‘A magical thing’: Fringe faithful Britt Plummer is leading a clown revolution
Theatre-maker, trained clown, and producer Britt Plummer explains how The Courtyard of Curiosities has snowballed from a yurt in a museum courtyard to an international artists’ hub.
Britt Plummer was a fresh-faced graduate of the Adelaide College of Arts when she first made the pilgrimage east to work for the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, joining a cadre of itinerant workers who travel from festival to festival around the world for most of the year.
“I discovered that you can do it as a job – work three to six months in one continent, and then go to the other,” Plummer tells InReview. “That was quite appealing. I got a working visa to go to the UK and work at Assembly Hall, which is a fairly prominent Edinburgh venue, and I think that’s where it all started.”
Plummer has been a fringe faithful ever since, attending most Edinburgh and Adelaide festivals for the past decade. Sometimes she’s an artist, sometimes a venue worker, and, more recently, the producer of Adelaide venue hub The Courtyard of Curiosities. Whichever hat she’s wearing, Plummer is always a theatre obsessive.
“I saw 60-70 shows every year while I was working [in Edinburgh], and then I was seeing shows whenever I wasn’t.”
Initially based in the courtyard of the Migration Museum, The Courtyard of Curiosities emerged as a collaboration between Plummer and Nick Phillips, the Adelaide Fringe’s graphic designer (and performer of the crowd favourite Werewolves). Phillips had been inspired by the Edinburgh venue SpiegelYurt – a 55-seat theatre inside the established ‘clown hub’ venue, BlundaBus – and decided to construct his own yurt that could tour festivals in Australia as a pop-up venue. He soon enlisted Plummer to program the space.
Plummer’s own connection to the international clowning community runs deep. “The best years of her life,” she says, were during her training in Étampes, France, under the legendary clown master Phillipe Gaulier, who is known both for his vicious critique of students during classes, and for his emphasis on Le Jeu (literally, “the Game”) which includes examining the ‘game of the scene’, exploring notions of play with the audience, and the literal enjoyment – or ‘pleasure’ – of the performer as they perform.
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“You have to earn your place on the stage,” she says. “You’ll notice every Gaulier clown is very good at having that play state, having so much fun up there with whatever they’re doing that it’s infectious. In a Gaulier class, if you’re not having enough ‘pleasure’ he will bang a drum and send you off. You develop a very thick skin, [and] you learn because it is so rigorous, what you have to do to cut through.”
Plummer spent a year working six jobs to save for the journey and once in France juggled odd jobs including babysitting, teaching English, and life modelling. “It was a good job because you didn’t have to be fluent in French to do it, and it tested the body physically,” she explains. “It mirrored the physical intensity of the training itself.”
"There was this global community of artists training together, cooking dinner for each other."
Plummer notes that Gaulier training has become extremely popular in the last five years, despite Gaulier himself retiring from teaching last year.
“It has taken off in the last five years, it feels like everyone is going to France to learn it, whereas I felt that back when I went it was a unique thing. But I think that’s cool, obviously it’s appealing to a wide variety of artists.”
Plummer’s time in France also saw her immersed in an international clown family, and many of her peers, such as Elf Lyons and Hannah Camilleri, have now joined her in performing regularly at The Courtyard of Curiosities.
“There was this global community of artists training together, cooking dinner for each other.”
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Plummer’s years of graft have begun to pay off. After premiering in 2023, her solo show Fool’s Paradise – an autobiographical riff on long-distance relationships and border controls – picked up a London producer and toured to Edinburgh.
Back in Adelaide, Plummer and Phillips have worked to cultivate a community of touring and local artists in the Courtyard premiering new work as a launching point towards Edinburgh and beyond.
Modelled on Edinburgh’s SpiegelYurt (“It was a lovely little hub for the clowns, for people coming straight out of Gaulier [who] want to test work at the Edinburgh Fringe,” Plummer explains), its inaugural year saw Phillips pitch his yurt in the museum’s central courtyard, while a chapel space became a black box theatre. Noting how the Edinburgh festival commandeers unconventional spaces from university campuses and community spaces, Plummer sees a greater opportunity for Adelaide-based artists and presenters to seek out alternatives to established venues.
“The time of the year that [Edinburgh’s] festival happens, people are off from university,” Plummer explains. “Because those venues already have seating in place, all you need to do is bring the drapes, the rigging, and the lights.
“You discover all these unique spaces that you didn’t know existed, and then you’re seeing incredible art happen within them, and these hubs pop up. So I felt, ‘Here was an opportunity for us to do something similar’.”
The Courtyard of Curiosities’ first two years drew the attention of neighbouring North Terrace cultural institutions, with an offer made by the State Library to include some of their iconic rooms – such as the Circulating Library – in the 2025 season. Plummer received around 180 artist applications, managing to whittle it down to sixty shows across five venues. Plummer says when she visited Edinburgh to tour Fool’s Paradise, she had several clowns approach her about appearing at the Courtyard back in Adelaide.
The Courtyard’s expansion rolls on into 2026. This year, Plummer has managed to swing the Mortlock Wing of the State Library which will feature the award-winning UK duo Wright and Grainger’s double bill of Orpheus and Eurydice, performed with a live string quartet and vocal ensemble, “with the River Styx running through the centre, and audiences seated across two levels of the library”.
“It’s going to be dynamite,” Plummer beams.
The Courtyard has birthed several critical successes, such as Damien Warren-Smith’s Garry Starr – Classic Penguins in 2024, and Jessica Barton’s Dirty Work, who received ‘Best Newcomer’ at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival after their run at the Courtyard.
For Plummer, the Courtyard’s most affirming success however is the supportive community of artists that emerge during the frequent lurches and curve-balls that the Fringe’s open marketplace serves up. International and local artists alike are seen spruiking each other’s shows, printing out reviews and sticking stars to flyers to support their peer’s publicity.
“Often as a touring solo artist you don’t have a tech touring with you – and I’ve been that person on the other side of the world – so having that community of artists around you where you can celebrate the wins and console each other during the lows is a magical thing about the festival.”
Fool’s Paradise: A Comedy of Cross-Continental Courting, Clowns and Catastrophes runs from February 21 – March 21 at The Yurt at The Courtyard of Curiosities.
This story is part of a series of articles being produced by InReview with the support of Adelaide Fringe
Read more 2026 Adelaide Fringe coverage here on InReview
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