Cassie Workman: You Are Here review – a remarkable standup on a crumbling world

Melbourne international comedy festivalThis show is an extended metaphor about modern capitalism told through a young boy’s battle with a sentient shopping mall. If that sounds weird, that’s because it is Get our weekend culture and lifestyle email Cassie Workman has spent the past two years living and working in the US. She has returned home to Australia with tales to tell – but perhaps not the ones you were expecting. At the centre of her new show, You Are Here, is an extended metaphor about modern capitalism told through a young Hispanic boy’s battle with a sentient shopping mall. If that sounds weird, that’s because it is. This is a Cassie Workman show, she tells us as she grills a plastic lobster over a cellophane fire, anything could happen. The fictional West Valley Mall in Newark, New Jersey, has been abandoned. Since its heyday in the early 80s, this monolith to American consumerism has fallen into disrepair and been entirely forgotten – until a nine-year-old boy breaks in and finds himself at the mercy of the shopping mall’s twisting halls and forgotten alcoves. The mall claims to offer everything a person could ever want but the boy only wants one thing –