one4review | On 13, Aug 2026

Stand Up If You’re Here Tonight is weird.

“You’ve tried everything. Yoga. Acupuncture. You floated in salt water in the pitch black dark. You juiced, you cleansed. You reached out, you looked within. You have tried, and yet here you are.”

So begins John Kolvenbach’s play, with Jim Ortlieb alone on stage: a man bent by isolation and desperate to connect with the audience in front of him.

Ortlieb’s acting is so close to reality that when the fourth wall breaks, it becomes genuinely confusing whether we’re hearing the actor or the character.

The house lights remain on throughout. Ortlieb talks directly to us, notices us and gradually calls us into action. Each invitation follows naturally from the last until, almost without noticing, the distinction between performer and audience begins to disappear.

I don’t want to give too much away, because discovering what this play is doing to you is part of the experience.

Ortlieb reels us in almost against our will. The writing plays brilliantly with everything an audience does to protect itself: judging, second-guessing, retreating into our own heads. He doesn’t allow us to.

There are moments of comedy, genuine tenderness and just enough unease to make you wonder how you got here. Ortlieb may tell us he’s losing us, but across 55 minutes he actually gets more and more of us.

At one point, he describes himself and the audience as two warm pots of water, with the space between them hot enough to boil pasta.

Filling the space between one human being and another: loneliness, communion and our desperate need to know somebody.

Afterwards, audience members struggled to explain what they’d experienced. One compared it to a religious revival without religion; another to watching a motivational speaker become a cult leader. Again and again, people simply described being drawn in and moved.

For 55 minutes, a man tries to close the space between himself and us.

He boiled my pasta.

*****

Reviewed by Stephen “Sharpie” Sharp
Underbelly Bristo Square
Until 31 August (not 18)
16.40 (1hour)