The Festival Fringe is always a bit of a chook raffle. With hundreds of events programmed, many with bizarre titles and uncertain provenance, it is difficult to know which is the best investment for the hard-earned rouble.

Daily reviews and colosseum star-ratings both hinder and help but more often it is the halitosis, or otherwise, of word-of mouth which decides. It is an unpredictable business, full of surprises – some delightful, some excruciating beyond measure.

This year’s range has been more variable than most. Some offerings have been of a high standard, others, lamentably, well below. But it is no good muttering about selection committees and the like. The Fringe here, as in Edinburgh and elsewhere, is a catch-all and the players have to accept that Darwinian principles rule, even if that’s not entirely OK.

It can mean that talent at times is undervalued, or discovered too late in its season. Sometimes zealous publicity can attract particular attention to a show but only quality will sustain it. For some performers it is sadly ttue that their work, however sincere, cannot expect to compete at a time when so much other entertainment is on offer in the Fringe and the main Festival.

This time the theatre programme has been stronger than cabaret and comedy. Early on, Whistling in the Theatre’s Ship of Fools, a mordant dystopia linking the exiled outcasts on the Rhine in the late 15th century with the unemployed in the near future, defied the odds in turning disparate elements into theatrical success.

Nigel Kellaway’s Sydney Front revived Marat/ Sadeian techniques for the Pornography of Performance. While some declared they’d seen the face of God, it was neither as profound nor innovative as claimed. Nevertheless, it offered powerful moments and one wonders what the Sydney Front might create if it sank its teeth into the late Jacobean repertoire.

In other performance experiments Lloyd Jones’ La Mama group’s Warnings produced some unexpectedly memorable didactic pranking with its close audience encounters of an anarchic kind.

Local Aboriginal writer Eva Johnson showcased her newest play, Murras (Pitjantjatjara for ‘hands’), an earnestly direct lament for the lost arts of carving, weaving and dance. Unfortunately I missed Mainstteet Theatre’s production of Bob Maza’s The Keepers. Perhaps both productions will offer return seasons later in the year.

In the one-person shows, Patricia Leventon kept the home fires Boylan with Molly Bloom, local actor and writer Tony Mack engagingly explored the preperformance angst of Edwin Booth, brother of Lincoln’s assassin, and Tanya Uren, in a critically under-valued show entitled He Gave Me His Heart far One Minute, meshed her own shrewd writing on the labours of love with those of writers as diverse as Steven Berkoff and Jamaica Kincaid.

Local singers Pat Rix and Cate O’Brien in a song cycle called Decibels celebrated the affirmative voices of women in harmony. Coached by English singer Frankie Armstrong, their music is technically accomplished and politically forthright. Among the thinner ranks of the Funnies this time there were some familiar returns. The Doug Anthony Allstars were as · rancid as ever, offering in a double bill with the literate sexual comedy of the Hot Bagels, some of the best cabaret value in the Fringe.

Even Orchestra’s turned out to be a compilation, retreading material from 1986. The films seemed fuzzier and the behind-the-screens kitchen cupboard instruments had less charm. It is a pity that the orchestrators, especially the astonishing Paul “Flacco” Livingston have not been more prolific since their last visit.

Bing Hitler, alias Craig Ferguson, opened his gorbal wide for some knife and fook humour. He was Rodney Rude from the Highlands really but an amusing man for a’ that. Also on the same programme, the Golden Holdens’ risky form of almost-humour showed that it can be a perilously funny business, this comedy.

Combo Berko’s Slave Clowns of the Third Reich also bounced differently for some audiences even though their manic Berkhausian clowning is scrupulous in its attention to style and these escapees from Circus Oz, Funny Stories and Tick Where Applicable are certainly no rank beginners. For me they captured the essential hilarity of Old Bavaria and their particular brand of Nuremberg thrash has yet to be heralded.

Then in the final week, Tony Strachan and Chrome’s introduced the dance talents of the gifted Meme Thorne in an interesting theatre/ dance/ music study of Australian beach manners seen through a sunglass darkly. The show needs a few calibrations but as ever Strachan is pushing new boundaries – even into the sea.

Shows I was sorry to miss were Glynn Nicholas’s Glynn with a Why, Lenny Kovner’s Mistero Bufo, the Budapest Ensemble and Inside-Out’s The Lover and the Beloved. You can’t be everywhere but I think quite a lot of music crept by me on those waters.

Others will argue about the wisdom of the Fezbah embargo, the Fringe joining fees and the lack of support for shows outside the Living (and Partly Living) Arts Centre. The new Fringe Club Theatre is a plus but the rest of the LAC can’t be tarred up with day-glo paint for too much longer. Nevertheless, supremo Rosemary Miller and her army still managed· to make an awful lot of trains run on time.

“Combing the Fringe” The Adelaide Review, No.50, April, 1988, p.30.