Is bigger better?: reflections on Adelaide Fringe 2016

It seems that every year since going annual in 2007, the Adelaide Fringe Festival has been convulsed by a fresh bout of severe self-reflection. Normally, the Festival’s artists and commentators have the good sense to wait until the last bleary-eyed comedian has left the city, or returned to her day job, before reporting on the Festival’s vital signs. This year the examination began prematurely, initiated by a Facebook broadside from British comic Alexis Dubus on 5 March, over a week out from Festival’s end. Dubus’ post, much quoted by approving artists and local media sensing a useful ruckus, read in part:

Well it saddens me to say this, but farewell Adelaide Fringe. This is going to be my last time playing you.

9 shows in and my total sales across my entire run are still 50% of my OPENING NIGHT sales in Perth.

Something’s not right here any more.

When I first came here in 2009 it felt like a genuinely experimental and exciting creative hub, with audiences seeking out tucked-away venues and subversive shows.

Having visited Adelaide before, I was blown away by how much this sleepy town got behind the weird and the wonderful offerings that Fringe threw at them.

Seven years on and those people seem to have vanished.

I wouldn’t be so cynical as to suggest a marketing ploy lay behind Dubus’ clearly heartfelt missive, but a part of him must have been satisfied to see his words embraced by local, national and, eventually, international media in a way he felt his show, Alexis Dubus Verses the World, had not been by Adelaide audiences. The city’s daily tabloid the Advertiser ran Dubus’ post in full as an op ed, and both the ABC and the Guardian picked up on the story as it made ripples as far afield as the UK. Unsurprisingly, however, the debate played out with the most intensity within the small circle of artists for whom the Adelaide Fringe has traditionally been a key stop on the global circuit that underwrites their professional existence.

The Garden of Unearthly Delights

  

This year marked my Adelaide Fringe debut as an artist (I’ve covered the Festival as a critic since 2009) and, like many artists, I had my own set of experiences against which to hold up Dubus’ comments. As a maker of (relatively) serious-minded theatre, I sympathised with Dubus’ bemoaning of the seeming preference of Adelaide audiences for ‘soulless, mass-produced bollocks over thoughtful, innovative works in quirky spaces’. But is this true?

The raw facts tell us only that ticket sales have been going up every year, as have the number of events (up to around 1,200 in 2016) in what remains, true to the Fringe’s original vision, an open-access festival. At such a size – second only to Edinburgh – there are no guarantees of quality for audiences, and no guarantees of full houses for artists. My own show, This Storm, ran for five performances at Tuxedo Cat, the same venue where Alexis Dubus Verses the World struggled. Conversely, we enjoyed audience numbers well above our expectations with an average house across the season of over 90 per cent (current Fringe director Heather Croall reckons 40 per cent is ‘a pretty good night’ – we did too, as reflected in our budget).

Alan Grace, whose company Duende produced two plays at the same venue by acclaimed Adelaide playwright Duncan Graham, told me his experience was similar:

For the most part, audience numbers exceeded our expectations, or were about where I had hoped they might be. We did really well for the last week, and sold out two of the nights of the season. With a 70-seater venue, we were extremely pleased with that.

Local comedian and fringe circuit veteran Fabien Clark, whose show The Walking Dreads played for two weeks at CBD venue The Producer’s Bar, was similarly positive when I asked him how it went, describing this year’s Adelaide Fringe as his ‘best to date’ in terms of ticket sales. Dubus also had a successful show, albeit not the one at Tuxedo Cat: his Marcel Lucont Is proved a considerable commercial and critical success at parklands hub Gluttony.

I’m not suggesting that this small sample of experiences is broadly representative – I also know of artists who struggled, like Dubus, to fill even small venues, and those who ended up having to cancel underselling shows, even taking into account Adelaide audiences’ notoriety for booking late/not at all. A Melbourne-based playwright I know has stated publicly that, after bringing shows here for six consecutive years, she won’t come again after her last play in 2014 got houses of three to eight people a night as against between 30 and 60 in Melbourne and Perth (Dubus has made contradictory statements about whether or not he’ll return to Adelaide).

But the historical reality is that for every show that undeservedly bombs, one deserving of good houses gets them. No doubt this equation has been skewed in the wrong direction by the heightened competitiveness brought on by the increasing domination of cashed-up venues The Royal Croquet Club and The Garden of Unearthly Delights – not to mention the Festival’s sheer size in the face of a small, economically disadvantaged and geographically isolated population – but artists like Dubus have no more right to feel entitled to large audiences than audiences do to, as Dubus rightly lamented in his post, access shows for free.

