Post's ICH NIBBER DIBBER

Witty, gritty conversation draws laughter and reflection

Ich Nibber Dibber is really as it sounds, a nonsense phrase dressed up as “a woman’s work” in German, and if this is women’s work, Post co-creators Zoë Coombs Marr, Natalie Rose and Mish Grigor make it look fabulously funny.

Descending from the heavens, these three angelic women draped in white come to be upon the stage. Make whatever metaphor you want from it – exiting the womb, descending like messengers from heaven – the women have something to say, and it starts with plenty of cussing and fussing about being trashed at a party.

Welcome to the human experience.

If you thought poo jokes didn’t captivate theatre goers, then listen here, you are gravely wrong. But there is so much more to this wonderful production than the humdrum of day-to-day life – my friend and I, and so many more in the audience can remember conversations like these with our friends, a combination of the profound and the banal. On a superficial level, the blokes in the audience will laugh, but for the women, we will laugh because we see ourselves in these three very human characters (even Gywneth Paltrow would agree).

The women inhabit personas we all recognise within our friendships – the sardonic, the naïve, the progressive, and it’s all tongue in cheek. If they poke fun at each other, they do it with profound love, in only the way the closest of kindred spirits can. Nat, Mish and Zoë admit that this is all them – they are just hanging out on stage having the really silly and gritty conversations close friends do. It’s really refreshing and welcoming, and it’s incredibly easy for the audience to connect and relate to the work.

The 70 minutes of Ich Nibber Dibber is all talk, but it’s the talk of over a decade of friendship. The women party, break up, and give birth in the span of the decade, and their conversations continue to shift with the times of their lives and the eras they fall within. It’s a glimpse into the past for many in the audience, from the choices of music to the socio-political backdrop of the noughties and today. There are serious issues the women face: sexual and racial discrimination, the disintegration of intimate relationships, haphazard views of the self – and it’s all handled with an impressive amount of subtlety and humour.

There are some poignant moments within this spectrum, particularly when the writer John Berger is quoted as they cannot recall whether John Berger or John Burgess was the first celebrity death of 2017. Berger’s quote on women surveying themselves as a man alters the atmosphere reminds us that while we are watching women inhabit the stories of their lives, they are still a spectacle of the male gaze.

I find Ich Nibber Dibber intelligently comments and navigates the complex terrain it raises with a lightness of being, and its capacity to make its audience laugh under such examinations makes for powerful theatre.