Yes, Sir! is the most disarmingly honest hour of the Melbourne Fringe. I’ve been to my fair share of Fringe shows over the years, but I can’t remember any previous time an icebreaker involved the audience being handed a blindfold on the way in. That’s the level of commitment Yes, Sir! demands from you before the performer Andrew Rose has said a single word, and honestly, it’s the perfect tone-setter for what follows – one of the rawest, vulnerable and genuinely craft-driven pieces of spoken word I’ve seen in years.
Wheat, Wine & Whisky doesn’t look like the kind of place that hosts boundary-pushing spoken word – from Smith Street it’s a cosy, multi-level gastropub doing wine, whisky and a serious pub menu. But this is a venue that runs live shows nearly every night of the week, and the Fringe action happens downstairs in its underground event space: a low-ceilinged room with a stage, booths, high tables and its own bar. That intimacy is the whole show’s secret weapon. You’re not watching Yes, Sir! from the back row of a theatre – you’re in the room with it, close enough that a whispered safe word would still land.
We open with the hanky code – the old-school pocket-signalling system where your colour choices advertise exactly what you’re into. Rose walks us through it with a teacher’s patience and a dirty mind: grey for rope and bondage, pink for breasts, hunter green if you’re playing daddy, coral for kink, black for heavy S&M. It’s funny, it’s practical, and it’s smart programming – by the time the poetry starts, the room has already been let in on the language of the show. There’s also a practicality here that a lot of Fringe shows would kill for: toilets at the back, drinks between poems but do it quietly, and a menu of approval methods – finger flicks, snaps, or an enthusiastic “fuck yeah”. The blindfold stays in its envelope unless you want it, which is the first of many choices the show hands you.
I took the option. I wore the blindfold for the first poem, and I’d recommend it, with your eyes gone, Rose’s voice completely fills the space, and the childhood memories in that poem hit differently when you can’t see the audience shifting around you. It turned the opening into something closer to a memory than a performance, guided by Rose’s attention to detail.
At its core, Yes, Sir! is autobiographical, and it goes back to 1997, when Rose was fifteen and enduring daily bullying, slurs and cruelty, and at one point, a death wish. What he does with that material is the show’s masterstroke: he traces how teen sexual fantasy became a coping mechanism, a way of transforming pain into pleasure, of taking power back in the only currency available to a bullied kid. It’s confronting, it’s explicit, and it’s handled with such control that it never tips into shock for shock’s sake.
From there the show’s timeline rolls forward: coming out at nineteen, a vanilla relationship at twenty-two, building a chosen family at twenty-seven, and finally reclaiming sexual freedom in middle age. Not every poem is a deep-dive. “Vanilla” is a comedic celebration of uninspired, straightforward sex, personified by “Chad” – the archetype of the bland bloke who nevertheless delivers intense physical pleasure. It’s the show’s comic relief and its most accessible entry point, all physicality and consent, and the room lapped it up.
“Safe Words Are Sexy” is where Yes, Sir! earns its place. Rose recounts a scene where, under distress, the safe word simply could not be found, and then builds the case for safe words as the very thing that makes exploration possible. You can only push limits if you can pull the cord. His line on aftercare is the one that’s going to follow me home: “If you don’t do good aftercare, you have no business being a dom.” That’s not just a good line about kink; that’s an ethic, delivered like a commandment.
The explicit core of the show is a run of dom/sub scenes; there are blindfolds, bondage, gags, spanking, breath control, forced oral, the full vocabulary of Sir and Daddy – rendered in poetic rhythm rather than prose confession. Rose alternates between the dominant voice and something quieter and more self-aware: admiration for the sub, and a frank recognition of the ego fragility that dominance can conceal. The standout sequence is “Monster Tamer”, where Rose interrogates the beast inside the dominant, the tension of drawing power from someone while being acutely aware of the emotional cost of breaking them. The scenes here are framed as negotiated but never consequence-free, which is a great showcase of just how honest this show is.
Yes, Sir! is that rare Fringe show that allows for Rose to showcase a side of the queer community we don’t often get to see, all told through a kinky, explicit, 18+, no-apologies story. It’s not only that, it’s also a document of survival that argues, persuasively, that identity is not shameful, and neither are sexuality or BDSM. The performance runs tight, just a little over forty minutes of poetry, leaving time for the mingling and photos afterwards, and the consent-first scaffolding never feels like a disclaimer bolted on for safety; it is the show. Rose has cemented himself as a fine performer, a master of prose, able to hold the room in the palm of his hand and deliver an unforgettable evening.
FIVE STARS (OUT OF FIVE)
Yes, Sir! is now playing at Wheat, Wine & Whisky through to October 6th, 2026. For more information and to purchase tickets, head HERE.
Reviewer attended on Friday October 2nd, 2026
Image credit – author
