The Adelaide Fringe: Parallel performers

Published on Monday 1 March 2010 18:03

The weather is a bit different, but otherwise the Adelaide Fringe is a mirror image of its Edinburgh counterpart. Perhaps this is why the festivals keep such a close eye on each other, finds Tim Cornwell

SITTING on a sunny Australian pavement is one Guy Masterson, theatre director, actor, and producer, whose show Morecambe has graduated from the 2009 Edinburgh Fringe to the West End and two Olivier nominations. As a nasty-looking giant wasp hovers a few yards away – about 8ft tall, on stilted legs – he's telling me how he's laid out $95,000 to bring eight shows to the Adelaide Fringe.

From last year's Fringe First winner, The Sociable Plover, to Scaramouche Jones, they are Edinburgh award-winners coming here for the first time, filling a new Fringe venue in South Adelaide, a three-space arts studio now called the Higher Ground Theatre. While his previous shows, 12 Angry Men and Under Milk Wood, have made Masterson a star in both cities, the venture is one sign that the historic two-way traffic between Edinburgh and Adelaide over 50 years is thriving, perhaps more than ever. "It's a very strong, developing link," he says.

Adelaide's month-long Fringe boasts about 700 shows and events this year. That makes it a third of the size of the Edinburgh Fringe, but it is a crazy mirror image of the original. From its origins in 1960 as "other activity" to the official Adelaide Festival, it took its name and charter from Edinburgh. All too familiar issues – commercial vs experimental, comedy vs theatre, main Festival vs Fringe, the costs of accommodation, competing venues and bar revenues, the one eye on rival festivals in other cities – play out in different ways. The two festivals constantly learn from each other's experiences, as well as swapping administrators and acts at all levels, though Edinburgh will never master Adelaide's rainless days of glorious blue skies.

Down an alley off the main Rundle Street hub, with its atmospheric colonial-era frontage for cafs and clothes shops, lies the hip Tuxedo Cat venue, a ramshackle brick building with a record and bric-a-brac shop on the ground floor, artists' studios and a roof top bar – with no umbrellas – above. Manager Cass Tombs is running three spaces this year, with acts like Dr Brown Behaves, a surreal comic act which includes Dr Brown pelting the audience with wet handfuls of olives and fan-driven salt and pepper. "Pure gold," declares a departing audience member.

For three years Tombs has been working to develop the studio venue as a low cost place for "people to try out new ideas" and reduce costs of thousands of dollars, she says. But Tuxedo Cat is heading for extermination, or rather demolition. "It's been earmarked, and we finally got an eviction notice for May. It's to be 16 stories of cheap student accommodation. It's one of those things that you knew would happen, but thought people would come to their senses and realise it's not really what we need in Adelaide."

Walking round the city, you cannot help but feel that Tombs has a point. Adelaide was laid out from its 1836 founding as a gridded square mile surrounded by parkland with the residential suburbs on the other side of them. It made the centre focused and walkable, the ideal quality for a Fringe.

The current mix of shining sharp-lined modern tower blocks, and charming period stone and brick from the 19th century to the early 20th, can create stunning architectural contrast. But the other impression, for this ignorant outsider, is that recent overbuilding risks killing off the intimate atmosphere block by block.

At the heart of the Adelaide Fringe, like it or not, is the Garden of Earthly Delights. Founded on city parkland in 2000 when the Famous Spiegeltent first came to the city, it grew organically into an open air, sunswept, multi-tented and much larger equivalent of Edinburgh's George Square. For taxi drivers and many punters it almost is the Fringe, and the shows draw your steps inevitably to it, but it's also criticised for commercialism and crassness. Adelaide, you're reminded, has close to 300 venues, many one-roomers in pubs or studios, more than Edinburgh.

Playing in the Bosco Theatre is The Boy with Tape on His Face with Australian Sam Wills, a silent comedian who expresses indignation with his eyes and relies on his willing audience for constant interaction, such as doing a mock striptease while he sits and watches. At least two Edinburgh venues, the Gilded Balloon and Underbelly, were courting the show. Across the gardens Wills' wife Felicity, who has the stage name Lili La Scala, is performing War Notes, songs and readings running from the Western Front in the First World War to Afghanistan in 2009. The Boy with Tape on His Face won awards and sell-out runs here in 2009, but the couple are awaiting their moment to gamble on Edinburgh. They met there, when Wills was a Royal Mile street performer and Felicity an English opera singer turned Fringe act.

Adelaide is more nurturing, the couple say, as well as boasting stunning weather; though it also happens to be the capital of South Australia, a long slog by road from Sydney or Melbourne. "Flyering is effective here, because there isn't the sheer number of shows in terms of Edinburgh," says Wills. "There's enough audience for shows to go around. They always say the average size audience for Edinburgh is six people, whereas here it's a lot higher."

Wills deserves to do well in Edinburgh. But one show, En Route – in my haphazard selection – stood out as a true original; Adelaide brought it here from the Melbourne Fringe with a travelling award. From the Melbourne company Betty Brooke, and featuring three performers, the promenade show takes you through city malls and alleys, guided by iPod and mobile phone, sometimes by hand. It throws you off-balance, and has you looking with different eyes at a city and yourself; without giving it away, there aren't many shows that would have you shouting from a multi-storey car park, or in my case buying a porcelain statuette in a record mart. Edinburgh venues, it is said, are eyeing the act.

There has been a particularly strong presence from Scotland this year; not just Guy Masterson, but an Underbelly director for the first time, and the Assembly director William Burdett Coutts, on his first visit in more than a decade, partly drawn by the Australian Performing Arts Market trade show.

Burdett Coutts, with an eye on some ten projects from here, notes the enthusiasm the city of 1.2 million people has for its Fringe; Adelaiders don't just rent their apartments and leave. "They love it," he says. "It may be because it's a quiet place for the rest of the year, but they really are behind it; the great thing here is you sense that at every level, from the public through to the top politicians, there's great support or what is going on here."

The Adelaide Fringe's director, Christie Anthoney, is herself a veteran of Edinburgh's festivals, having run Fringe Sunday and been a former site manager at our book festival. She says Edinburgh needs to learn one lesson: Adelaide gets more than A$1 million (about 600,000 in public money partly for programming a parade, party and this year to station giant inflatable astronauts in incongruous positions round the city as its symbol. She urges Edinburgh to do the same. "We understand each other," she says. "We are on the same page. We have a parallel history."