Nick Robertson is back in New Zealand for Fringe 2025. I spoke to him while he was touring his latest show, Everything That Happened at Number 68, in Adelaide. I had a great time at his show in Wellington last week, and he’s performing in the Dunedin Fringe Festival from 13 to 15 March at the Nat. Tickets are available here: Everything That Happened at Number 68 | Dunedin Fringe Festival.
Callum Knight: What can you tell me about Adelaide Fringe and what you’re looking forward to here?
Nick Robinson: Adelaide Fringe has been, as always, a beast of a thing. It’s the largest arts festival we have in Australia, so the saturation of shows is unlike anything else in Australia or New Zealand. It’s been equally as stressful as it’s been inspiring. It’s like the epicentre of arts at the moment—anyone who’s anyone is here, so to feel part of something that big is really cool. But at the same time, I’m debuting a brand new show, and I’m head-deep into getting the show up and running, so I haven’t been seeing that much.
My favourite thing about Fringe is, and I say this anywhere I go, I never see comedy when I go to Fringe, because I want to see the weird shit. I want to see the stuff that you can’t find anywhere else, so I’m seeing all the sexy circus I can find, I’m seeing the audio experiences in shipping containers, I’m going to the street performers, I want weird shit. And maybe I can bring the weird shit into my art form.
I will get to see more at New Zealand Fringe. A lot of the stuff at New Zealand Fringe never crosses the pond into Australia, so it’s cool to see—I couldn’t even tell you how, but there’s a different flavour of live performance in New Zealand Fringe. Different countries do things differently, so it’s cool to see how it operates and how people are telling stories. It was really inspiring last year and I hope to do more of it this year.
CK: So when you’re launching a show, would you try to do a couple versions of it before something like Fringe?
NR: I’ve been doing this one a lot differently. I’ve been doing a lot of storytelling nights throughout the year in Melbourne and trying pieces of the puzzle separately. But this Fringe I’m going into [in Adelaide] is the first time I’m putting the jigsaw puzzle together. It’s been a unique experience for me; in previous years I’ve been workshopping it and doing trial shows and coming into a festival with a fully-formed show, and figuring out the kinks along the way. This one has been more like, let’s hit the ground running and feel this out with the audience. I wouldn’t call it a work-in-progress, but in Adelaide the show’s been changing every night. Adding things, taking things out, removing things altogether, which is always part of the process.
CK: Oh, I know exactly how that feels. All my terrible puns don’t go down super well with my DnD group, but I will repeat them, and they’ll be like, “No, we heard you, it just wasn’t good.”
NR: And it’s just like, maybe if I say it louder or with a different intonation … it feels like the audience needs to take you aside and stage an intervention. “Nick, that joke is not funny, move on.” Luckily I’m not having that bad a reception with this show. I’m having a lot of it resonate with a lot of people. I went into this show trying to be more relatable in general. My last show was about the time I was deported from Scotland, which is not a very relatable thing. This show is all about sharehousing, which I’ve been getting some reviews call “unbelievably relatable.” It’s good to see that intention coming through.
CK: Before we carry on – ‘sharehouse’ is the Aussie term for flatting, flatmates?
NR: Yes … and I suppose that is a good thing to learn now, before I go into New Zealand. Yeah, a flat-share. The show itself is about the first sharehouse I lived in when I moved to Melbourne, and it’s about all the ups and downs, the relationships. I call it a story about a house and all the people who lived in it and a rabbit named Meat Ax. It’s all about learning how to coexist as adults for the first time. I think of it as a coming of age story – it’s a story about me, but it is a story about us. Even though these experiences are so unique to me, as I’m telling them everyone has an experience e with a shit landlord, with hearing their flatmates have sex – it’s such a universal experience, especially for those in their twenties. It’s the only way you can live in inner-city Melbourne, with four or five others.
CK: And then if you’re living in a shitty apartment building like me, it’s not just your flatmates you hear, it’s upstairs and downstairs as well.
NR: Yeah, dude, it’s just so… I talk about hindsight in the show as well. In the moment you say to yourself, “It’s fine, it’s fine,” but then you look back and you realise, “How did I live in that?”
