Fringe Reflections

Murray Bramwell

Since its relocation in the Rundle Street precinct the Festival Fringe has, seemingly, had a charmed life. But I say seemingly, because sometimes in among the razzle dazzle it is hard to work out exactly what is actually going on. In identifying the success of the Fringe you wonder, in the words of the poet, how you might tell the dancer from the dance ? There is certainly a lot of action in town. The nights are balmy, the living easy and, by the look of the non-stop trade in cafes and pubs, the cotton is as high as an auditor’s eye. But while we have heard plenty about the profit margins on Rundle Street, it would seem, that for many Fringe events, things are not so rosy.

To an extent this is inevitable. The program, unsolicited and uncurated, is on a scale of competition that would trouble even Malthus. When the La Mama six-pack from Melbourne called its season Survival of the Fittest, it carried only a partial irony. Take them as a case in point. Despite strong reviews and three week seasons the La Mama shows fared only modestly well. The Producers’ Shed was but two blocks from the epicentre but that ,maybe, was already a bridge too far. After all, haunts like the Fringe Club looked all but desolate some nights, the attempts at Fringe West in Gouger Street pretty much packed up, and reports were that the Big Red late sessions were not well supported either.

There have been other glitches as well. There was a sense of an infrastructure in siege. Despite valiant efforts by operators the phone lines did not handle bookings briskly enough, there were internet delays and some customers reported errors and misinformation. And with a printed program that only became more impenetrable as time went on, the problem of identifying particular events in the general ruck became almost impossible.

You couldn’t tell where acts had come from, or really what they were offering. International performers were mixed in with local listings and only the Big Red events appeared to enjoy an advantage when it came to publicity. Ticket prices, while generally cheaper than the Festival, were steep enough for punters to want to avoid taking risks, and, if conversations I had were anything to go by, the door price for late shows at Big Red dampened any chance that the cargo cult container venue would repeat the Red Square vibe in Kosky’s 96 Festival.

A number of patterns are now evident in the Fringe. The headline acts, boosted by the familiarity of television, will predictably take a big chunk of the box office. Jim Rose, now successfully mainstreaming from the grotesquely arcane little lounge act he used to be, captured the gawping classes, especially when he talked up his X Files and Simpsons connections. The Three Canadians, the Scared Weird Little Guys, Tokyo Shock Boys and Judith Lucy all reclaimed their 1996, and even 1994, constituencies. And acts like Colin Hay, Cassandra Wilson, the Indigo Girls and Kate Ceberano, The Blind Boys of Alabama and Charlie Musselwhite all proved to be popular one night stands.

Then there are those unexpected hits. The Fat Elvises, who I was sorry to miss, played to full houses at Big Red. Lightning Strike, with its Carrick Hill production of Much Ado About Nothing just about had to beat back the crowds with a stick- proving that not everything had to be in town to get an audience. Word of mouth was also good for the North American Foreign Legion program at Madlove. Perhaps the most talked about show, and one I knew I somehow would be thwarted from seeing, was Dawson Nichols’ I Might Be Edgar Allan Poe. The buzz on Nichols was very enthusiastic – as it was for Escher’s Hands from Seattle-based Theatre Simple and for Stephen Rappaport’s second one-man show, The Chocolate Quarry.

Also in the theatre program was Brink Productions’ lively version of Jez Butterworth’s wide boy caper Mojo, playing at the Red Shed. Racily directed by Benedict Andrews and designed in suitably tacky retro woodgrain by Imogen Thomas, Mojo ensured that Brink again gathered the accolades for best production. And the praise was well deserved. Mojo was a good choice.

A fast, smart, blackly comic account of a gang of hoods in a London nightclub, the play is like a cracked partial version of Hamlet, with Justin Ratcliffe as the psychopath Baby, seeking revenge for his bisected father against the usurper Mickey, played with dour menace by Paul Moore- while the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern figures, Sweets and Potts, performed with ferocious deadpan by David Mealor and Richard Kelly, try and cut Skinny Luke (a macabrely zany John Molloy) out of the action.

Also performed in repertory with Mojo was Harold Pinter’s creepy two hander The Dumb Waiter. Directed by Gina Tsikouras and played, in Emma Peel mod black, by Lizzy Falkland and Catherine Bishop, the tensions of Pinter’s bleak little tale of two hit-persons were engagingly established. Marred only by occasional vocal excess, the performances were nicely paced and coolly captured the excruciations of Pinter’s cat and mouse dialogue.

With these two shows Brink show themselves in fine form. The revival of The Dumb Waiter paired with Mojo, itself a kind of cartoon of Pinter, reminds us of the company’s flair for selecting repertoire. Mojo goes to Belvoir Street in Sydney sometime in May and there are plans for Melbourne also. Audiences better watch out. Brink have got their Mojo working- and this production will slay them.

Another highlight in the final week of the Fringe is the comedian Rich Hall. In a program dominated by old faces, and some rather callow new ones, Hall, who originally hails from Montana, shows why he has already become a popular fixture at the Melbourne Comedy Festival. His show at the Nova Cinema is a shrewd blend of local observation, improvisation and wonderfully dry, slow moving schtick.

A sometime writer for David Letterman, Rich Hall has echoes of the young Walter Matthau. Serious, lugubrious and unmistakably intelligent, Rich Hall works the room with a kind of amiable menace. Its a fine line between comedy and stalking, he quips as he interrogates the front row about their jobs, their partners and their own black little hearts.

Refering to a display map of the world Hall does some radical geography. He removes Australia back to England- “we’re ho-ome.” He shifts New Zealand to Wales, so that a country of vowels can meet a country of consonants, and he renames countries in the African continent after famous snack foods so that Americans might remember them better. Then he reads listings from the Trading Post, makes up a song based on a garage sale and then, in a series of non sequiturs, starts a brilliant riff about the Hubble telescope and how it was accidentally installed in a Buick.

Greg Fleet’s Underwater World was a hit and miss thing compared to the considerably more together Thai Die in the last Fringe and at least some of the material we had heard in the Space cabaret season in January. Janei Anderson’s Lucy Fell From Heaven, a monologue with music about angels and ingenues falling out of thrall, crossed from fragile into feeble as the material melted like wax from its wings. It was a sweet idea but I fear too ethereal for this world.

So just as well as for Rich Hall who provided some of my best Fringe moments along with Mind’s Eye, Legs on the Wall, the Blind Boys of Alabama and Clarence Fountain, Jerome Pride in Self, Stephen Rappaport in the Museum of Contemporary Art, Rod Quantock in Kennettville, The Master and Magarita and the Mojo boys complaining about the white pills making their piss black.
The Fringe is a terrific vortex of a festival and Barbara Wolke and her associates have done well. But given that it all depends on the goodwill and commitment of participants let’s hope that with all this new-tech on offer, the real lines of communication can be improved for next time round.

The Adelaide Review, No. 175, April, 1998. p.28