from an act entering both her 30s and, perhaps, the big league.