The Belfast Bar Band is performing in a circus tent for an audience of Aussies. The leader announces the next song as the unofficial Australian National Anthem. Everyone thinks: “Waltzing Matilda.” The band breaks into “A Pub with No Beer.” A guffaw courses through the circus tent, as it dies down the band switches to “Waltzing Matilda” and the whole tent is singing in a way to put a Pete Seeger concert to shame. Perhaps that’s why “The Shamrocks” won the Adelaide Fringe “Pick of the week” award for the first week of the festival. We were there. The band calls itself a bar band but the six lads from Belfast are tight professionals, but they can get a good craic going even in a big circus tent. They are two sets of brothers and two friends from both sides of the divide in Belfast. They note that their band would have been impossible twenty years ago. They would not have been able to play in any Belfast pub without triggering a fight.
We had two days in Adelaide and saw six fringe performances. Except for visiting with some friends one afternoon, which is about all we did in Adelaide. We stayed at the Marriott. We have a bazillion points so they upgraded us to a corner room on the 12th floor with a great view. The hotel is fourteen stories built behind the façade of the old General Post Office, preserving the street view and the Post Office clock tower. It’s within a 5 minute walk of two of the venues and 20 minutes to another.
The Shamrocks performed in a festival area called Gluttony in a city park with circus tents, open air stages, and lots of food booths. Other park venues had names like “The Garden of Unearthly Delights.”
After the Shamrocks we walked to the Pilgrim Uniting Church (In Australia the Congregationalists, Presbyterians and Methodists have merged into the “Uniting Church of Australia.”) There we saw the Scottish Pianist, Matthew Shiel perform works based on Scottish folk tunes, Bobby Burns songs and classical works on Scottish themes. He called it his Burns Supper hootenanny; a program imported from the Edinburgh Fringe. We had a good conversation with him afterward and we crossed paths the next night to continue our conversation.
We attended two one act plays and had supper between them at the Holden Theater, a 20 minute cab ride from the hotel. The Holden Theaters are on a campus of former Anglican churches. The first and smaller church is the Studio Theatre, the bigger church that replaced it is the Arch Theatre. There is also a bar theater and two performance spaces for small audiences of up to thirty in the manse and the gardens. It is a great venue except that it is right next to the major football stadium in Adelaide and they can’t schedule shows when there’s a match on. One play “Eat the Rich but maybe not me mates x” written and performed by Jade Franks is a one woman show over from England about a girl from Liverpool, working at a call center who gets a diversity scholarship to one of Cambridge’s universities. The rules say she had to be a full time student and cannot take a job but the economics don’t work for her so she becomes a cleaning lady and end us being assigned to clean her boyfriend’s dorm room. Of course, she doesn’t want to admit to being a cleaning lady to her new mates at the uni. It is a funny social commentary on class, privilege, code switching and whether to betray your old self to create a new self. The main character is named Jade and it is based on her own experience.
The second play was “The Debate” featuring a real Australian mother/daughter acting team playing mother and daughter. The mother tries to advance her daughter by waging a social media harassment campaign against her daughter’s rival for debate team leader. It was funny until it wasn’t. But it was a powerful performance.
The other two events we attended were at St. Francis Xavier Cathedral, an afternoon organ concert featuring works across 5 centuries. One piece by Johann Gottfired Walther, Johan Bach’s Cousin, was a riff on Isac Watts “Oh God Our Help in Ages Past.”
The second cathedral event was a sound and light show set to liturgical and other classical music. It runs every half hour and lasts 20 minutes. If you have a ticket, you can stay as long as you like, and we went through two runs.
Below, if you are reading this in a browser, are two 30 second clips of what the program was like.
