★★★★★
Adelaide Fringe. CRAM. The Mill. 20 Feb 2026
There are people out there right now who are dealing with the impending loss of a parent, friend, partner, or child from an incurable disease. For some that journey is still happening. For some it is over, but their next stage of life without has begun.
Melissa Pullinger’s Meteors tackles her experience of losing her Mother to cancer. Her solo performance is a tremendously intelligent, very considered observation of what she and her family experienced, of what life becomes when something terminal comes to stay. Of what the ‘end’ really began.
Pullinger’s writing is so brilliantly measured, laced with humour dark and light, of understanding gained, of seeing where confusion was. She delivers it in performance with an aware honesty empowered by emotional honouring truth of moments remembered without schmalz, or false sentimentality.
Director, Connor Reidy paces the production perfectly in partnership with Will Spartalis’s deft sound score. With just one chair, two steps and careful light management, the world of Pullinger’s experience is perfectly presented.
The over arcing motif for the work is meteor showers, eclipses. Pullinger is fascinated by them. Her tales of sharing them out in Tea Tree Gully and the hilarious tale of scoring cheap eclipse glasses set a mood that’s inviting. That experience is ground point of her connection to her Mother after death. Of us all, carbon formed creatures we are.
What really gives a great sense of the journey’s length and depth at shows start is meeting a strange guy, not a serial killer looking type at The Exeter. It‘s a cracking scene, in which telling this guy her mother has died sends him into tears over the memory of his cat’s death. The ‘I know how you feel’ story. At that moment, she’s in control. Comforting him.
Before getting there, it was entering a new world, a different life. Filled with being seen differently. Hiding in the dark as new treatments turned her Mother’s skin to that of a vampire fearing light. Of cancer becoming not even noticed.
Dealing with the aftermath is core to this tale. The Dany DeVito look alike counsellor, the problematic seven stages of grieving theorem, getting on with life, whatever that is now.
It’s here Meteors really powers up as an explication of understanding and sharp comedy.
In many ways, living with her Mother’s impending loss became normal life, as bizarre as it actually was. A sense of ease within it is expressed.
The aftermath is being thrown out of the dark into sharp light. Confusing, frightening, unbearable. How to manage? How, very genuinely, to breathe again?
The best advice comes in the last lines of the work. An understanding gained. A simple one
against the complexity of the experience and journey.
David O’Brien
When: 19 Feb to 17 Mar
Where: The Breakout, The Mill
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Adelaide Festival. Slingsby Theatre Company. The Wandering Hall of Possibility. 20 Feb 2026
“All trees are possible.” An incredibly foundational line from The Childhood of The World bound to echo throughout Slingsby Theatre’s richly ambitious triptych of works exploring 2,000 years of the world’s relationship with nature. A relationship explored through three writers reimagining of three very well-known fairy tales.
Jennifer Mills’ take on Brothers Grimm’s Hansel and Gretel is a dark and foreboding tale for the first triptych instalment. There’s a hint at a spirit of sparseness as the awaiting audience are offered strands of straw, asked to tie them together to create a long continuous strand. One person must be the keeper of the strands, placing them in the basket of the woman they find inside weaving (Elizabeth Hay).
It is a medieval 1300s like world, gripped by famine. Brother and sister Crann (Nathan O’Keefe) and Ré (Ren Williams) farm with their father yet are starving as all in the village are. When selected by lottery to become apprentices to the village, in ways unknown, their fears abound as to their future given the unknown fate of children gone before them, never to be seen again.
Mills’ writing is beautiful in its focus; tension, fear, frail hope against darkening despair, enveloping lost siblings in a forest of potential danger and hunger riven, her words are given to actors as story telling lines. The cast deliver them without attempting to impose themselves over the tale, but be in body and spirit frightened, searching, hopeful siblings they are. This has great impact, buoyed by Composer Quincy Grant’s score of madrigals, poetic dreamy strands of dulcet music played by the Horizon Orchestra.
