Melbourne Fringe’s 2026 program features more than 20 clowning-related shows, 17 of them produced locally, as the festival brings Australian and overseas performance styles to its stages. It runs until October 18. The program includes theatre, comedy, cabaret, puppetry, circus and dance, drawing on Melbourne’s varied clowning scene.
Festival chief executive Danny Delahunty said clowning shows “ballooned” the previous year and remained numerous in 2026. He described Melbourne’s approach as embracing “the ridiculousness” while keeping performances technically sophisticated. Some performers spend years learning to make an act look as if “it’s just gone really wrong,” he said.
Local Work and International Styles
Seventeen of the festival’s more than 20 clowning-related productions are locally produced. Other shows draw on styles associated with different places, including California character clowning and improvisation, as well as the physical, emotion-oriented approaches associated with Paris performers Jacques Lecoq and Philippe Gaulier.
Melbourne’s scene includes mime, mask work and ensemble clowning, styles that have been popular for decades. North American approaches have emerged in Melbourne over the past five years, Delahunty said, bringing more absurdity and audience interaction. Clowning, he said, is an artform built on “the convened chaos” of taking unpredictability and giving it an element of control.
One production is The Carrot Show, created by Hayley Edwards, a clown doctor at the Royal Children's Hospital. It combines puppetry, a large papier-mache carrot, projected image, archived documents, prerecorded interviews and real carrots. The show explores how distraction and absurdity can help people navigate difficult times.
The show draws partly on Melbourne’s Carrot Man, Nathan, a local figure who worked as a street clown in the 1980s and now walks the city with a comically large vegetable prop. Edwards said “clown” was a broad term that could describe “finding connection, playfulness and joy.” Some performers carry a giant papier-mache carrot to make people smile, she said, while others work in children’s hospitals to distract patients.
A Broad Range of Performances
The festival also includes Freidah Will See You Now, Caitlin Duff’s performance about a bewitching creature who ushers people into the underworld, and Dune but Worse, Sean Burnett Dugdale-Martin’s attempt to perform the entire Dune saga solo.
Mel McGlensey’s 2025 show Motorboat features a woman-boat hybrid character. Benny Boot’s Die Clown Die combines clowning and spirituality, following a clown who repeatedly dies ridiculous deaths in the hope of finding nirvana. Melbourne’s scene has “porous” boundaries, Delahunty said, with clowning relaxed and interchangeable across related artforms.
Clare Bartholomew, a performing artist who teaches clowning in Melbourne, said hula-hoopers and acrobats had taken her classes to develop physical comedy and slapstick skills. Their performances may not technically count as clowning, but they can draw on that training. Bartholomew said Melbourne arguably has one of the strongest networks of clown teachers and workshops, a scene that largely began with theatre director, teacher and clowning expert John Bolton in the 1990s.
Public Perceptions of Clowning
Australia’s clowning scene also includes “sex clowns” and clown-adjacent artists such as Sydney’s Betty Grumble, described as a “proud ecosexual [who] believes in art as an action of her spirituality.” Bouffon-inspired performance features intense mockery, grotesque realism and dark social parody. “This all has merit,” Bartholomew said. “It’s a broad church.”
Bartholomew sometimes leaves the word “clown” out of production descriptions because she fears it may put audiences off. Her recent Melbourne Fringe show The Portrait was described as “wordless satire” and physical theatre, though it includes clown elements and follows two oddball gallery attendants preparing for the unveiling of a notorious artist’s portrait.
Some people associate clowns with two-dimensional buffoons or serial killers, Bartholomew said, citing US killer John Wayne Gacy, who dressed as a clown to commit crimes. Pennywise, Stephen King’s clown character, and Twisty from American Horror Story also feed frightening images, while Ronald McDonald and Bozo the Clown bring to mind oversized shoes and a large red nose.
Delahunty said most clowns are probably “tarred in some way by the brush of Pennywise.” Fringe festivals and clowning workshops across Australia can help shift those preconceptions, he said. Clowning is play, vulnerability, movement and collaboration. The festival runs until October 18.