Docklander resident Fini Liu brings bilingual historical comedy to the Melbourne stage

As the Melbourne International Comedy Festival unfolded, Eighteen Lives (祖宗十八代) offered audiences a rare bilingual work that blended historical reflection, emotional depth and understated humour.

Led by Docklands resident and director Fini Liu, the production stood out as one of the festival’s more distinctive offerings.

Rather than presenting history as a lesson, Liu selected six historical moments and treated them as heightened human situations, using them to explore how relationships form, fracture and recur across time.

The work followed ordinary people placed in extreme circumstances, tracing patterns of connection and separation through reincarnation in a way that invited contemporary audiences to reflect on the emotional repetitions of their own lives.

Performed primarily in Mandarin, Eighteen Lives used language not only as dialogue but as atmosphere. Liu approached Mandarin as a sensory and musical medium, allowing its rhythm, sound and emotional texture to carry meaning even for audience members who did not speak the language. I

n this way, the production relied on tone, pacing and soundscape as much as direct comprehension, creating a theatrical experience that reached beyond linguistic boundaries.

The result was a work that offered audiences a window into the humanity and spirit of Chinese-Australian experience without leaning on familiar historical clichés. Instead, it presented a different comic and emotional logic, one built on vulnerability, surprise and the strangeness of human connection.

Liu described the work not simply as a comedy, but as a “beautiful comedy”, and that phrase captured much of what made the production unusual. Rather than chasing punchlines alone, Eighteen Lives moved between wit, tension and sadness, creating something more layered and reflective than a conventional festival comedy show.

At its heart, the work suggested that human encounters are rarely accidental, and that the people who pass through our lives may feel strangely familiar for a reason. It invited audiences to sit with that idea, and perhaps to leave the theatre with a sharper awareness of how fleeting and precious those encounters can be.

Presented from March 25 to April 4 at the Explosives Factory in St Kilda, Eighteen Lives added a thoughtful and emotionally resonant note to this year’s comedy festival.

For Liu, a Docklands local bringing a deeply personal and culturally textured work to the stage, it was a reminder that some of the festival’s most memorable moments came not from the loudest laughs, but from the works that lingered longest afterwards.