Ailsa Patterson’s set and costumes are simple but effective in the circular hall. From the roof hangs dark webbed matting, through which Chris Petridis’s lighting transforms the stage into a place of nature. So steeped in the sense of a dark forest is the work, there’s a moment it literally comes to physical life.
The siblings escape from imprisonment is a moment in which they discover who each of them is as a person and where they are figuratively and personally.
This tension of fear, growth and understanding is so delicately managed by Director Andy Packer, Choreographer Lina Limosani, and supported spiritually by Composer Quincy Grant’s score. The appearance and disappearance of their late mother (Elizabeth Hay) in a dream sequence adds to sense of loss and search of safety, meaning.
Being discovered by a tribe of children who live safely and in plenty offers a conundrum. Stay or go? Return to father and hunger or stay in safety and abundance? There’s also the question of what this life challenge means. Because the children are bearing the brunt of those in the world wanting more than they need.
What do The Mother’s (leader of the children ensconced in a giant tree) words “all trees are possible” mean for the siblings? All children? The world?
This is a crucial question and challenge. Trees are things of nature. Having as many as possible is surely easy. But to qualify that by saying ‘are’ suggest that’s a choice that might not be taken.
David O’Brien
When 20 Feb to 15 Mar
Where: The Wandering Hall of Possibility
Bookings: my.adelaidefestival.com.au
★★★★
Adelaide Fringe. The Jade. 20 Feb 2026
Nick Parnell is one of the best vibraphone players around. He’s South Australian born and bred, but the world is his stage. Even though he’s performed with some of the best orchestras and conductors here and abroad on elite concert stages, he’s also happy performing in clubs or al fresco venues. He is unassuming, almost shy, but, as a musician, he is bold and fearless.
Instrumental art-music concerts staged in the Fringe frequently lack the pizzaz and audacity of other events, and border on being ‘polite’ and ‘safe’. Parnell’s concert, entitled Home, is a case in point: it doesn’t have ’razzle and dazzle‘, but it is relaxed and the emphasis is squarely on the music, the allure of the vibraphone, and particularly on Parnell’s consummate skill as both a player and an arranger.
Parnell explains that the concert program derives from his soon to be released fourth album and the music selections invoke feelings of being home, wherever and whatever that means. The program includes arrangements of well-known folk songs like Scarborough Fair and Danny Boy, as well as iconic numbers like I Still Call Australia Home and Amazing Grace. But it’s not only ‘popular’ music that receives the Parnell treatment. He also includes classical favourites like Satie’s Gnossienne No. 1, excerpts from Bach, and more recent art music such as by Brazilian composer Ney Rosauro, one of today’s most significant composers for percussion, which proved to be a favourite of the capacity crowd in the Jade.
For me, Parnell’s performance of Gary Burton’s 1959 composition A Singing Song was just sublime. Parnell demonstrated his command of the instrument and of 4-mallet playing, as well as his intuitive feel for jazz inflected rhythms that makes the music sound like it is being composed for the very first time.
Not all of Parnell’s arrangements are as compelling as others: his extended Scarborough Fair was revelatory, but Danny Boy sounded too detached and lacked the mellifluousness and pathos that strings can give. I Still Call Australia Home included evocative and enjoyable mystical nods to Aboriginal dreaming, but Gnossienne was given much rubato, perhaps too much, and grace notes were cut alarmingly short. But it’s all a matter of taste.
Parnell doesn’t need the razzle and dazzle that is so often on show in the Fringe and sometimes relied upon by lesser performers to disguise shortcomings in technique and style. Parnell simply lets his polished world-class technique and thoughtful musicality do the talking, and the audience just love it.
Kym Clayton
When: 20 Feb – One night only.
Where: The Jade
Bookings: Closed
★★★★1/2
Adelaide Fringe. Holden Street Theatres. Judy’s. 19 Feb 2026
Not the most attention-grabbing of titles. I wouldn’t have rushed to see this show. But, oh my, I am so glad I saw it.
