Fringe benefits
By Colin Rose
June 3 2002
Theatre on the edge is thriving in Sydney. Colin Rose introduces some of the people who are making it happen
Fringe, independent or alternative theatre. Whatever you choose to call it, Sydney's up-and-coming theatre-makers are riding a new wave of popularity and artistic success.
Three micro venues seating 100 or less and their artistic directors are spurring the scene. The Old Fitzroy Hotel in Woolloomooloo is often credited with having ignited this latest boom; the Downstairs Theatre is the punky, pocket-sized version of Belvoir St's main stage; and the Darlinghurst Theatre in Potts Point is the handsome new kid in town.
Lyn Wallis, director of Belvoir St's BSharp program, recently took the pulse of the fringe, polling the Downstairs Theatre's audience.
"The question I asked," Wallis said, "was: `Are you satisfied with the independent theatre you're seeing?'
"I was stunned by the answer: 99per cent said, `Yes'.
"They said things like, `It can be a bit raw and rough, but I feel there's energy on stage. People are really trying. I'm going to see something unexpected'."
The great thing about the fringe is that just about anybody can get a play on. For those prepared to work for next to nothing, mounting a production can be relatively inexpensive.
The terrible thing about the fringe is that just about anybody can get a play on: the quality of writing, acting and directing can be highly variable.
Enter Wallis and her colleagues, Glenn Terry at the Darlinghurst Theatre and Alan Flower, co-artistic director of the Old Fitzroy. Each is busy curating seasons, encouraging projects and mentoring emerging artists, all of which helps raise the standard of fringe theatre and give the scene greater cohesion.
Competition between theatre companies to appear at these venues is stiff. Wallis receives about 100 applications for just eight slots in the B Sharp program. Terry and Flower juggle similar figures.
"The fringe is empowerment, freedom and a voice for artists," Flower said. "We're opening up theatre for things other than just high art.
"Amco Riders, the first play I directed here, was not the most brilliant piece of theatre, but it brought in a whole culture of surfers. They really got into it. I was thrilled that we did full houses to people who'd never been to the theatre before."
Wedged beneath a Thai restaurant and a grungy bar, the Old Fitzroy is Sydney's most informal, bohemian and, it has to be said, dingiest venue. Plans are on the drawing board for renovations later in the year.
Belvoir St's Downstairs Theatre was redesigned last year. But the spiffiest fringe venue is the newest the Darlinghurst Theatre, which opened last July. Terry estimates the cost of installing this bijou theatre in a former community hall was about $500,000.
Terry programs an eclectic and populist mix of events. He admires the "roughness" and "irreverence" of the fringe, and those who "choose scripts which the mainstream companies won't touch".
"They'll take a risk with a show," he said. "I think it's important that the venue managers don't police the stuff too much."
Kate Gaul, Mark Kilmurry and Brendan Cowell are theatre-makers who earned their stripes on the fringe.
Since graduating from NIDA in 1996, Kate Gaul has become one of the fringe's busiest directors and arguably its most distinctive.
Last year she graduated to Belvoir St's main stage, directing The Laramie Project. It was a breakthrough production, one of the season's best, and this year she has mainstream directing gigs with the Ensemble Theatre, Griffin Theatre and again with Belvoir St.
These high-profile jobs will keep her away from the fringe this year, but she'll be back there next year with her own theatre company, Siren.
"The fringe allows me to explore very particular things, work that I wouldn't otherwise get to do," she said.
Mark Kilmurry recently pulled off an extraordinary coup writing, directing and performing two excellent plays back-to-back. Mercy Thieves was a gangster comedy-thriller and Happy As Larry And Viv took a fictional peek into the marriage of Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh.
Kilmurry began his career as an actor touring plays in the UK: "We wanted to do hard-hitting theatre that could be played in any space anywhere, without lights, without set, just using the actors and their voices.
"That has stayed with me having to be cheap makes you inventive."
Brendan Cowell is a writer and actor (you may recognise him as Todd the handyman from SBS TV's send-up of lifestyle programs, Life Support). He has written three audacious and comically bizarre plays Men, Happy New and ATM that his group, Roguestar, presented at the Old Fitzroy and the Sydney Festival.
His most recent play, Bedhead, was co-winner of the 2002 Patrick White Playwrights' Award. And later this year, assisted by another arts prize, he'll travel to London, where there's interest in mounting Men and Bedhead as a double bill not bad for someone in his mid-20s.
"I like to speak from gut to gut," Cowell said, describing the immediacy of producing theatre in a small venue.
"When I'm writing [for the fringe], I don't feel like I'm constrained in any way. I've been called `foul-mouthed' and `acerbic' that's kinda cool.
"The fringe is the place to create new ideas. It's more challenging and more interesting if we respond to what's going on now. The mainstream doesn't do that because their seasons are booked two years in advance. We can get a show up in two months, so we can really go at what we feel.
"What is the fringe if not the place to take massive risks? The mainstream is fringe that works, everything starts on the fringe."
Remainder of article clipped
This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/06/02/1022982650605.html