Like a lot of artists, I’m not immune to wishing that more people would seek out provocative, non-mainstream (i.e. actual fringe) fare rather than queuing up for the latest, reassuringly familiar appearances by the same marquee comedians who were here last year (and the year before that). As someone deeply invested in both seeing and making this kind of work, and who believes in its unquantifiable benefit to society, I understand the urge to implore audiences to challenge themselves and, in doing so, support local and emerging artists. But how quickly this desire turns into contempt for audiences, and the most repellent appeal imaginable that says you must do something because it is worthy. Maybe Dubus’ Tuxedo Cat show deserved to fail – more likely, if the reviews are anything to go by, it didn’t. Either way, pointing the finger at ‘the attitude of Fringe-goers’ is to disappear up a rhetorical cul-de-sac. It ignores the inconvenient but nonetheless decisive reality that audiences for live art are shaped by many factors, not the least of which – especially in Adelaide during the city’s famously event-saturated ‘Mad March’ – are limitations of time and money. 

Michael Allen (l) and Tamara Lee (r) in This Storm. Photo: Lauren Playfair

Why shows succeed or fail commercially sits on a complicated axis of geography, timing, reviews, publicity, word of mouth, luck, and the vagaries of public opinion. The mix is even more convoluted during festivals where competition for the attention (and cash) of audiences is fierce. It’s no wonder that, as it grows seemingly exponentially in size, increasing numbers of artists are feeling like committing to the Adelaide Fringe is to dive into the deep end, left to sink or swim alongside commercial leviathans like The Garden by a management primarily concerned with profit. But smaller venues – none of which are run by Fringe – must step up too. Holden Street Theatres, in inner suburban Adelaide, recorded its highest ever Fringe ticket sales this year, the result, largely, of slick advertising and the canny crafting out of a niche in a certain kind of show – well-made, minimalist, lightly political – imported from Edinburgh.

Anyone watching these events from that city will no doubt be doing so with a feeling of déjà vu. Edinburgh Fringe, too, has gone through its share of growing pains. One result was Forest Fringe, a free, not-for-profit ‘Fringe of the Fringe’ launched in 2007 as ‘a community of artists making space for risk and experimentation’ – in other words, the fostering of exactly the kind of work fringe festivals were established to showcase. It remains to be seen whether such an enterprise could work in Adelaide, but Edinburgh – with its three and a half thousand shows – is nevertheless seen as the model: in August, members of Festivals Adelaide, the umbrella organisation that represents ten of South Australia’s major arts festivals, will travel to Edinburgh on (depending on your point of view) an intelligence-gathering mission or a junket.

What they won’t need to be told is what everybody already knows: that Adelaide simply doesn’t have the population, or proximity to a large centre such as London, to sustain a fringe festival of anything like Edinburgh’s size. The irony is that it is precisely what has traditionally made Adelaide Fringe special – the city’s small size and compact CBD, which allow for the electric, all-encompassing atmosphere of a bustling village – is the very thing that is now perceived to be threatening its sustainability. Whatever the Festivals Adelaide committee discover in Edinburgh, the same debates will rumble on about the dominance of big venues and big comedians, and about what Writers’ Week director Laura Kroetsch and others regard as Adelaide’s festivalisation problem – too many cultural events taking place over too short a space of time, resulting in an overcrowded calendar in February and March, and little going on for the rest of the year.

But the reality is that a culture of festivalisation suits the economic interests of all the big players, right up to the state itself. As Croall recently told the Advertiser:

There is this growing idea that you should shut down big shows in order to make people go to the little shows – that is totally never going to work.

On the table at the moment instead, according to Croall, are subsidies for artist accommodation and venue hire. These will help. Talk of an imagined lost golden age won’t, and neither will excoriating audiences for going to the ‘wrong’ shows. We can expect more hissy fits while the Adelaide Fringe goes through its difficult adolescence. But we have no choice but to work together if we are to maintain and strengthen its viability as a platform for independent artists to try out new work, to experiment with form and theme, and to engage with audiences in ways that won’t happen anywhere else.           

Fringe review: 'Maybe You Could Crack My Sternum'

Tandanya - Firefly, 27 February-6 March 2014. Written and performed by Emma Hall and Emma Smith.

Photo: Beth Jennings

In the human body, the sternum is a flat, T-shaped bone which sits in the centre of the chest. Its function is to protect the heart and other organs from external trauma. You won’t find this out in Maybe You Could Crack My Sternum, but you may elicit something about the metaphysical emptiness which its performers Emma (Hall) and Emma (Smith) describe as being like that mysterious indentation just below the ribcage.