One may call it one of the “sleepers” of the Fringe—really obscure but with potential to be a must-see.
And, audiences shouldn’t hesitate about booking because it is in one of the tiniest of Fringe venues—Judy’s—a room in the main house at Holden Street.
Vera Shrimp may well meet you at the door. She’s a wee English schoolgirl girl with a dramatic pageboy fringe and beautiful sad brown eyes.
She will explain how nervously she is doing a school project on water about which, for one reason and another, she has become something of an expert. Her anxiety is so pitifully acute that one just wants to take her home and look after her. But she wants to impress and she has done the work. So, we see how water moves and evaporates. She has demonstrations. And she has slides which she projects over a wall absolutely covered in school notes and data.
Gradually we learn why she has this preoccupation as she reveals something of her peer group and parents. Therein it weaves into a vivid audio-visual tale of the cloudbursts of loss which have been her life. She draws us in closer and closer in the tiny, close room. And our emotions ride into hers and the beauty of sadness is profound.
Vera Shrimp is just not ordinary. And its performer, Martha Walker, is not ordinary, either.
She’s quite a marvel.
Get thee to Judy and see for yourself.
Samela Harris
When: 19 Feb to 22 Mar
Where: Holden Street Theatres
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Adelaide Fringe. Moa @ Gluttony. 19 Feb 2025
An Opening Night Gala should—I’d say almost by definition—be a star-studded affair for the well-heeled and the well-dressed, except of course when it’s at The Fringe and the venue is a tent in Gluttony, The Fringe’s marquee Parklands space. Adelaide has no ‘A’ list to invite, former sports persons and TV people who are unrecognisable without their makeup barely constitute a ‘B’ list, so it’s fair to concentrate on the parklands. The completely redeveloped pond and surrounds make a fantastic gift wrapping for the business of relaxing, meeting friends, having a drink and seeing some shows. Gluttony is great!
The Gala was hosted by Hugh Sheridan, who quipped his way through the evening and assured us his rumpled suit was ‘a tuxedo’. He resembled a Fringe artist impersonating Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles.
But I get ahead of myself: a pre-opening gala performance should—I’d argue—showcase the best of skills, both of the artists and the venue, so to standing around outside15 minutes after the scheduled start time listening to the talent still soundchecking is, obviously, unprofessional. This morphed into the opening performance, thus as we gratefully filed into the Moa we were quite literally sung to our seats by the Soweto Gospel Choir. It was a deft touch in programming; the performance solos were in places exuberant and ‘shouty’ but the hot and dusty conditions clearly played upon the voice.
A snapshot: Hailing from Belfast, The Shamrocks showed solid style in rollicking pipe and drum music and absolutely no sign of genre advancement in their rendition of the hoary classic Whisky In The Jar. Hailing from Adelaide, DJ Groove Terminator explained why his History Of Dance Music still attracted crowds then hastily threw to Screaming Jets/Angels singer Dave Gleeson who explained how the ‘History Of’ idea was to be applied to the Australian rock music scene. Hailing from Tandanya, the venue across the road on the corner of Grenfell Street, WAYIN:THI Collective’s Fibres was a sublimely presented contemporary dance piece which captivated with its simplicity and the way set, lighting, costumes and movement meshed so well.
Hailing from Japan, Gasha is described as ‘a new wave of Japanse circus’ and was undoubtedly the highlight of the evening. A contemporary reconstruction of a Bushido acrobat (!) Gasha appeared to be suspended for her acrobatics by the hair. Powerful both visually and stylistically, her performance was interrupted by a technical issue and the crowd rose to her defence as she spun and twirled in a spray of red and white lights.
It’s always interesting to see what is considered the crème de la crème of a festival; I found some of the choices questionable, but overall, as a teaser, there’s clearly some great shows to be seen in Gluttony.
Alex Wheaton
When: Closed
Where: Moa @ Gluttony
Bookings: Closed