Adelaide’s Fringe: from sexed up circuses to a roll call of comedians
With its carnival vibe, Australia’s largest arts festival transforms the South Australian capital.
In La Ronde, an astonishing cabaret-meets-circus show at this year’s the 2025 Adelaide Fringe Festival, “Polina from Belarus” hangs in mid-air from a small device fixed to her hair. A pioneer of the hair-hanging routine, this gifted aerialist performs high above a small, round stage, spinning so fast the sequins on her barely there leotard become a glittering blur.
Polina’s equally bold colleague Felipe Reyes (from Colombia) accomplishes his aerial routine while hanging by his mouth from a chain. As if that were not painful enough, for his finale Reyes ups the ante by holding two fire torches while dangling in mid-air – still holding on with nothing more than a bit between his teeth. The Colombian creates a ring of flames around his suspended body, provoking gasps from the audience at the Fringe festival’s Spiegeltent.
This cabaret-circus from Australian producers Strut & Fret keeps you on the edge of your seat with acts that seem to push the boundaries of human endurance and physical possibility. Members of its multinational cast perform one jaw-dropping feat after another, from the “look, Mum, no hands!” aerialist routines to an impossibly elegant gymnast swinging out over the audience on a moving pole, to a skinny unicyclist (Britain’s Sam Goodburn) in a beanie and Borat-style mankini.
Goodburn plays the comic foil to the acrobats, aerialists and their perfectly toned, strutting bodies: he can gently punt a biscuit with his toe, spin around and catch it in his mouth. In an extended gag, the comedian loses his trousers while riding the unicycle and needs to get them back on. His extraordinary sense of balance is further tested when he hoists onto his shoulders an audience volunteer – a young woman in high heels – while riding the unicycle in, you guessed it, the mankini.
La Ronde is part of the new wave of circuses that combine Cirque du Soleil skill levels with pumping soundtracks, live music, comedy and burlesque. There is a plethora of PVC bondage gear, whips and G-strings in this production and its hit sister show Limbo, another circus-cabaret hybrid playing at the Fringe. At times, the attempt to amp up the sex factor with scenes including a collective partial striptease can seem like a case of trying too hard.
However, this is a relatively minor gripe, given the sublime skills and fearlessness the performers bring to their roles. Among Limbo’s daredevils is a female fire-eater who looks as if she wandered in from an Australian Ballet rehearsal. Yet before long she is gulping down mouthfuls of flames in quick succession, as if guzzling an energy drink on a hot day.
Adelaide Fringe artistic director Heather Croall’s 2025 program features several alternative or sexed-up circuses, a host of tribute shows and a rollcall of stand-up comedians ranging from household names (Tommy Little, Luke McGregor, Merrick Watts) to emerging stars testing the waters with cheeky, anti-PC shows such as The Racist Immigrants.
This year marks Croall’s 10th program. What started as an event in 1960 to give exposure to local performers who missed out on a berth at the mainstream Adelaide Festival has grown into the country’s largest arts festival, with 1400 acts across 500 venues in the 2025 iteration.
South Australian Arts Minister Andrea Michaels has said the Fringe is “a cornerstone” of Adelaide’s cultural identity and contributed $149m to the state’s economy in 2024. Croall tells The Australian the annual event “is an economic powerhouse for South Australia, injecting millions of dollars into local businesses, hospitality, tourism, and the arts … Year after year, we see the festival drive interstate and international visitation, support thousands of jobs, and generate an economic uplift that benefits the entire state.”
The 2024 Adelaide Fringe attracted almost 60,000 interstate visitors and the organisers are hoping to exceed that number in 2025.
Ticket sales have doubled across the past decade on Croall’s watch: one million were sold in 2024, imbuing this open-access arts and entertainment bash with the ability to transform the sometimes-sleepy SA capital into a town where a carnivalesque vibe is palpable. As Croall puts it: “The opening weekend is always an electric time to be in Adelaide; the city comes to life with new energy and people.
“It’s a time when our streets, parks and venues transform into vibrant stages.”
Last weekend the paths through the festival’s key parkland venues The Garden of Unearthly Delights and Gluttony were so packed you were obliged to shuffle rather than stride, while long queues formed outside many venues.
“It’s as if all Adelaide is here,” one visitor said, as seniors and children, hipsters and tradies visited the festival in search of shows, food, drink and carnival rides. This is the kind of festival with an onsite tattooist, 15-minute comedy routines that cost $10 and more expensive international shows such as the performatively glamorous LadyBoys of Bangkok and an acrobatic The Black Blues Brothers show that already has played to 650,000 people around the world.
Staggering in from Britain for a return Fringe season is Sh!t-Faced Shakespeare, a version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in which “an entirely serious Shakespeare play” is staged with “an entirely sh!t-faced actor”.
Festival regular the three-time Grammy-winning Soweto Gospel Choir was in top form this week as it performed songs – in six African languages and English – from its latest album, Hope.