MYCCMS (as it will be convenient to call it) is a brief but ebullient exploration of female anxiety as experienced by 20- and 30-somethings. In the opening minutes we are introduced to some of the (presumably real life) characteristics that distinguish the two Emmas – their favourite drinks and pastimes and so on – but they are virtually interchangeable. Dressed in matching white t-shirts and underwear only, they are more ciphers than genuine characters although differences do emerge; the wide-eyed, almost six feet Emma Hall gives a restrained and quietly mischievous performance, whereas her much shorter namesake is angry and elastic, at times worryingly unstable.

In rapid, often surreal scenes, the Emmas navigate the fraught transition from adolescence to young womanhood. Internet dating, eating disorders and depression are all touched on but the script is fast moving and densely imagistic; in short, hard to pin down. The all-white set, designed by Taryn Dudley and perceptively lit by Jackson Trickett, is similarly opaque, though its geoboard-inspired webs hint at the complexities and confusions of the Emmas’ attempts to connect with men, the world, and each other.         

If MYCCMS has one abiding problem, it is that its performers can’t seem to register when their eccentricities stop being charming and start to look a lot like self-indulgence. The show is entirely self-devised, and I couldn’t help but wonder if the involvement of a director or outside eye might have usefully diluted some of this excess and, perhaps, steered the script in one or two riskier directions. MYCCMS is weakened (though, happily, not fatally) by its unending cutesiness. The show isn’t long enough for this oneness of tone to really grate, but it is odd that in a play that is, in part, about human connectivity, Hall and Smith do so little to connect with us. Their intimacy, though potent and clearly deeply felt, eventually has a distancing effect. The audience feels shut out.

I understand that the company regards MYCCMS as a work in progress. It certainly feels like one, although there is plenty to go on. The writing, often evocative and understatedly funny, is already strong, and both Emmas are fine performers whose onstage chemistry, if given the necessary checks and balances, will undoubtedly prove an asset to future productions.    

Fringe review: 'Yours the Face'

Quiet Little Fox, Tandanya - Firefly, 15 February-1 March 2014. Written by Fleur Kilpatrick, dramaturgy by Raimondo Cortese. Directed by Robert Reid and Sarah Walker.

A photographer and his subject, a beautiful but damaged model, are played by the same actor in Fleur Kilpatrick’s ‘duet for solo voice’ Yours the Face. The function of the conceit – and it is one that mostly works – is, according to the playwright, to prevent the audience’s objectification of a female actor in the role of a model.

Roderick Cairns is excellent in both modes, physically lithe and emotionally brittle as the troubled Emmy, hard-edged and unaffected as the straight-talking Aussie photographer Peter. Kilpatrick milks the contrast between the outwardly genteel model and the gruff photographer to sustained and successful comic effect. One of the pleasures of this production is watching Cairns keep up with these tonal shifts which grow steadily darker as more is revealed of Emmy’s chequered past.   

The couple meet, naturally, at a shoot, their respective solitudes cancelling each other out in a blaze of studio light flashes and pounding techno. The honeymoon period is brief as the jet setting and drugs take their toll and the old silences of their lives return, alone together, the weight of personal demons ultimately crushing the thrill of young love.

Kilpatrick’s writing is sharp and grittily profane but often funny, reminiscent in places of contemporary American dramatists such as Neil LaBute and David Mamet. The playwright’s program notes gesture towards another stateside influence, realist painter Edward Hopper, in their evocation of lost souls permanently in transit, belonging only in ‘airport terminals, in hotel lobbies, in hire cars’.

The play is not, however, as melancholic as all that, mostly because the set up is not that of one of Hopper’s icy Midwestern tableaus, but rather that of a classic odd couple tale, told in brisk monologues whose backdrop is the razzle-dazzle world of high fashion. There is something inscrutable about both Emmy and Peter which this reviewer found frustrating, but their uneven, quietly obsessional relationship is lent a graspable reality by Cairns’ skilfully distinct characterisations. The inevitable breakup, when it comes, is strange and affecting.

While it is playing, Yours the Face is unquestionably enjoyable, its studied interiority making for an intimate and involving experience. Afterwards, however, I felt uncertain what its casually satisfying parts amounted to. There are intriguing suggestions in Kilpatrick’s script of bigger stories – of the costs and consequences of physical beauty, of the alienating effects of globalisation, of the differing narcissisms of both the loved and the unloved – but nothing quite sticks. It is perhaps, too, an unintended result of Cairns’ bravura soloing that it is easy to see Yours the Face as a play which does not add up to much more than a performance vehicle, albeit an unusually well-crafted and pleasurable one.