Classic Penguins was one of the biggest hits of last year’s Fringe – just don’t tell anyone
On paper, Damien Warren-Smith’s Fringe hit Garry Starr: Classic Penguins is a romp through the literary canon. In the room, it’s an unpredictable hour of anarchic comedy – and an urban legend of the festival circuit.
In an age when even the most minor celebrities have brand managers and everyone is one TikTok video away from viral fame, there’s something almost quaint about word-of-mouth publicity. And yet every year, whispers circulating throughout the artistic community turn a handful of acts at the Adelaide Fringe into bona fide hits. Must-see performances of recent years have included Robo Bingo, Elf Lyons and Mel McGlensey’s Motorboat, but one name has been bandied about more than any other.
Since debuting in 2024, Garry Starr: Classic Penguins has grown from a Fringe show into an urban legend thanks to ever more outrageous stories of absurdist sketches and anarchic crowd participation delivered through fits of giggles. But most of these recommendations come with a key caveat: you don’t want to know everything before you go in.
So what actually happens onstage? The show ostensibly sees Garry Starr (played by Damien Warren-Smith) recreating every Penguin Classics novel ever released. It’s hardly a spoiler to say that there’s a lot of audience interaction, and even more nudity. Some scenes are inspired by well-loved classics, but other selections are more obscure; one of the most talked-about sequences is inspired by a collection of seaside short stories called The Bodysurfers.
This unforgettable set piece is a perfect encapsulation of just how ambitious the audience participation is, but giving away too many details would rob audiences of the joy of experiencing it firsthand. Somewhat remarkably in this age of oversharing, most audience members have been able to show the necessary restraint.
“When I lead up to that bit, the way I tease it means I can gauge whether people can tell that it’s coming or not,” says Warren-Smith. “And there are still a lot of people who don’t expect it.” To keep it that way, Warren-Smith and his production team have removed any archival footage from the internet. “We want it to be one of those shows where people are like, ‘you just have to go and see it’.”
The show’s notoriety means that more than half the tickets for the 2026 Adelaide Fringe run were sold before it began, but Warren-Smith cautions that “this show is really well-known in a very small sub-subgroup of society. People are constantly bringing their friends to the show who have never heard anything about it.”
Warren-Smith admits that he hasn’t read many of the books featured in Classic Penguins as “that wasn’t what was necessary for the research for the show”.
“My clown teacher, Philippe Gaulier, used to say that if you’re really passionate about something, you’re the worst person to make a clown show about it,” he says. “You want to be too clever, and you put things in that go over people’s heads.”
Nevertheless, he throws in plenty of Easter eggs for literature lovers. “It might be a character name or an accent I use and if you don’t know it, that’s fine – you don’t even realise that something’s going over your head. But other people get the reference, and people who have studied literature are constantly coming up to me and telling me that they love the show, but I’ve ruined their favourite book.”
It’s fair to say that the show’s success has taken Warren-Smith aback, as has the willingness of audience members to throw themselves into the madness onstage. The high level of interaction means that every performance unfolds differently and he inevitably becomes a ringmaster trying to contain the onstage chaos. At a time when the spectre of AI casts a pall over workplaces and dominates news cycles, the appeal of wildly unpredictable human interactions to audiences is obvious, but it also helps to keep things fresh for Warren-Smith after 220 performances.
With successful runs across Australia as well as in London and Edinburgh, he admits that Classic Penguins has exceeded his wildest expectations. “It’s so odd to me that Toni Collette has been multiple times, and Graham Norton came along. I just never thought it would get to that level,” he says.
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And with a New York season planned for September (he is “really, really worried about getting sued”), the show’s popularity looks set to grow further. That success has created pressure for a follow-up and while Warren-Smith is bringing a second show (Too Clowns) to the Fringe this year, it is not a Garry Starr vehicle.
That’s partially because “I wanted to be off the radar and not have anyone really know what I was doing.” But it is also “a very different show” – the character Warren-Smith plays is fully clothed and doesn’t speak, though it still includes plenty of the audience play that he has become known for.
As for Warren-Smith’s most famous creation, there’s already a concept and a title for the next show. Garry Starr of Bethlehem will tackle the Bible (yes, all of it), but he jokes that he wants to play New York before debuting it – as he may not be welcome in the US once it’s out in the world.
Until then, Classic Penguins will continue to shock and delight. The show’s format makes it easy to adapt, and “the nice thing about being the author of your own work is that if there’s any bit that I start to get bored with, I just change it.”
With almost 3,000 Penguin Classics to choose from, he won’t run out of material any time soon, and he promises anyone who has seen previous iterations of the show that “everything is so much tighter now that it feels like a very different show”.
“We’re also adding Wuthering Heights this year and it’s worth coming just to see that.”
Garry Starr: Classic Penguins will be performed from March 6-21 at The Factory in the Garden of Unearthly Delights
Too Clowns will be performed from March 2-22 in The Crawford Room at The Courtyard of Curiosities at the State Library
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