Perth festival presses pause, with regret

Plans are in disarray as dozens of WA festival shows, including Fringe World and Tim Minchin’s Perth Festival opening concert this Friday, have been postponed

Tim Minchin’s Perth Festival concert has been postponerd. Picture Matt Turner

Perth’s lively festival season was supposed to be the celebration not just of summer but the state’s remarkable success in tackling COVID.

Instead, plans are in disarray as dozens of festival shows, including Fringe World and Tim Minchin’s Perth Festival opening concert this Friday, have been postponed.

Perth’s streets have emptied and theatre, art gallery and museum doors around the city have shut tight for the five-day lockdown imposed after Sunday’s news that a security guard in a city quarantine hotel had contracted Covid-19.

The arts sector is fervently hoping the single new case of community-transmitted infection – the first for the state in nearly ten months – proves to be its last.

Meanwhile, all Perth Festival events scheduled to open this weekend, including Michin’s sold-out show, will be shifted to unspecified future dates next week and beyond.

Especially hard-hit are Fringe World performers who are midway through one of the alternative arts’ festival’s most successful seasons, with patrons clamouring at the box office for the last few seats to almost every performance.

Fringe World’s CEO Sharon Burgess says the cancellation of this week’s entire program “is a huge blow and a disappointment, but it’s also necessary.”

“We have had this possibility looming over us, and we’ve always felt grateful for the freedoms we’ve had, but we knew it could go in a whisper.”

She says over $1400 was donated in less than 48 hours after the lockdown to the $32,000 Fringe Fund for artists. “If we stay in lockdown longer, we’ll try and cushion the blow by helping artists to extend their performances and we will accommodate them.”

Rouge cabaret and circus performers Michaela Burger, Paul Westbrook and Sarah Platts are viewing the lockdown as merely “a long intermission” before the curtain goes up again.

“We’ve been through it before in Melbourne and Adelaide,” says Burger, who adds their show Rouge is “circus for grownups” which attracted five-star reviews and has sold every seat in a season they pray will resume next week. “We also have our fingers crossed that we’ll make it to the Adelaide Fringe this year.”

“Meanwhile, we’re sitting tight, behaving and doing what we’re told,” she says. “And of course training and trying to keep in touch with our audiences.”

Perth Festival escaped the onset of Covid-19 lockdown last year, with its final spectacular Highway to Hell tribute to Bon Scott held on the day after Australia’s first Covid fatality, Perth man James Kwan, died.

This year, it faces major disruption as artists, crew and venues are unable to operate, forcing the festival to move its opening events into next week to allow for rehearsal and setup time.

Festival organisers say it will be “a pause for Perth Festival, not a stop, and we look forward to being able to celebrate our community, our artists and our Western Australian stories in a safe and welcoming way as soon as we can.”