Bed Bug - Adelaide Fringe 2026

Bed Bug

The Crawford Room

Bed Bug is what happens when heartbreak mutates.

Not a gig. Not theatre. Not quite a rave.Something messier. More intimate. Slightly unhinged.

Bed Bug is a live unravelling: a heartbreaking, experimental electronic-folk concept work that traces the collapse of a decade-long relationship and the grotesque, fascinating metamorphosis that follows. It sits in that deliciously unstable space where performance becomes emotional weather.

Created by Jack Brett, with music production by DINNERLADYYY, weaving a live electronic undercurrent that shimmers, fractures and carries the work into something more volatile, Bed Bug dissects the sticky, destructive patterns of human behaviour. Even in its darkest turns, the work remains alert to the possibility of transformation. The result is a performance that is entirely inhabited.

Brett is a charismatic and deeply watchable performer. There is something both alluring and unsettling in the way he holds eye contact with the audience: intimate, exposed, slightly dangerous. He has the voice of a broken angel - tender, bruised, and capable of sudden force. On guitar, keys, loops and tin whistle, he builds a miniature epic from fragments, textures and pulses. The sound world is rich and engulfing, moving from poetic fragility to full-bodied electronic surge.

The show’s references make sense: Kafka hovers here, as does the contemporary alt-pop lineage of confessional composition. But Bed Bug never feels derivative. It has its own feverish logic. Brett’s background as a music, performance and visual artist is evident in the work’s total composition, as is the breadth of his collaborative life - from Sleep Walking Animals to his internationally touring work with storyteller Casey Jay Andrews. This is a maker who understands atmosphere and how to use it to destabilise an audience, then draw them closer.

What lingers is not only the sonic sophistication — though there is plenty of that — but the sense of emotional risk.

This is tricky to categorise, and all the better for it. Looking around the room, it is clearly reaching the theatrical adventurers - those audiences hungry for work that slips between genres and resists easy packaging. For me, that makes Bed Bug exactly the kind of work a festival like this should hold close: ambitious, strange, musically arresting, and utterly unafraid of its own intensity.

This is an evening of music, performance and images that will last a long time in memory.

Review by Kate Gaul