February 19 to March 14

Bookings : FringeTIX – 1300 FRINGE (1300 374 643)

The Fringe has been under way for a week now. The carny playground, of sideshows and spruikers, big tops and little, known as The Garden of Unearthly Delights has been going even longer. Sprawled across Rundle Park just over the road from the city’s favourite café and restaurant precinct, it is again proof that the Fringe captures the whole city. Last Friday an estimated 80,000 lined the streets for the opening parade, and every night since, punters have been queuing up for shows, while others take in the strolling entertainment or the alfresco menu. The nights so far have been balmy. This is Adelaide in late summer. The fish are jumping and the cotton is high.

At the Spiegeltent (not to be confused with the Festival’s Famous Spiegeltent) Fiona O’Loughlin is opening her new show, drily entitled On a Wing and a Prayer. This is her first live gig since her much-publicised onstage collapse in Brisbane, last July, on the eve of her stint on the TV ratings magnet Dancing with the Stars. Yes, she admits, she was tired, and yes, emotional. And Fiona is saying the word herself – alcoholic. She’s taking the twelve steps, but also pausing for some very droll jokes along the way.

As always, her sharp, smart comedy goes where the sanctimonious fear to tread. Even without a pre-prandial double vodka, the mother of five (who can’t remember their names off the top of her head) still has women in the audience in fits and the men looking around to see if it’s alright to smirk. Family values get a razzing, so does being peri-menopausal. And her evocation of her Catholic clan is fond, hilarious and deliciously exaggerated.

At Light Square, on the west side of the city, a very different event is being staged. My Name is Rachel Corrie is a play compiled, by the UK actor Alan Rickman and Katherine Viner, deputy editor of The Guardian, from the notebooks and emails of a 23 year old from Olympia, Washington who went to the Gaza Strip as part of an international group protesting the forcible removal of Palestinian settlements. That she was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer in March 2003 is the dread fact which precedes the ninety minute performance. But it is the evocation of her life which is so dramatically startling. Admirably directed by Daniel Clarke, Hannah Norris gives a splendid account of an idealistic young woman, raised to be forthright and truth-seeking, setting off to discover the world for herself.

With Cassandra Backler’s inventive décor of cardboard boxes, miniature houses and gardens, and Tonka bulldozers, the unfolding tragedy is given a tender particularity. The tone is neither shrill nor sentimental. This is because Rachel Corrie’s own writing is unexpectedly articulate and memorable, as are the letters from her parents. It is no wonder Alan Rickman, reading excerpts of her diaries in The Guardian sensed their dramatic potential. And this production, with its poise, its restraint and its theatrical invention, has found their measure.

The link between the Adelaide Fringe and the Edinburgh original has always been strong and 2010 marks fifty years since the program was first introduced as doppelganger, or rambunctious sibling, to the Adelaide Festival itself. This year’s contingent from the UK is a lively one. Holden Street Theatres now sponsor an event from Edinburgh as part of their schedule and this time the choice is Heroin(e) for Breakfast, a trainspotting study of a ménage a needle, written and directed by Philip Stokes for Horizon Arts in Leeds.

Using the delectable conceit of heroin arriving at the door in the form of a platinum blonde in a white Marilyn skirt, the seduction to the lower depths begins, as two sisters and their cocksure lover gradually discover they don’t control the game. Overwrought, at times over-written, but also strongly etched – this play is a view of not-so-cool Britannia. Not so much look back, but look up your arm, in anger.

Actor, director, and Edinburgh impresario Guy Masterson returns with a strong list of productions at Higher Ground, in Light Square alongside AC Arts and the Shimmering West venue. Masterson’s wonderful turn (alongside the able Ronnie Toms) as the twitching birdwatcher in Tim Whitnall’s grimly comic The Sociable Plover, is eighty minutes of sheer theatrical pleasure. In quite a different key, David Calvitto’s performance of New York playwright, John Clancy’s monologue, The Event, is a witty introspection on the nature of performance – the actor, the audience, the conventions, and the paradox of rehearsed spontaneity. The performer talks about his predicament – and about the way we also act and silently watch in the wider world. His show is a bit “meta”, “David” observes satirically. It is also thought provoking and surprisingly diverting.

Murray Bramwell

The Australian published February 25, 2010.