The 2026 Adelaide Fringe is well underway, and ArtsHub’s Performing Arts Editor Richard Watts attended the festival’s opening weekend. James Rowland’s Team Viking is one of his clear standouts so far; his earlier reviews can be read here and here.
Team Viking review – quick links
Stand up comedy with heart
Seamlessly blending storytelling and stand up, and adding live, looped music to the mix, English comedian James Rowland brings the 10th anniversary production of his heartrending and truly hilarious Team Viking to Adelaide for the first time. It’s an unmissable gem of a show performed with passion and gentle, genuine care for the audience’s comfort in the face of some truly dark material – and sparked both tears and uncontrollable laughter in this jaded critic on Saturday night.
Childhood friends James, Tom and Sarah have been inseparable from the moment Sarah asked to join the boys’ backyard recreation of The Vikings, the swashbuckling historical drama starring Kirk Douglas, Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, which the boys had recently watched on TV.
Their abiding love – for the film and one another – are sorely tested years later as adults when James, dying from a rare and aggressive form of cancer, makes an unusual request. He wants an ahistorical but cinematic Viking funeral – his body cremated in a burning ship – and enlists James and Sarah to enact his dying wish.
In would be a crime to reveal more about Team Viking, in which Rowland operates the lights – as he did in the show’s original run in a small room at the Edinburgh Fringe – while simultaneously entertaining, charming and moving his audience.
He warmly embraces enthusiastic consent, balances astute observations and beautiful turns of phrase with hilarious scenes and breathtaking moments, and reminds us once again that truth really is stranger – and wilder, warmer and far more blackly comic – than fiction. A gentle, hilarious, heartbreaking and healing masterpiece.
James Rowland: Team Viking plays The Hetzel Room at The Courtyard of Curiosities at the State Library until 8 March as part of Adelaide Fringe. See all reviews.
The writer visited Adelaide as a guest of Adelaide Fringe.
