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A drunk witch once told Bronwyn Kuss to have a baby. She didn’t. But she’s still convinced there’s an outside chance it could happen accidentally – despite being in a long-term lesbian relationship.
Kuss’s new show, Bronwyn & Sons, is a rambling look at what success looks like in your late 30s, when you’re broke, childfree and your parents don’t really understand your job. The show’s title comes from the dying genre of business named for their parent and child proprietors. What happens to these businesses, Kuss wonders, when parents are too supportive of their children’s dreams and they grow up to be clowns instead of bricklayers?
Kuss wanders from one topic to the next, often letting silence linger between sections. There is a slowness and ease to the way Kuss performs that feels lived in. Surrounded by a small, homey set featuring books, plants and soft lighting, it is as though Kuss is inviting us into her living room to talk about what’s been on her mind.
Kuss is parchingly dry; her deadpan humour and delivery style feels specifically Australian, delivered in her broad Queensland accent. She receives empathetic nods at almost the same rate as laughs, with one joke eliciting a “hear, hear” from the audience. Her observations are cuttingly accurate, speaking to the elder millennial experience of living a very ordinary life in a world that is getting “towards the end”. This show is not a laugh-a-minute, which will be off-putting for some. But there’s a quietness to it that lets the jokes breathe. Despite the slower pace, the hour flies by.
Ultimately, this is a show about coming to terms with the fact that you might not have children. Kuss has just celebrated her partner’s 40th birthday and it is becoming increasingly clear that motherhood is unlikely to be something Kuss experiences. This is never presented as being melancholy or existential. Rather it is a winding journey through the different thoughts Kuss has as a result.
The decision of whether or not to have children is so often an urgent one. Those who choose to be childless must do so with conviction, ready to defend their decision against insistent family members. But Kuss presents a more complex and very relatable perspective – what if you thought you might but then you didn’t? There’s no huge turning point or blinding realisation, just the growing awareness that a choice has passed you by. It also contains what Kuss describes as a “goldilocks” amount of abortion jokes.
Kuss has supported well-known acts such as Hannah Gadsby and Mel Buttle and it is easy to see how she would appeal to fans of both. This is a show you could take your mum to (assuming she’ll be OK with jokes about abortion).
Despite the struggles she recounts on stage, Kuss is slowly cementing a place as a fixture in Australia’s comedy landscape. Just don’t expect an heir to follow in her footsteps.
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