In 2005 Joan Didion published The Year of Magical Thinking, a portrait of her grief following the sudden death of her husband. Didion adapted the novel for the theatre and in 2007, the play opened on Broadway. Neil Watkins, writer and performer of The Year of Magical Wanking, told me that when he saw the play, he “didn’t connect” with it. Didion’s affluent existence in New York was, for Watkins, too far removed from his own life; “I couldn’t feel for the character.”

Despite his reservations, Watkin’s play shares a method of enquiry with Didion’s work. In his candid revelation of his mind’s internal workings, his anxieties, desires, and fears, Watkins, like Didion, exposes the depths of the psyche, and in doing so offers himself a chance at redemption.

The title of Watkin’s play is instructive. In referencing Didion — an established literary author — he highlights the high-art desires of his own work. But in substituting ‘thinking’ for ‘wanking,’ Watkins contrasts this with the crass, the low, the vulgar. This contrast is maintained throughout the show. Though the monologue deals with sex addiction, drug abuse, sadomasochism and molestation, it is delivered entirely in iambic pentameter and uses a complex, looping rhyme structure employed in baroque sonnets. As Watkins explained to me, “I raped Shakespeare’s style”.

Watkin’s decision to make poetic his own darkness is not purely an exercise in self-aggrandisement. Though he admitted that, in keeping with the idea of ‘wank,’ he wanted to see “how pretentious can you be,” he also explained, “if it was going to be about murky things, I had to find a way to make it nice.”

Though ‘nice’ is not an adjective I would ascribe to Magical Wanking, it is, undoubtedly, moving. There is a danger with self-penned stories of redemption, especially ones that come in the form of a sixty-minute monologue; it can quite easily slip into painful, boring self-obsession. Luckily, in Magical Wanking, Watkins has been able to strike a balance. Far more than an ‘airing of dirty laundry’, the play acts as a confession, a plea for redemption and, more broadly, an analysis of the issues surrounding sex addiction, self-hate, and shame. In bringing these repressed issues to the fore and by allowing — forcing — himself to be seen and heard, Watkins brings light to bear on the darkness. As we sat outside the Adelaide College of the Arts building he seemed visibly shaken by the performance. “It’s difficult,” he admitted. “I can’t hide.” But, he believes that the difficulty is worth it, not just on a personal level; “I feel like it’s a worthy cause.”

Although the play is bleak, watching it is not simply an exercise in toughing it out. The scenes are littered with humour, offering respite from the gloom. And the writing — the sheer poetry — shimmers in the darkness, lighting the way as we descend into the labyrinths of Watkin’s mind. For the audience, in the unflinching look into the abyss there is more pathos than pain. Part way through the monologue Watkins asks, “Am I emotionally present?” As I sat in the darkness, there was no need to ask myself the same question; the answer is a categorical yes.

A part of me is cursing my decision to review this show; it’s nearly impossible to write about and convey how, or why, it works. But believe me, it does. It is absurdist humour at the very edge. If The Mighty Boosh overdosed on acid, gobbled a medicine cabinet full of pills and was let loose in a house of mirrors, it might be somewhere close to the marvellous insanity that inhabits this show.

In a way, I’d be happy to leave the review at that. I’d add in “Go and see it”, perhaps put in a more eloquent way, and send it in, 400 to 600 words short of my required word count. It’s not laziness let me assure you. It just that explaining the absurd is sort of like trying to sculpt a statue in the air with a chisel — you can give it your best, but all you’re going to be left with is a manic look in your eye. And a chisel.

But I’m meant to tell you why you should go and see it. Thus begins the formal review.

There is an inexplicable physics to telling jokes — push one far enough and it’ll start to work for you. It is under this premise that Paul Foot’s Still Life begins. We hear his voice, the obligatory offstage announcement. You know the drill, “Ladies and Gentlemen, please make welcome, X,” at which point X comes strutting onstage to a cacophony of applause. Only, this time, it doesn’t happen. Foot remains hidden, and we suddenly become privy to his musings on when is the right time to come out. As the minutes tick over, the awkwardness of the process — something Foot is clearly attuned to — starts to pile up. Finally, when you’re squirming in your seat, it breaks into hilarity. The crowd erupts in laughter, relieved, grinning. Because he’s got a laugh, Foot tells us, it might be worthwhile to stay behind the curtain a bit longer.

When Foot finally does appear from behind the velvet drapes of the cinema, he skips the stage completely, walking from audience member to audience member, explaining what, when he does come out, he’ll do to get the show started. This meta-humour, in which the show becomes the joke, gradually begins to gather momentum; offhand comments become integral threads to later routines, ridiculous games become the crux of the conclusion.

