Abby Govindan: Pushing 30 review – playful comic makes the case for marriage as a side quest

In south Asian culture, marriage continues to be paramount, with women still largely bearing the brunt of this societal pressure. Tonight, the few south Asian women in the audience that US comedian Abby Govindan calls upon – myself included – verify this, one explaining how her parents have given up now that she is in her mid-30s.

For Govindan, who is nearing 30, it’s a familiar conversation she has had with well-meaning relatives, and one that creates an internal paradox. While she loves her south Asian identity and her Indian heritage, it can be difficult to reconcile this with the patriarchal stereotypes and archaic values that tend to hold women back.

A show with heart … Abby Govindan. Photograph: Varun Mummadi

In a confident fringe debut, Govindan explores the reductive nature of conversations around marriage and ageing, and the value that is placed on dating and relationships over simply living life to the full. She regales the audience with stories of her many wins in life, from that time she managed to convince the internet that she was the creator of Emily in Paris, to when she scammed the KKK.

Slides on a screen behind her show screenshots proving her penchant for pranks, with tweets that have unexpectedly gone viral and led to the dreaded Notes app apology, and even a playfully contentious Venn diagram illustrating her flawed reasoning for only dating Indian men. Discussions around misinformation and the impact of big tech’s stranglehold on our lives add an interesting through-line. But the show loses momentum a little with the general over-reliance on PowerPoint, which occasionally takes us out of the narrative and away from Govindan’s easygoing and conversational storytelling.

Even so, in a show with heart, Govindan details her desire to shatter generational and gendered expectations, placing emphasis on her right to just be her silly self. As she notes, patriarchy is not just a south Asian problem – but in her actions and achievements, it’s up to her to break free from the confines that every generation of women in her family has faced.

In the end, through the recreation of a funny heart-to-heart with a young family member, we see that it’s about not wanting to perpetuate the same harms, choosing to view marriage as a side quest and not necessarily the main event.