It would have been easy for Stephen Hall – beloved for his kooky characters on Shaun Micallef’s Mad As Hell – to pull together a sketch show for MICF 2025. He could have taken Darius Horsham (his Arnie-esque cigar chomper) off the shelf to deliver a few crowd-pleasing catch phrases.
But Hall likes to stretch himself, as he’s proven in his previous MICF shows like Bond-A-Rama!, which crammed every 007 movie into a single live performance, or his take on three Indiana Jones films in Raiders of the Temple of Doom’s Last Crusade. This time Hall has taken his love of cinema craft into a bigger challenge: splicing together 15 unrelated films into a single narrative and somehow making hilarity out of drama.
Hall introduces the show himself in a tuxedo telling us that he has ransacked 15 classic (and definitely out of copyright) films then dubbed his own dialogue over the top. If you’ve ever chuckled at The Late Show’s Bargearse, then you get the vibe. The film opens in a Washington dungeon where a besuited agent is interviewing John Smith, a 2187-year-old man locked up for “suspiciously unreliable narration”. It’s a wink to how this film both uses old film devices while parodying those same mechanics.
Through Smith’s nonchalant and distinctly Australian drawl we are taken back to Paris by dubbing over the 1954 film The Last Time I Saw Paris. Here character voiceovers poke fun at the bad make-up, awkward costume choices and hammy acting of the original to big laughs.
Hall switches between male character voices and is joined by Mad As Hell alumni Roz Hammond doing characters that suit their comedic chemistry. Hammond making sobbing choking noises over a young Elizabeth Taylor looking like she’s eating a ribbon is pure gold that could run longer.
Read: Comedy review: Rob Carlton, Willing Participant, Beckett Theatre, MICF 2025
Stephen Hall at his best
From this the story jumps to Biblical times (using 1949’s The Pilgrimage Play) then leaps to Custer’s Last Stand, which reminds us of the Spaghetti Westerns and their unintentionally funny English voiceovers. One of the better vision versus audio gags overlays a sax soundtrack to bend a firing squad scene into something spicier.
This is For the Term of His Natural Lies at its best: undercutting the original film’s drama with whimsy. It has that rare silly humour of Monty Python, of which Hall is not only a fan, but also a participant in, having appeared in stage versions of Spamalot and Fawlty Towers. Some characters in a parade scene could be cantering with coconuts through the Holy Grail as they have some silly dialogue.
The disjointed narrative is hard to avoid in cutting between so many films, which Hall pulls together with recurring jokes and characters. The story is unapologetically secondary to the chance to laugh at old filmmaking techniques, from greenscreen driving trips to stunt punches that miss their mark.
A longer cut of For the Term of His Natural Lies may have allowed for gags to land and audiences to catch their breath, but with only an hour the edit has to skip frenetically between jokes, times and films. Don’t take anyone with you who needs to ask “Who’s that again?”, because making sense of the story or characters isn’t really the point. What the audience gets is a frolic through film with a chance to rediscover silliness when the rest of the world seems so terminally serious.
Stephen Hall: For the Term of His Natural Lies was performed at DoubleTree by Hilton Melbourne until 20 April as part of Melbourne International Comedy Festival (MICF 2025).
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