A Voice Like Shrapnel (Cabaret Version) by Natalie Gamsu, Ash Flanders and Stephen Nicolazzo, 2026, Adelaide Cabaret Festival + Shrapnel by Natalie Gamsu and Ash Flanders, 2023-2024, fortyfivedownstairs, Hayes Theatre, Brunswick Ballroom

An evening of storytelling, music, and yearning to find the flamenco dancer inside, A VOICE LIKE SHRAPNEL, is an autobiographical theatrical work created by Natalie Gamsu, director Stephen Nicolazzo, and dramaturg Ash Flanders.

Gamsu grew up in Namibia in the 60’s, as far away from being a flamenco dancer as one could possibly get. A country that was colonized by the British, the Germans and by the South African government.

She grew up under the apartheid regime, went to boarding school in Cape Town, performed in underground nightclubs during the state of emergencies, and searched for a way to make sense of a country that made no sense to her at all.

In A VOICE LIKE SHRAPNEL and its original version SHRAPNEL, Gamsu searches for meaning through diabolically funny stories of tsuris- the Yiddish word for pain, eating her mother’s blood by mistake, psilocybin spiritual journeys into the past and of course, her shapeshifting days suffering from temporal lobe epilepsy. There are also stories of meerkats and tortoises without their shells. And customer service arguments over tinned fruit.

Combining poetic writing, ridiculous and heartbreaking personal stories, and the deep and haunting singing voice of one of Australia’s most gifted performers, A VOICE LIKE SHRAPNEL is a celebration of Natalie Gamsu’s strange, beautiful, and fearless capacity to expose her eccentricities and uncanny life experiences with you all.

Performer: Natalie Gamsu

Director: Stephen Nicolazzo

Writers: Natalie Gamsu, Ash Flanders, Stephen Nicolazzo

Musical Director (Cabaret Version): Nigel Ubrihien

Set + Costume Design Tatiana Hotere

Original Musical Direction: Mark Jones, Max Lambert (2023-2024)

Original Lighting Designer: Sidney Younger

★★★★★ “Vocally magnetic, her brassy voice is rich with years. Her gestures are precise and poised, beckoning us closer with every outstretched hand. There is an intensity to her storytelling that lingers long after each line. Her life emerges as a collage from which she seeks our final meaning. She reflects on releasing the need to be special, instead embracing “sitzfleisch” – to sit on your butt flesh, to endure, to simply be.  In doing so, Gamsu grants the audience permission to embrace themselves with equal abandon. My face wet with tears, I joined the thoroughly deserved standing ovation”The Scoop

★★★★½ “Shrapnel is performed in a way that dignifies Gamsu’s deepest secrets and induces the audience into bursts of laughter through a series of self-deprecating anecdotes and colourful descriptions of her favourite influential figures. Among the most memorable of these are her peculiar first casting agent in Cape Town and the eccentric directors of a cabaret club in Johannesburg. As the recital nears a close, Gamsu describes a fond, long-awaited love from her mother amid her battle with dementia before closing her performance with ‘A Song For You’, affording herself a well-deserved and heart-felt standing ovation.” Amelia Williamson, Its On The House

“Shrapnel is a mosaic of things that have made Natalie Gamsu who she is. Her storytelling style is captivating. Her singing is powerful. And her collection of stories kept the audience laughing or awed or shocked.” Keith Gow, Theatre First

“Natalie Gamsu lays her experience on the stage, performing Laurika Rauch’s ‘Hot Gates’ – a song that, in Gamsu’s care, feels pertinent to the way so many of us are cheering for humanity right now, with great sorrow and an essential hope that can’t help but rise. She strikes every chord. She’s stunning.” In Review

“Gamsu possesses two remarkable instruments. The first is her singing voice, rich with ache and startling vulnerability, capable of moving from fragile intimacy to overwhelming force without sacrificing honesty. The second is her speaking voice, a storyteller’s instrument of astonishing precision. Every sentence carries texture. Every adjective shifts the emotional temperature of the room. She paints with language so vividly that audiences find themselves suspended between explosive laughter and quiet devastation, often within the same breath.” Beyond The Encore

“Natalie Gamsu was once awakened by a zebra’s breath on her cheek in a marijuana plantation, and Shrapnel, an hour-long monologue frosted with music, gave us raw slices of her remarkable life, including growing up during South Africa’s repugnant apartheid years. Her version of being a musical theatre triple threat, she told us, was being fat, stoned and epileptic – yet she still bravely performed edgy cabaret in a police state. Life, she said, is partly about letting go of the need to be special. She might have let go, but she was the festival’s most potent performer.” John Shand, Sydney Morning Herald