No. This isn’t working. I’m trying to get it, but my hands are getting sweaty and I’ve got very little to show for it. Perhaps a list is in order.

Throughout the show I experienced: lengthy, increasingly manic musings on the detriments of Pierce Brosnan opening a cockerel sanctuary; Foot’s alter ego, Penny, dry humping an audience member (pun intended) while screaming for medication and admission to a mental hospital; a recap of the show that included the recap within the recap; Foot speaking English, English/Gibberish and outright Gibberish, as dictated by the position of a toy horse’s head on a vertical plane; instructions for applause volume based on enthusiasm on hearing about the reunification of Prussia; a diatribe about the inability to have food allergies during WWI. Amongst other things.

If this hasn’t convinced you to go, well, I’m not surprised. But you should. If you do, I’d be more than happy to give you the invisible air sculpture I’ve made. And if you don’t… Well, I’ve got a chisel. That’s all I’m saying.

A purple light shines from the basement of the RiAus building. I step down the ornate wooden staircase, the stairs creaking under my feet, and move into a short tunnel swathed in a neon glow. I stare at the floor, then at the walls, then the ceiling, trying to make sense of the pattern that envelops me. When I feel I’ve worked it out, grabbed hold of some repetition, decoded the sequence, my eye skips to another group of geometric shapes and I feel my certainty collapsing.

The work is Opening, 2012, by Melbourne-based, Adelaide-born artist Sam Songailo, and according to the booklet I hold in my hand, apparently what I’m experiencing is the mind’s natural inclination to examine patterns for points of difference, to decipher them. Somewhat reminiscent of Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson’s light-based works, the piece acts as a useful entry point, both literal and figurative, into Art, Pattern, and Complexity, curated by Margot Osborne.

As Osborne notes in her illuminating introduction to the exhibition, “A survey of contemporary artists influenced by scientific philosophies of pattern and complexity is a rich field indeed and beyond the modest scope of this exhibition”. Despite both the cautious warning of this statement and the pokey size of the exhibition space, Art, Pattern, and Complexity manages, for the most part, to satisfy both the mind and the eye, cleverly raising questions about the interplay between art and science, and the future of artistic practice in a technological age.

Rather than cataloguing work that crosses the art/science divide, Osborne’s aim is to introduce, “the fields of biology, the cross-disciplinary thinking of complexity theory and the fledgling scientific study of ‘neuro-aesthetics’,” highlighting the potential for science to shape the way art is created and experienced. Though expressions like ‘complexity theory’ and ‘neuro-aesthetics’ might usually have my inner Arts student running for the hills, Osborne has been careful to choose works that hint at their scientific influence rather than beating one over the head with a hardcover textbook.

Perhaps the best work in the exhibition is Natalie McLeod’s Membrane Layer, 2011, a digital textile print draped down the east wall of the FutureSpace Gallery. A selection from her Natural Produce series, the work uses monochrome micrographs of chicken eggshells to create a textile print of immense depth. As I try to make my way through the exhibition, I find myself gazing at the fabric, my eye traversing the seemingly endless peaks and troughs of the fibrous image. In addition to being visually arresting, through its subject the work questions our conceptions of both waste and recycling. By utilizing eggshells, a substance usually cast by humans into the rubbish or the compost, McLeod questions our unthinking categorisation of waste. And by ‘recycling’ this product for creative, rather than utilitarian, ends, she complicates ideas about sustainability and re-use.

Similarly striking is Caroline Durré’s wall painting, Armed Space with ornament, 2012. By playing with pattern, perspective and shadow, Durré has constructed a piece that as I stand before it, seems to bloom out from the wall.

As I make my way around I pause and sit before a TV screen. On it, a series of shapes move slowly, overlapping one another, gradually changing colour. The work is Paul Brown’s Dragon, 2012, and though it is interesting, meditative, even, it really captivates my interest when I discover that the work develops through ‘Cellular Automata’. As Brown explains, “These are simple [computational] systems that can propagate themselves over time and display complex behaviour”. In other words, once programmed the work modifies itself, changing its appearance through its own internal processes. As I stare at the image I wonder what the repercussions of this approach are for the position of the artist; perhaps this is art as ‘intelligent design’ rather than creationism.

