Landed - Sydney Fringe 2026

Frumpus — Landed

I really wanted to like this.

Frumpus is a long-running Sydney experimental performance collective, known for irreverent, absurdist, physically theatrical work, now returning after a lengthy hiatus. They come with pedigree: a long history of making strange, irreverent, experimental work, emerging from a particularly fertile period in Sydney’s performance culture.

In Landed, Cheryle Moore, Lenny Ann Low and Stephanie Hart relish that history with the company's familiar appetite for cheap props, pop culture, exaggerated bodies, fake blood and gloriously ridiculous transformation. Frumpus has described its own practice in terms of striking visual imagery, text, orchestrated sound and a distinctive visual language, with an appetite for pop culture, beauty, grotesque imagery and the monstrous female. That last idea is particularly intriguing now. What does it mean to make the female body monstrous in 2026, when so many of the old cultural anxieties around women - ageing, sexuality, beauty, appetite, excess and unruliness - have been challenged and repackaged? Landed brushes against those questions.

Landed should have been catnip.

There are moments when you can see it. One performer who could really work a yo-yo. A beautifully silly skit involving a horror door and the increasingly desperate attempts to get out. Ancient bar wenches arriving with tankards of beer, the mugs topped with gloriously fake, fluffy foam, followed by food, then the inevitable mess and suddenly the whole thing side-lit through a heap of low fog.

That was genuinely great. A strong theatrical image, beautifully timed, beautifully ridiculous.

There is also a hint of the Brontës, and I wanted more of it. Much more. It suggests a darker, stranger world that the production never quite commits to. The Brontë reference particularly intrigued me because it seemed to open a door into something more psychologically charged. There is so much there to play with: confinement, desire, female rage, hysteria, isolation, the wild landscape, the gothic and the grotesque. Landed gives us a glimpse of that world, a tantalising fragment.

This is where Landed became frustrating for me. There are clearly interesting ideas and images at work. But too often they arrive and disappear; an idea sparks, an image lands, a character or conceit appears, and then the work moves on.

I wanted more of the ideas to land with the force of the images. That is what I wanted from Landed: not polish, but commitment. Not explanation, but a deeper pursuit of the strange worlds it kept hinting at. Perhaps that is what I kept bumping up against. I don't need every image to have an explanation, but I do want to see what happens when artists stay with an idea long enough for it to transform. The beer, the foam, the mess and the fog didn't need explaining; they simply worked. They created an image, a rhythm and an atmosphere. I wanted more of Landed to trust that kind of theatrical intelligence.

Moore, Low and Hart have assembled a world full of intriguing visual possibilities - costumes, lighting, sound, props and physical transformation.

Of course, this is also what Fringe is for.

You get the work out of the rehearsal room, put it in front of an audience, take the temperature and discover what is actually there. Not every experiment needs to arrive fully formed. There is value in artists being able to take a low-risk punt, make something strange, and find out what survives contact with an audience.

Landed is still finding its shape.

I came away frustrated rather than dismissive. I could see flashes of something genuinely exciting. I just wanted more of them.

Review by Kate Gaul