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Australia - Source: ONE News
The Adelaide Fringe is the second biggest festival of its kind
in the world but producers would like to see a greater audience
from interstate and overseas.
This year's Fringe's box office had seen more than 200,000 ticket
sales, but Adelaide audiences still made up the bulk of the more
than 700 shows.
For the past month the city of churches has become a cultural
hotspot with artists descending on the normally quiet town.
Fringe comes on top of the Australian International Documentary
Conference, the Australian Performing Arts Market, the Adelaide
Bank Festival of Arts - including Writers' Week, WOMADelaide (the
world musical festival) - a street theatre festival, a future music
festival and to cap it off, the Clipsal 500 Adelaide car
race.
Martha Lott is an actor and theatre producer who runs the Holden
Street Theatres in a converted church in Hindmarsh.
Her theatre is presenting 16 shows for the Fringe this year,
headlined by the hard-hitting Heroin(e) for Breakfast by Philip
Stokes.
"We try and have enough of a variety that the audiences can come
and see a bit of everything," she says.
Lott comes from a showbiz family. Her concert promoter father Bob
owns ticket seller Venuetix and she started acting when she was
eight years old. While her first baby due in about five weeks is
her next project, her last play was King Lear with John Gaden for
the SA State Theatre Company.
She believes she has a responsibility to make sure what she imports
will encourage the industry here either by making it angry (because
they will think they can do it better) or by presenting a new style
or a new approach.
After scouting for shows in Edinburgh she brought out the play,
What I Heard About Iraq, by Simon Levy, which she directed using a
local cast.
"The calibre of work (here) is so high that we need to be aware of
what's going on overseas. My role is to bring it here and hopefully
we can develop it here."
She's also working on taking local work from Holden Street to
Edinburgh.
Lott says while the Fringe is growing at a massive rate, organisers
need to ensure the audiences increase at the same rate.
"Yes it should be marketed interstate heavily and people encouraged
to come into town.
"The difficulty with us, which is different to Edinburgh, is it's
not during school holidays and the Edinburgh model runs from early
morning to late at night. Generally we're in the evening."
British producer and actor Guy Masterson, who runs Theatre Tours
International, has eight shows at the Fringe, this year. They
include his rendering of Under Milk Wood and Richard Fry's Bully,
about his struggle against a life of violence.
While getting great reviews, translating this into ticket sales is
not so easy.
At times there's only a handful in the audience.
"We've done phenomenally well (we couldn't have bought the
reviewers) (but) I'll only just break even.
"My particular audience is a discerning Festival audience, and very
often (they) don't even look at a Fringe show."
Masterton is known in Sydney and Melbourne for his acclaimed 2004
production of Twelve Angry Men with a cast which included Marcus
Graham and Peter Phelps.
Phelps also acted in Reasonable Doubt by Australian writer Suzi
Miller, which he took to Edinburgh in 2008 based only on a pitch by
the playwright.
This year he's looking at two pieces here he may take to Edinburgh
in August.
While at the Scottish capital around one third of the audiences
come from overseas, he says local shows that rely on casts' friends
and family are more likely to sell tickets and describes Adelaide
as very parochial.
The ones who benefit are the publicists, printers and distributors
but the artists and venues don't make a bean, he says.
But the good thing about the Fringe is that it's a "hotbed of new
entrepreneurs cutting their teeth in a purely commercial
market".
And those coming here for the festivals "get to see work you
normally would never see".
The Adelaide Fringe and the Adelaide Festival runs until March 14.