Though most of the pieces manage to be interesting on both aesthetic and theory-based levels, as is often the case with contemporary art, some fall foul of the idea-over-execution trap. Jon McCormack’s generative software programs explore similar territory to Paul Brown’s work, but do so in a way that, for me, fails to excite the eye. Similarly, Tracy Cornish’s Plotting Glitches, 2011-12, though undoubtedly governed by software I could never hope to understand, comes off looking like a Windows 98 screensaver.

But these are minor hiccups. As I stare at Whoosh, 2011, by Kerrie Poliness, or stab my finger at MESNE Design Studio’s Pricking 1.2, 2012, an interactive screen that creates lace patterns, or stop again before McLeod’s Membrane Layer, I find that despite the tiny size of the exhibition space, the relatively small number of works in it, I’m somewhere new, lost in the mutterings of my excited mind.

Sometime around 2002, when my poxy face refused to form a smile and my answers to any adult questioning were monosyllabic, my parents presented me with a copy of (I’m) Stranded by seminal Australian punk/post-punk band, The Saints. Maybe it’s because the album was released in 1977, maybe because it came with parental recommendation, but I gave it a cursory listen, grunted that I didn’t like it, and slouched back into my room.

But later, out of earshot, I played it again, and again, and again. I stared at the cover — four morose-looking dudes in high-waisted jeans, leaning against a graffitied wall — and read the sparse liner notes. It was then that I came across the name Ed Kuepper.

Over time the name disappeared into the recesses of my brain, covered by swathes of useless information, its light dulled by quickly deteriorating synapses. But perusing the Fringe guide, I stumbled on the name once more, discovering that Kuepper was to perform one show as part of the Fringe. Partly out of nostalgia, partly out of a desire to investigate his post-Saints back-catalogue, I arranged some tickets, and with my brain chemicals having levelled somewhat from my tumultuous teenage years, brought my father along.

We entered the Idolize Spiegeltent, shuffling amidst a throng of beaming baby-boomers, clearly excited by the prospect of a seated show. As we waited for the gig to start I craned my head over those in front of me to get a look at the stage set-up. As primary songwriter and guitarist for The Saints, Kuepper helped define punk-rock guitar, thrashing distorted power-chords into cathartic, fist-pumping anthems. Without The Saints’ influence, modern-day ‘groundbreaking’ bands like Eddy Current Suppression Ring, would be staring at their instruments and scratching their heads. So I was somewhat surprised to see a pristine acoustic guitar as his axe-of-choice. Surely he hadn’t mellowed in his steady march towards old age? Surely he wasn’t going to come out and serenade us with a shiny-eyed ballad?

My fear of boring simplicity was allayed somewhat with his first few words to the crowd. As he stepped up on stage an addled punter, evidently still riding the psychedelic wave of his youth, called out from the back; “How stoned are ya?” Kuepper walked slowly to the mic. “In the biblical sense?”, he asked. Backed by Mark Dawson, (formerly the drummer of two other Kuepper projects, The Aints and The Apartments) Kuepper launched into a rolling, darkly evocative song, the open tuning on his guitar filling the domed tent with a rumbling drone. I needn’t have worried. Though nothing like The Saints, these were not the songs of a former-trailblazer settling for the beaten track, the easy way out. Each piece fit perfectly with the others, creating a spooky ambience, somewhat reminiscent of Nick Cave’s oeuvre, but more restrained, without the Old Testament bombast.

The crowd convulsed in their padded seats, heads shaking furiously to the beat. When the tempo slowed, eyes closed, faces cast up in rapture. At some point I stopped watching them, concentrating on the two men on stage.

Musically, the duo wrung all manner of sounds from their minimalist setup, cleverly embellishing the pieces with off-the-cuff improvisation and dynamic interplay between the two instruments. Drummer Dawson demonstrated his versatility on the kit, scratching a fork across the ride cymbal to produce an ambient creak, deftly handling mallet and stick swaps, reacting instantly to Kuepper’s flourishes, even pounding his hands against the skins, mimicking the percussive sound of bongos. Despite my earlier worries, Kuepper’s guitar work remained cleverly innovative, treading the fine line between a cohesive sound, and a varied delivery throughout the show.

As my father and I shuffled out an hour later, everyone around us nattering excitedly, he turned to me. “What did you reckon?”, he asked. “Fantastic”, I answered, trisyllabically.

Let me be clear; Scaramouche Jones is nothing short of incredible. Written and performed by the phenomenal Justin Butcher, and directed with understated brilliance by Guy Masterson, it is theatre that will convert the unwilling, satisfy the jaded and replenish the true believers. Housed within Masterson’s Centre for International Theatre at Higher Ground in the West End, the play returns until March 4 after an enormously successful 2010 Adelaide Fringe season.