These songs and anthems were inspired by Nelson Mandela’s Freedom movement, the US civil rights movement of the 1950s and gospel music.
Despite the language barriers and lack of program notes, you can glean what the choir is singing about from its perfectly co-ordinated choreography and the emotional register of the performers’ deeply felt singing: when the choristers mime machineguns being fired during their Mandela tribute, you know they are referring to the evils of the apartheid era.
At the performance I attended, while the drums and keyboard initially overwhelmed the choir, these technical issues soon settled. With the performers vibrant woven skirts, bibs and headbands, this ensemble packs a punch – emotionally, politically, musically. This show will be seen deservedly as one of the highlights of the Fringe’s 2025 iteration.
Hope is a theme that features strongly in another Fringe highlight – Gill Hicks’s Still Alive (and Kicking). Hicks is the Adelaide woman who lost both her legs below the knee, some hearing and one lung in the 2005 Islamist terrorist bombings in London, and this emotionally searing show chronicles her journey from her near-death in a devastated Tube carriage towards discovering that the meaning of life resides in the small moments.
During the show, Hicks sings her own version of the Bee Gees’ Stayin’ Alive and several jazz classics with a voice that is low-toned, mellow and mesmerising. Her storytelling skills are formidable – you could hear a pin drop as she recounted how, in the aftermath of the bombing, she asked British forensic police if she could see her severed feet in a hospital morgue. As she puts it, she needed to “say goodbye to myself”. Such confronting anecdotes are counterbalanced with Hicks’s quirky sense of humour and deep humanity.
Accompanied by a double bass player and violinist, Hicks will perform her hour-long show in London during the 20th anniversary commemoration of the bombings in July. First performed at the Fringe in 2021, her show has been updated and, with its message of exceptional resilience and optimism in the face of overwhelming adversity, it deserves to tour nationally in Australia.
Tribute shows are all the rage at the Fringe 2025. The award-winning An Evening Without Kate Bush is back for a return season, while 27 Club revisits the hits of the superstars who died at that age (Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix). It’s one of the strongest selling shows in the 2025 program.
This One’s For You, a tribute show to Elton John, bring us a jukebox’s worth of Elton’s greatest hits from three British performers. The narrative is bare bones, the choreography, gags and sparkling pink evening jackets are a little cheesy, but the singers are talented, engaging and impeccably professional.
As mentioned, comedy is another festival staple, and The Racist Immigrants features two Indian comedians and a Mexican-Filipino stand-up with a nice line in edgy jokes that include inappropriate things people of colour say about each other, along with some well-aimed jabs at the white majority.
The understated Indian comedian Aditya Gautam had the sellout audience in stitches with his story of how random white people (assuming he is an Uber driver) jump into the back seat of his car, uninvited. Then again, he says, the car is a Toyota Camry.
The Fringe operates with an open access model, which means any performer can register to take part. The participating artists bear the financial risks of putting on their shows. Nonetheless, from street performers to large-scale productions, there are scores of international artists at the 2025 festival, drawn, in part, to its official marketplace or “honey pot”. This marketplace draws hundreds of buyers from dozens of countries, scouting for acts to program at prestigious festivals, arts complexes and on cruise ships.
Croall says the Fringe management “doesn’t keep the box office (takings) – that is paid out to artists and venues, which is a huge boost in the tens of millions of dollars”.
Immersive experiences are increasingly common at arts festivals and across the Fringe’s opening weekend I found myself inside a series of repurposed shipping containers in David Musch’s Dream State. This installation uses sound, laser lights, mirrors, projection and dystopian settings to interrogate the nature of dreams.
Nightmares we can’t escape are evoked through a hanging sculpture suggestive of raw meat and an end times room consisting of sand and abandoned furniture. Other rooms designed by Musch use laser lights and mirrors to convey that disoriented state between waking and sleep. It’s a thoughtful, clever and sophisticated work that repays repeat visits.
Making her Fringe debut was Indian mentalist and magician Suhani Shah who has more than four million YouTube subscribers and has been reading people’s minds since childhood. In her hour-long show this ebullient performer guessed everything from random words audience members wrote down, to a woman’s phone passcode and a seven-digit number the audience collectively created by shouting out random numerals and adding them together.
Is Shah a trickster or does she have a superpower? By the show’s end you are asking yourself how she does it and questioning your own scepticism about the mind-reading business.
Clearly, whether your bag is high, middle brow or popular culture, Adelaide is the place to be in late February and March. The sense of intrigue, drama, curiosity and fun nourished by one of the world’s most significant fringe festivals will no doubt feed into the mainstream Adelaide Festival of the Arts and Adelaide Writers Week that get under way this weekend.
The Adelaide Fringe runs until March 23. Rosemary Neill travelled to South Australia with the assistance of the Adelaide Fringe.
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