Looking forward to your favourite show for the fourth time in a row? Prepare to be disappointed. According
to Fringe manager Kate Axe Davies, productions are only granted a three-year run at the Festival.
Looking forward to your favourite show for the fourth time in a row? Prepare to be disappointed. According
to Fringe manager Kate Axe Davies, productions are only granted a three-year run at the Festival.
Although the same artists can return as many times as they like, they have to change the productions they bring. This rule was introduced about three or four years ago because Festival organisers were experiencing excessive recurring content.
“We want to encourage people to write new work, and the Festival has a reputation for cutting edge theatre,
especially on the Fringe. We want to encourage people to create new work for audiences and performers,” says
Axe Davies.
However, certain shows such as Raiders and Stef ’s Hypnotherapy session are exceptions to the rule. “This is because these shows will never be the same shows second time around, their content changes,” Axe Davies says.
Frequent festinos will not be surprised to find Raiders on the programme, especially since it has been there for the last 20 years! Both verbal and visual, the performances have become a cult institution. A visit to Grahamstown without A Midsummer Night’s Raiders is never going to be complete.
Queen Elizabeth I of England gets the hots for Willliam Shakespeare, but Shakespeare is in love with a Dark Lady. Men who have denied the Virgin Queen her desires have lost theirheads or worse and Shakespeare realises he is in the runnings. But the playwright has writer’s block and is forced to stage his own death to evade his demanding company, and plans to escape to the new world disguised as a pious missionary. After two days out at sea he is captured by pirates and their ship is wrecked in a storm. Years later he finds himself back in England, desperate to stage one last play.
Queen Elizabeth is dead, and the new King Charles has shut all the theatres. So, disguised as Ben Jonson, he
rebuilds his company of players and defies the law. The show goes on!
Another festival favourite returns in all its humiliating hilarity. Directed by Justin Nurse (Rhodes graduate and proprietor of Laugh It Off), Doctor Stef The Miraculous Hypnotist will be astounding Grahamstown audiences
for the twelfth time as part of his global Hypnosis Healing world tour.
Prepare to have your mental state manically altered and your funnybones rattled to the marrow as Doctor
Stef inducts unwitting audiences into
