Edinburgh Fringe success requires edge, energy – and complete disdain for the laws of physics
Australian performers flock to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and this year’s crop are worthy successors to Tim Minchin and Hannah Gadsby.
It’s midnight at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and the Assembly Bar is crawling with Aussies. Josh Thomas is holding court in a booth across from Jonny Hawkins, the former Christian youth minister turned DJ-queer-party-icon. Michael Dalton, who is English but lives and works in Australia and performs as cabaret queen Dolly Diamond, has turned in for the night, spent from unpacking her childhood trauma in The Unburdening of Dolly Diamond. Her sidekick, Jens Radda, (Skank Sinatra), kicks on. Australian acts from Tim Minchin through to Hannah Gadsby have slogged through years of financial drain and sleeping on rolled-up blankets before launching their careers at the Fringe. As the world’s biggest arts jamboree approaches its final week, we take a look at the best Australian acts making waves in the Scottish capital.
Lewis Major: Lien and Triptych
Award-winning choreographer and director Lewis Major is one of the most exciting names in Australian contemporary dance. His new show, Lien, is a 10-minute one-on-one performance, where patron and performer meet on stage in facing chairs to talk for five minutes before the dancer performs a solo inspired by the exchange – it’s like a combination of a therapy session and a lap dance. Triptych, a triple bill that features four dancers in a mesmerising collocation of sound and light calls to mind wood nymphs frolicking in dappled sunlight and mermaids communing underwater.
Virginia Gay: Cyrano
Fringe runs on word of mouth, and Gay’s Cyrano, which premiered at Melbourne Theatre Company in 2022, is on many people’s lips.
Gay turns up the dial on the original funny, steamy and weird elements of Edmund Rostand’s classic to create a gender-flipped, queer love story that explores how smart women, like the bright and beautiful Roxanne (Jessica Whitehurst), can be the most interesting person in the room and still think themselves unworthy of love.
Gay says her retelling leans into “’the exquisite and sometimes exquisitely awful feeling of getting a good ‘yearn on’ … How delicious and rotten longing is, and how a crush sometimes makes you do terrible, stupid things”.
Hilary Bell: Summer of Harold
When playwright and librettist Hilary Bell, and founder and artistic director of Sport for Jove, Damien Ryan, collide, you can expect good things. This trilogy of short plays is the brainchild of Australian barrister and philanthropist Georgie Black, who supports and platforms Australian acts at the Fringe. In the titular play, it’s the summer of 1984 and Janet (Lucia Mastrantone), a 19-year-old backpacker, finds herself in the unlikely role of housekeeper to Harold Pinter and Antonia Fraser. In Enfant Terrible, Gareth (Berryn Schwerdt) plays a sculptor consumed by envy over his former art school bestie’s hallowed career, while his own fades into nothingness. In the final story, Lookout, Schwerdt is poignant as Jonathan, a 60-year-old man crippled by the memory of his overbearing mother.
Reuben Kaye: The Kaye Hole
Charismatic ringmaster Reuben Kaye (whose show at last year’s Sydney Comedy Festival required security and police presence after a sexually charged joke on The Project led to death threats) holds court at the Palais du Variete for a late-night cabaret that sold out in 2022 and 2023. It’s still a not-to-be-missed hot ticket that showcases Kaye’s remarkable stage presence, and their big-hearted generosity as a performer. Kaye loves to platform up-and-coming acts and is a pro at the essential end-of-show shout-out to fellow Aussies.
Clockfire Theatre Company: Plenty of Fish in the Sea
Fans of absurdist French theatre will delight in this allegorical tale about hook-up culture (get it?). All three players trained at Ecole Jacques Lecoq in Paris, and their skill in physical theatre and comedy – why is slapping someone with a dead fish always so funny? – carry this tale of a lost castaway saved hook, line and sinker by two mysterious and lusty women come to life. Where they are, and when, is unclear, there is barely any dialogue, and a lot of it is in French. Ambiguous and provocative (you’ll never look at a baguette in the same way again), it’s a highlight of the House of Oz stable.
Yozi Mensch: No Babies in the Sauna
Adelaide comedian Yozi Mensch’s absurdist semi-autobiographical sketch, No Babies in the Sauna, earned five stars at Prague Fringe. It’s a riotously funny show about a clown school dropout, full of clever wordplay and silly faces. Mensch calls it “a tragicomedy about trying to find where you belong and realising that where you belong is wherever you want”. Their UK influences – Black Books, Monty Python, Rowan Atkinson – make them a natural here.
Gravity & Other Myths: Ten Thousand Hours
Multi-award-winning Adelaide circus troupe Gravity & Other Myths is true to its name. Nine performers and one drummer show complete disdain for the laws of physics as they scale each other’s bodies and toss each other across the stage with as much casual energy as it takes to bin a half-eaten sandwich. The show is about the hours and preparation it takes to become good at something, and the troupe shows us what it’s like to get it wrong, and, repeatedly, what it’s like to get it very right. It’s an ode to the determination of artists singularly focused on perfecting their craft, with a dash of Aussie battler spirit on the side.
The Listies: ROFL
It’s no mean feat getting the adults to laugh as hard as the children but “kidult” comedy duo The Listies gets it right every time. Potty humour is king in this act, which features Rich in the role of harried parent trying to get Matt, adorable as a hyped-up, flossing, bum-shuffling bedtime denier, to settle down for the night.
Down Under: The Songs That Shaped Australia
There is no better display of the universal appeal of Australian music than a bunch of Gen Z Spaniards bopping to Kylie, rocking out to INXS, and doing palmas to the intro of You’re the Voice in the Bijou Spiegeltent. Multi-award-winning songstress Michelle Pearson leads her band in a performance that is an ode to the stories behind some of our most beloved music. You might know the tragic story of the town behind Blue Sky Mine but I sure didn’t.
Michaela Burger: The State of Grace
Grace Bellavue was Australia’s best-known sex worker. She advocated for decriminalisation of sex work (and delivered a Ted Talk on it) and became a cause celebre on social media after naming her rapist on Twitter. After her sudden death by suicide, her mother discovered a trove of diaries, poems and hip-hop lyrics. She entrusted multi-award-winning artist Burger (A Migrant’s Son, Exposing Edith) to turn her daughter’s unpublished musings and life story into this one-woman show.
Edinburgh Fringe Festival runs until August 26. Hannah Gadsby’s Woof premieres on August 18 at Underbelly Bristo Square.
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