Dear customers,
It is with great sadness that I am informing you that I will not be returning to my duties at the launderette.
This does mean that there will no longer be any service washes or dry cleaning services in this launderette.
Thank you for your custom over the years, I hope to see you around.
Stay safe,
Pet.
What would you do if you found your favourite local laundromat closed for good, with this letter taped to its shopfront? For UK-based clown-comedian Ozzy Algar, it was enough to inspire their Fringe show Speed Queen which took Edinburgh by storm in 2025. Until then, the shop’s owner had blended into the background, but with the reveal of her unusual name – Pet – and anachronistic verbiage which felt old-fashioned and yet, looking back now, also ahead of its time, Algar was mystified. “This was pre-COVID,” says Algar. “Stay safe was a really strange way to sign off [at the time], especially in this really mundane place.”
It threw up questions about the dangers that could be lying beneath the everyday. What did Pet know that others did not? Was she tuned into another realm, or was it simply that the locals were scoundrels? It spoke to Algar’s nascent interest in the supernatural, as well as their fascination with England’s insular communities (Algar’s family hails from Hampshire. Fun fact: Its neighbouring county, West Sussex, is home to more cults than any other part of the country) and soon Algar was off and running with their own fictionalised version of Pet; a yarn spinner who airs the town’s dirty laundry in public.The show’s setting was to be a folk-horror inflected version of a British island that is seen as a bit of a cultural oddity: the Isle of Wight. Often met with accusations of being frozen in time, the minuscule island off the nation’s South Coast made for the perfect setting. Its once Enid Blyton-style postcard facade has faded into a pastiche of Victorian British optimism.
Pet, with her chiffon scarf and Vera Lynn style vocals, is the island personified. She cuts a fantastical figure, silhouetted by the steam of the laundromat and plumes of washing powder, and tells fabulistic stranger-than-fiction stories. “I think everything Pet says is true,” says Algar. “Whether she’s misremembering, or whether she’s a little bit magical” is up to the audience. “In [Britain] at the moment, so many realities are existing at the same time,” that it’s easy to see how folk tales originally emerged, says Algar. The show works as an exploration of that, and not just in Britain.
In bringing it to Australia, Algar expects those same questions to hit home. After all, the UK and Australia share a history of folk storytelling whose colonial silencing still looms. Beyond that, the present issue of division and individual narratives is a global one, with online discourse transcending geographical and cultural borders. Plus, for those who might still be left flummoxed by the Isle of Wight, Algar has been told that there may exist parallels between it and Tasmania, insomuch as the two places occasionally share a tendency to be viewed by mainlanders as curios; places where things feel familiar yet distinct.
It’s in this same intersection that Ozzy Algar operates, and happily so. They didn’t come to performing through the traditional route of, say, youth theatre. Rather, it was the drag scene in the English city of Leeds, where they went to university, that opened their eyes to the possibilities. “I think drag and cabaret scenes are so welcoming and wonderful. It’s the first place for many performers to see something other than [the mainstream], so that was really quite formative.” Suddenly, a whole world lay in front of them that encompassed more than stand up comedy, which never spoke to them because “personally, I think live performance should always have a bit of that [old fashioned] glamour.”
This last remark could have come straight from the mouth of Pet, Algar’s bardic alter ego. It begs the question, where does Algar end and Pet begin? Just as I’m wondering this, Algar offers up “I love Edith Piaf,” and it recalls a part of the show that is best left unspoiled, but let us just say a cabaret-style finale suggests that Pet too is a fan of the famous French chanteuse. It’s apt really, for a show that blends fact and fiction, that the performer and their character are cut from the same cloth. Or maybe it’s more like their colours have run into one another; their dyes have mixed in a hot wash. It’s a reminder that in life, like in a folk tale, there is no clear line between truth and tale. All we’re really doing is sorting the world into two separate laundry baskets: the stories that pass the sniff test, and the ones that just won’t wash.
Ozzy Algar: Speed Queen, The Chapel at The Courtyard of Curiosities at the Migration Museum, 10-20 Mar, 7.50pm
Ozzy Algar: Speed Queen is directed by Tanika Lay-Meachen