The audience takes the hill: An Evening Without Kate Bush

My relationship with Kate Bush is cordial but distant. I know Running Up That Hill, thanks partly to Stranger Things, and a few other songs that have made their way into the general atmosphere. Albums? I couldn't name one if my life depended on it. So when Sarah-Louise Young starts asking the audience at Arts Centre Melbourne to identify themselves as Fish People, I begin to suspect I've wandered into a meeting of a society to which I do not belong. Fish People, for the uninitiated, are Kate Bush's devotees. There are quite a few of them here.

Young knows what to do with a room full of people who have spent decades loving the same woman. More impressively, she knows what to do with the rest of us. Her An Evening Without Kate Bush, co-created with director Russell Lucas, has been touring for years, accumulating stories, wigs and apparently some rather troublesome luggage. It contains a pair of enormous illuminated eyeballs, a singing mop and a Russian rendition of Babooshka prompted by a fan's objections to the pronunciation. None of this is especially normal. All of it makes a peculiar sort of sense.

The first image is almost solemn. Young stands in dim blue light beneath a vast veil, a feathered headdress on her head and a red bicycle light blinking on an upraised finger. In the dark, that tiny pulse does an improbable amount of work. Later, the evening becomes considerably less mysterious about its methods. Young changes wigs in plain sight, exposes the little indignities of costume management, and discusses the difficulty of bringing giant eyeballs through Australian customs. She can also sing the living daylights out of Bush's music, taking its extravagant leaps and peculiar vocal shapes in her stride. The trick is that she doesn't confuse vocal impersonation with theatrical transformation. We can see the joins. She wants us to.

And then there's the business of talking to people. Young is almost indecently good at it. One man, a classical pianist, loves Violin — an occupational affinity, perhaps. He and his partner explain that they started out as flatmates. Elsewhere, a couple who have shared thirty-six years turn out to be Kate Bush devotees of considerable standing: the husband saw her seven times at Hammersmith and ended up being invited back for the after party. Young is so impressed she asks permission to touch his elbow. She asks questions, picks up details, gets the room laughing. She can find something funny in almost any answer without making the person who gave it wish they'd kept quiet. It's dazzling work, although at this point it looks suspiciously like having a chat.

It isn't.

When Don't Give Up comes around, Young needs two volunteers to embrace throughout the song. She seems to have made her choice already, and starts coyly describing people we've met. The former flatmates make their way to the stage. We know something about them now; not much, admittedly, but enough that the sight of them holding each other for six minutes feels different from watching two strangers perform an exercise.

During all this, Young reads comments posted beneath Kate Bush videos: an eight-year-old whose friends find their taste for 80s music peculiar, followed by a reassuring reply from their mother; an adult remembering a father who listened to Don't Give Up after losing his job, and wishing they hadn't made fun of him. These are the sorts of intimate disclosures the internet collects by the million and somehow makes easy to overlook. Here they are given time, a song, and two people who have agreed to hold each other and sway. The arrangement is faintly preposterous. The feeling it produces is absolutely not.

By now, something has shifted. The Fish People and the accidental visitors, initially sorted into their respective camps, have acquired a little common history. We know who loves Violin. We know who went to Hammersmith. We know how these songs have quietly accompanied people in the midst of sorrow. We know how two men fell in love. Young and Lucas have made an audience out of more than the fact of our having bought tickets.

And what of the mop? It turns out Young once attempted her own Kate Bush performance at high school with a mop head for a wig. A teacher discouraged her. Now the household cleaning equipment has graduated to a singing role in her professional show, while Young herself, at 50, has changed into a red leotard and is throwing herself around the stage to Running Up That Hill. Hair flying, limbs flailing, a cartwheel for good measure. After the stillness of Don't Give Up, it's a magnificent outbreak of unruliness, and the room goes with her. Not a bad outcome for either Young or the mop. “This is your time. This is your tribute. This is your comeback” she calls out. And by now she's earned the right to be quite so presumptuous.

For Wuthering Heights, she puts on a wedding dress and prepares to sing. Except our classical pianist from the embrace gets there first. He starts singing from his seat, then calls for the rest of us to join in. Young beams. The microphone turns towards the audience. She's been coaxing us into participating all evening, but here is someone taking matters into his own hands. For most of the song, we do the work.

And there I am, singing Kate Bush with a roomful of Fish People. Somewhere along the way, the distinction between those who came knowing every note and those who barely knew what they'd signed up for has ceased to matter. In a world that seems increasingly determined to sort us into mutually suspicious little groups, Young has managed something rather wonderful. For an hour or so, we've been listening to one another, remembering one another, making something together.

She can sing it better, obviously. That's rather beside the point.

An Evening Without Kate Bush plays at Arts Centre Melbourne’s Fairfax Studio until 18 October 2026.

Disclosure: A complimentary ticket to An Evening Without Kate Bush was provided to Melbourne Stage Review for the purpose of review. Melbourne Stage Review retains full editorial independence.