Fringe begins
Coming to you live from the Airbnb office.
A good friend of mine once told me that you can find something to like in every show. I’m taking that to heart, so the next two weeks of posts won’t be full of critical reviews, they will be Good Vibes Only: a like and a learning from all the art I see.
Show 1: The Tumour Show by Peter Beaglehole.
I’m so stoked to say the first show I saw was wonderful. It was honest, sweet, funny and gently challenging. He took us through his journey of discovering he had a spinal tumour in his early twenties with a PowerPoint, lists, a couple of acoustic songs and exceptional comic timing. For a self proclaimed non-performer he was captivating, charming and generous.
Like: Self awareness and signposting was used to great effect to set the tone and disrupt any one man sob-story tropes. It really set expectations and created an immediate understanding with the audience.
Learning: You can really ride an audiences emotional response with humour - Peter would let us get close to having a cry and then immediately cut it off with another joke. This seemed very deliberate because he is a master of structure and this was very much his approach to sharing news with his friends in real life , but some of the audience were definitely craving a moment of release.
I was also lucky to get to chat to Peter after the show - turns out we were both mentored by the irrepressible Mary Anne Butler!
Show 2: Fool’s Paradise by Britt Plummer.
An autobiographical story by a lovelorn clown, the show (in a very intimate Yurt venue) took us through the highs and downward spiral of the relationship between two performers navigating love and visas from opposite sides of the world through the Pandemic.
Like: I really enjoyed the simplicity and silliness of the puppetry in the show - two takeaway coffee cups getting it on, and a mop-headed stand-in boyfriend that cuddled Britt with her own arm stuck through a hole in a suit jacket.
Learning: I know' it’s basic story structure, but a character’s growth through their journey really is so important. There is real satisfaction in seeing them start in one state of being, shift and develop, and be irrevocably changed by a climatic event. If you don’t nail this the ending feels undeserved. I always think about this quote (which I will now butcher) from Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird: a climax should feel at once surprising and inevitable.
A huge perk of the evening was that I was spent it with the amazing Dr Sarah Peters from Flinders University. Sarah is a lecturer and verbatim theatre maker, and all round lovely person. I am headed to one of her lectures on Tuesday. Can’t wait.
Bonus pic of me about to catch the bus in for my first day of Fringe, listening to a deep-dive into Midnights by Taylor Swift.
