Sat, 26th, Sept, 2026: Danny Delahunty, Creative Director & CEO, Melbourne Fringe
Spring in Melbourne means one thing: the city is about to get louder, weirder, and infinitely more creative. The 2026 Melbourne Fringe Festival kicks off next Tuesday, September 29th, bringing three massive weeks of theatre, cabaret, circus, and comedy across more than a hundred venues.
This year’s theme is ‘Turn Towards the Heat’—a challenge to lean into artistic risk, lean into raw ideas, and step away from safe, cookie-cutter entertainment.
Winner of ‘Best Solo Show’ and the ‘Sydney Fringe Exchange Award’ at the 2025 Hollywood Fringe, with an additional four nominations including a BroadwayWorld LA nod for ‘Best Solo Show’.
A surrealist labyrinth that stretches time and space. Inspired by Italo Calvino’s ‘If On a Winter’s Night’ a Traveler, this razor-sharp, absurdly funny and deeply personal show breaks all genres and has no fourth wall. Join Gregory Nussen as they rummage through the power and peril of storytelling, growing up Jewish and queer, the genocide in Gaza, and the art that saves your life. QFWFQ neither begins, nor ends.
It was a game… wasn’t it? A gripping, contemporary encounter with a timeless story.
In this fresh, highly physical staging of Nigel Williams’ adaptation of Lord of the Flies, award-winning director Steven Mitchell Wright (MEDEA: Out of the Mouths of Babes, Ghosts) leads an ensemble of performers through a visceral retelling of William Golding’s literary classic. Play turns to ritual. Loyalty becomes leverage. Fear redraws the map. In creating their own world, they expose the truths beneath ours: the impulses we carry, the systems we defend, and how little it takes to break them. Bold, thrilling and deeply human, this production invites us to consider what rises when structure falls away. It asks us what happens when leadership slips into tyranny, fears birth myths, and the line between civilisation and brutality dissolves underfoot. A gripping, contemporary encounter with a timeless story, one that speaks to the world we live in now as urgently, if not more urgently, than when it was first written.
SLUGS
It’s about nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. We promise.
An electro-punk concert, a play, a clown show, and a basement puppet nightmare all rolled into one from award-winning performance/comedy duo Creepy Boys (S.E. Grummett & Sam Kruger). Join us for a technocolour acid trip where you’ll meet puppet Joni Mitchell, a two-person horse and every body part we have, and try to have a good time while the world burns. For tonight, at least, we are free.
RHOMBOID
The Melbourne premiere of Eric Jiang’s funny and touching play Rhomboid.
Xavier meets Sebastian in high school. They instantly hit it off, but it doesn’t take long for things to get complicated. Moving through university and into the real world, they miss each other, find new partners, have chaotic encounters, and make their own way. For Xavier, the allure of a promising future smashes into a murky reality – especially as a queer Asian-Australian. As he fumbles through relationships and unusual friendships, Xavier continues to orbit Sebastian, sometimes closely, sometimes from afar, infuriating him and craving him in equal measure as they gradually figure out what they mean to each other. Presented by fortyfivedownstairs, Margot Morales (And She Would Stand Like This, Antipodes Theatre) directs the Melbourne premiere of this funny and touching play by Eric Jiang (Lacuna, Griffin Theatre) about the unexpected forms love takes.
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