CK: Oh, god, I’m gonna come out of this and think that I really need to move out of my place. But I’m not leaving – I’m paying two hundred dollars a week for a mid-city apartment, it’s fuckin’ amazing. Yeah, it’s a shithole, but—
NR: But it’s a cheap shithole, and that’s okay too. And that’s also how I describe myself.
CK: Nice. That’s definitely going in.
NR: Ah, dammit.
CK: I’m curious how you navigate the ethics of telling stories about other people. Did you have to go to your old flatmates and let them know, hey, I’m telling
NR: Officially, it’s completely legal, I’ve got consent from everyone that I need to. I’ve changed the names of everyone in the story, of course, and even though I’ve called the show “Everything That Happened at Number 68,” you would never be able to identify the house from anything I say in the show. So I’m free from any defamation issues, we are in the clear.
But because I’m still friends with these people and they are still big parts of my life, I did mention it to them. They seemed totally okay with it, and when the show was announced they were very excited about it. I’m too nervous of a boy and too much of a people pleaser to go into it without asking for any permissions. We’ve done the ethical clearance, we’re good.
As I was writing it, I was having those issues, because it’s a very fine balance between being earnest and sincere without giving away too much.
CK: Was there anything influencing you in the approach this time around? Any comedians, any comedy specials?
NR: Yeah, I was listening to Sarah Kendall a lot while writing the show. She’s an Australian comedian, now based in London, and she’s a storyteller. There are very few comedians who brand themselves as storytellers specifically – there are comics out there who do storytelling, but she loves to tell stories. The BBC audio recordings has six chapters of some of her work on Audible, and I was listening to those as I was writing.
The thing I loved so much about it is that three of those chapters are fragmented memories that are joined together by a cohesive feeling, and that’s sort of the approach I took to this show. They’re all random moments from this sharehouse that speak to the overarching feel I had towards the house in general. I started writing about this house and I felt like there was enough to write a show about, but not why. As I was listening to her stories, it clicked that all these moments feel so separate but they’re all joined by what they did to me, how they made me feel, how I viewed the sharehouse experience: the visceral feeling of being out of home for the first time and what that teaches about yourself.
CK: Alright, time for a rapid fire round, inspired by Billie Eilish’s Vanity Fair interviews. You game?
NR: Done. Give it to me.
CK: Cool. What advice would you give to yourself a year from now?
NR: I regret this already.
CK: Rapid fire.
NR: [Long pause]. This is not rapid-fire at all. Um… Eat more.
CK: What advice would you give yourself a year ago?
NR: Care a bit less.
CK: What’s your favourite movie?
NR: Scooby Doo (2002). Most rapid I’ll ever get.
CK: What’s your favourite colour right now? … the fuck is this list.
NR: Oat. I’ve learnt that oat is my favourite colour and palette. Anything earth times.
CK: What’s your biggest regret?
NR: Stopping doing comedy when I was 21. I should’ve kept going. I was doing comedy from when I was 14 until I was 21, and I stopped for eight years. Who knows where I’d be if I’d kept going – the anxiety took over and my life took a different path, but I’m glad to be back on this path.
CK: What’s the biggest thing you’ve learned?
NR: Figuring out how to breathe properly is the best thing for your nervous system.
CK: What country would you love to visit?
NR: I want to visit Chad, cus I think that’s a cool name for a country. Done no research into that. Iceland if I’m gonna be actually honest. That is a magical country.
CK: How do you define your style in three words?
NR: My style is… casual, um, loud, and… hesitant.
CK: Those seem like very opposed…
NR: Welcome to my brain, with all those opposing forces inside trying to compete for first place.
CK: And your philosophy?
NR: Absurdism. Straight-up absurdism. Fell into an Albert Camus rabbit hole over lockdown and I haven’t looked back. That rock, baby, we ride and die by that rock.
CK: And lastly, what do you want to say to yourself in a year?
NR: You’re doing great. Keep going, just keep swimming. And then I’ll give myself a hug, because we all need a hug.
CK: Want to give us a quick sales pitch for your New Zealand attendees?
NR: I’m super excited to tell this story. I’ve been loving doing this new show. I was saying to my producer when we were starting this tour that I think the main reason I wrote this new show is so I could come back to New Zealand and do these Fringes, because I had the best time last year. Everyone’s just the loveliest people and it’s such a beautiful country. I can’t wait to tell this story in front of you wonderful people.