It begins with the muffled sound of applause, and a silhouette of an unspoken performance cast on the white sheets that frame the sparsely adorned stage. Though we are not to know it yet, we have seen, quite literally, the ending of the play foreshadowed by these swift, evocative movements. We have seen both the life and final moments of the clown of the Twentieth Century, Scaramouche Jones. He enters through a dark opening in the middle of the draped sheets and collapses into a chair, exhausted. As he soon tells us, we are about to witness his final performance.

It is December 31, 1999, the eve of Scaramouche Jones’ one-hundredth birthday, the eve of the millennium. Over ninety enthralling minutes we are lead through a series of fantastic episodes that make up the clown’s life and intersect with major moments of the Twentieth Century. It is no accident that the clown shares the dates of the century just past; he is, in a way, the very essence of the most tumultuous time in history. His story is hilarious, violent, and ultimately, extremely moving. As Butcher told me, Scaramouche’s journey acts as “a cockeyed squint at the Twentieth Century”. Like an era that spawned both penicillin and the atom bomb, it is both hopeful and hopeless, tragic and comic, the distillation of the very essence of the clown.

Born on a fishmonger’s slab to a Trinidadian whore — “a clown’s nativity” — and marked with peculiarly white skin, Scaramouche is destined for a life of complication. Forced to watch a string of men lose themselves between his mother’s legs, he becomes obsessed with discovering his father’s identity. Once, and only once, his mother lets slip that his father “was an Englishman”. And so begins his search for England. After a client kills his mother, he is sold into slavery by a missionary, and through a circuitous and unexpected route, finds himself working for a kind but bewildering Somali snake charmer. Through a series of absurdly believable events, each hinging on his enchanting white skin, Scaramouche becomes the object of desire for a homosexual Italian nobleman, is cared for then beaten by a group of gypsies, employed in a Polish monastery before finding himself in a German extermination camp in World War II. Forced into work as a gravedigger, while waiting to spread lime over the recently destroyed, he discovers he has the ability to momentarily distract the children from their impending doom. He mimes a comic execution, making the children smile before they are wiped out forever. In this combination of laughter and sadness Scaramouche realises his calling — to be a clown.

After being cleared of war crimes, he finds his way, finally, to England. It is here that he discovers an affinity with, of all people, a Trinidadian man, and in recounting his story to peals of laughter, assumes his final mask. For the next fifty years he is silent, entertaining audiences night after night with the mimed repetition of his life, fulfilling the role of his commedia dell’arte namesake.

Being someone whose natural inclination at a theatre performance is ‘the armadillo response” — curling into a ball and waiting till it’s over — I found myself, for the first time, completely enthralled by a play, and by Butcher’s flawless portrayal of the clown. As I tried to write notes, scribbling furiously in the dark, I found my pen trailing off. When I looked back over what I had written, all I found were half-formed sentences, my hand having been stilled by Butcher’s performance.

Even if the play were not so consummately acted, it would be worth seeing for the writing, its thematic depth, and its sheer originality. There is enough in this play to keep the more academically minded staring at their desks, deep in thought, for days on end. There is a wealth of material beyond the play’s analysis of the events of the Twentieth Century. Between the ornate grandiloquence of the clown’s speech, “the eloquent flood of language that vomits forth” (as Butcher puts it) and the silence of mime, lays plains in which to explore the efficacy of expression. The complicated position of ‘whiteness’ in the play could probably sustain a PhD.

But it is not only interesting on an abstract level. There is, undoubtedly, a political element to the play. As Butcher — an Englishman — told me, Scaramouche Jones, “was written in response to millennium fever” in England. Precipitated by the controversial construction of the Millennium Dome in London, Butcher’s script investigates the limits of the British national psyche; as Butcher explains, “I wanted to add my ten penneth to the mix.” It is in this light that the clown’s post-WWII silence can be understood. “The English identity is fixed in WWII,” Butcher argues. “That was the last gasp of English greatness.” For a country such as ours, whose sense of national worth is based almost entirely on the ANZAC legend, perhaps this element of the play is particularly poignant.

Wait. I’ve started rambling. I could go on. But I can’t go on. Time to wrap this up.

Let me be clear, again; go and see Scaramouche Jones. If there was one downside, it was that there were spare seats in the house. Theatre of this level is rare. With the play already cemented in its position as a modern classic, you would be a fool — a clown — for failing to go and see it.

