The opening weekend could make you grit your teeth, but there were also glimpses of necessity as the mother of invention.
Among the more innovative, tech-savvy work was REVISIT.exe, a digital rewiring of Friedrich Durrenmatt’s The Visit created (with director Marcel Dorney) by students from Monash University’s Centre for Theatre and Performance.
Durrenmatt’s play hinges on an immoral choice made for financial gain, and this nimble and interesting experiment adopted a self-reflexive form. It proved, among other things, a sharp rebuke to the university’s recent decision to disestablish its theatre school, which will deprive Melbourne of an industry-engaged hub of theatrical education.
Paradise Lost at the Melbourne Fringe
Technical difficulties were all too common. Shows that demonstrated technical mastery stood out, among them The Bloomshed’s Paradise Lost – an hour-long radio play with superior sound effects and design – which reframed Milton’s poem as zany capitalist satire.
Perhaps the weirdest Fringe offering blended unusual forms – homoDeathf— fused avant-garde film and contemporary dance, with David Woods and Jon Haynes voicing Thomas Bradley’s essay on homosexuality and death (itself a genre-busting mix of philosophical critique, intellectual and cultural history, mischievous humour and poetic fragmentation).
Short and spontaneous events also held appeal: Dial-An-Artist, for instance, let you ring a hotline to ask an artist any question, with a creative, often amusing answer on call.
Events held in the flesh were rare, but it was gratifying to find them.
Intimations of a return to something like normal service came late Sunday night, on a Brunswick side-street, where Fringe-dwellers gathered around Night Works, a pop-up street cinema showing avant-garde shorts, while around the corner, others watched a self-declared fashionista improvising recycled style solutions from his studio window.
