The village of Gotham’s legend turns on a single, devastating joke: the villagers perform stupidity to outwit a king, then go home to supper. Ryan Atkins’s A Kingdom of Fools rewires that premise – these villagers are fools before the king’s men arrive, leaving madness as their only weapon. The show’s title promises something the production doesn’t quite deliver.
Getting to Theatre Two at The Parks cost two hours on public transport each way. The show itself ran nearly three hours – fifty minutes past the advertised runtime, including a twenty-minute intermission.
That the parents of the three Atkins brothers at the heart of this production drove me into the city afterwards, restoring me to exactly the train I’d planned to catch, reveals something warm about this company’s character.
A Kingdom of Fools invites the Monty Python comparison in its marketing materials, which is the rod it beats itself with. Python’s physical comedy ran on iron internal logic – the imaginary hole, born from Aldrich (Ryan Atkins, who also wrote the piece) headbutting the ground in a drunken stupor the night before the events of the play, delights when honoured and disappoints when ignored. Python would have honoured the hole or turned that inconsistency into its own surgical mini-sketch; here it remains enjoyable sloppiness.
Lachlan Atkins enters as Gerd, and the room shifts. Comedy arrives in waves where before it arrived in bursts; the ensemble ignites around him; and Gerd – loveable idiot, calibrated to the algorithm of perfection such characters demand – earns every laugh without manufacturing one. His exchanges with Jordan Batten’s Sir William Drakeford pulled me so completely into the story that the job of reviewing temporarily ceased to exist.
Eight actors, three of them Atkins brothers with a lifetime’s chemistry between them, risk blurring into indistinct medieval noise. Smart pacing prevents it: each character breathes before the next arrives. Meredith Welch’s Mildreth drips open defiance; Alex Hutchinson-Smith’s Simple Thomas delivers innuendo with a choirboy’s innocence; Nala Davies’s Ethelfleda matches him beat for ribald beat. Her lusty pursuit of the handsome Sir Guy Ashcombe inverts the buxom-barmaid trope – it is he, and the audience, who squirm.
I live with bipolar disorder, and two manic episodes have seen me get entirely starkers in public – so Thomas’s line connecting madness with nudity lands closer to home than the playwright likely intended. It surfaces the show’s most unresolved tension: the show risks equating mental illness with strategic idiocy, and hasn’t thought hard enough about the difference. The legend understood that distinction. This production doesn’t yet.
Costumes are exceptional from head to literally costumed toe – no generic modern black shoes lurking beneath medieval tunics. Sir Ashcombe wears armour that looks genuinely heavy, confirmed by the redness in his face and the rivers of sweat; his relief at changing costumes is visible. The venue proves ideal for this production, and the cast used every inch of the stage – with props sometimes shooting offstage towards the audience.
A Kingdom of Fools is not the Monty Python collision the marketing promises. It is something more modest and, in its best moments, more charming – stupid villagers performing madly to defy authority, sustained by an ensemble who have found genuine joy in each other’s company.
Ryan needs to kill some darlings, fifty minutes’ worth at a conservative estimate; the wit is real (“the churned-up bowels of the underclass” arrived like a gift), and Lachlan Atkins is the kind of ensemble comic actor who makes everyone around him better.
A Kingdom of Fools
The Parks Theatre, 46 Cowan Street, Angle Park
Performance: Friday 27 February 2026
Season continues to 1 March 2026
Information and Bookings: www.adelaidefringe.com.au
Image: The Cast of A Kingdom of Fools (supplied)
Review: Daniel G. Taylor
Note: A brief note on the village’s name: it’s pronounced Go-tham – the Batman Goth-am came later