To most of us the Fringe is a time when our gridded city is inundated with arrivals from interstate and overseas. They flood our streets with vibrancy, alleviating the steady plod of the day-to-day, and for one glorious month we bathe in a sea of raucous cosmopolitanism. Then the flood recedes and we’re left to trudge onward through the mud. Or so it seems.

One of the unrealised (at least by me) benefits of the Festival is the way it brings some of Adelaide’s secrets to the surface.

As I walked into the beer garden at the Wheatsheaf Hotel, standing beneath the red lanterns strung unevenly across the tin roof, I had no knowledge of COMA, or Creative Original Music Adelaide. But, as Artistic Director, James Brown, informed me, the musician-run association has been active in Adelaide for around seven years, providing “a forum for those styles that don’t have one”. On the first and third Mondays of every month, COMA runs gigs at the Wheatsheaf, filling the space with electronic music, jazz, and any other genre bender too obscure to find an outlet. So it was in conjunction with the Fringe, that COMA presented Adelaide jazz/funk/beat-/spoken word collective Max_Mo, and puntastic, avant-garde jazz piano trio, Pen Island.

Outside small, die-hard circles, spoken word gets a pretty bad rap. If done badly it’s kind of like watching your drunk uncle-by-marriage quote Scarface at Christmas lunch — inappropriate, offensive, and enough to make you crawl under the table and smash your head against the floorboards until you pass out. Similarly, jazz-funk can be the equivalent of that same uncle dancing shirtless at the end of the night. It might seem counter intuitive then, to combine the two. But as co-poet/performer Amelia Walker explained, “it was kind of like a double burden. Jazz isn’t popular and poetry isn’t popular. We thought we’d put the two together and take over the world.”

Thankfully, Max_Mo were able to make the unholy duo work, with expert, creative musicianship — especially Derek Pascoe’s mercurial saxophone — providing a solid basis for Walker and Mike Ladd to weave their poetry. Though some of the poems left me cold — particularly Ladd’s “Meeting the ghost of Don Dunstan on Norwood Parade”, which came of as little more than a vessel for the airing of baby-boomer angst over the new conservatism, and Walker’s “Yoga”, which was unable to walk the tightrope between parody and overblown caricature — there were moments of real class. Ladd’s “Boomer Beach” and “The Ceiling Fan” were replete with beautiful, original imagery, while Walker’s “Work Experience” cast a much needed, nuanced dig at the state of commercial newspapers.

What I noticed, as my ears drifted between the effervescing melodies and the tightly meandering spoken word, was the way in which the use of the latter allowed both the music and the words room to breath. As Pascoe explained to me after the show, by remaining spoken word, rather than singing, the lyrics were able to stand separately from the music, while simultaneously intertwining with the moods and rhythms of the band’s riffing. This, he said, “allows people to be more drawn into the poetry”. As people around me cackled with delight at the various poems, it seemed that he might have been onto something.

True to jazz’s complicated relationship with timing, Pen Island were introduced twenty minutes late, after various sound issue delayed their set. When the three members finally hit the stage, dressed in full-length spandex of various colours and designs, introducing themselves as Phantom Jazz, Lumberjack and Stallion, I got a little worried; it seemed like such cultivated zaniness that five minutes into their first “song”, a drifting, noodley avant-jazz piece, I was ready to write them off with a one-liner, something pithy and grown-up like, “Three dickheads in morphsuits wank through interminable formless jazz”. But then, just as my knuckles began to whiten with frustration, there was a crack on the snare. Simultaneously the band locked into a stuttering chug, morphing (yes) into something else entirely, punishing their instruments with abandon, a band on a mission. PUN-ishing.

As they progressed through a catalogue of jazz standards “bent till they’re unintelligible” (as drummer and band leader Miles Thomas told me), exploring generally divisive genres like ambient noise, thrash and freeform soloing, I watched both myself and the rest of the crowd be drawn-in by the juvenile high jinks. The crotch-stuffed morphsuits, the song titles like “Briefly Coming” and “Gloria’s Whole” became more and more hilarious, cleverly jarring with the expectation of jazz as “cool” and “sophisticated”. Though they achieved the level of technical proficiency usually reserved for savants, these were guys that would probably draw a penis on your face if you got drunk, dropped your guard and fell asleep.

As Thomas told me, the band had “wanted to get around the whole ivory tower thing with jazz” and “make modern jazz more accessible”. During a pause between “The Eternal Triangle” and “Gloria’s Whole” the band began to banter with the audience, swapping penis puns, and shaking their stuffed crotches for our viewing pleasure. As they launched into their next mind-bending display of virtuosity, the audience still giggling like adolescents, it appeared that they’d succeeded.