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Carnival Dispatch

A programme of free jester games — published in Fremantle, Western Australia

The Troupe

Three people, one heritage office, and an unreasonable fondness for bells

A heritage office in Fremantle with vintage carnival posters, banker lamps and a jester marionette
Our House

A small office above Phillimore Street

Carnival Dispatch is written in a single room above a limestone shopfront in Fremantle's West End, a short walk from the harbour cranes. The walls are covered in old playbills, the desks are older than the writers, and a jester marionette named Bartholomew supervises the bookshelf. He has never approved a single review, which we take as artistic integrity.

The Dispatch began in 2021 as a photocopied programme handed out at the Fremantle Markets, reviewing whatever free games the three of us were playing on the ferry. Readers kept asking where the next issue was, so we moved the whole production online and kept the format: acts, intervals, curtain calls, and not a single number score.

The Players

In order of appearance

Beatrice Hartwell

Editor & former stage manager

Twenty years calling cues in Perth theatres taught Beatrice exactly when an act overstays its welcome. She plays every game on the bill twice — once for joy, once with a stopwatch — and writes the curtain calls.

Silas Crane

Critic, retired from print

Silas reviewed touring productions for three decades before deciding that casual games were the last honest vaudeville. He contributes the longer essays and maintains the Dispatch's strict no-score tradition with religious fervour.

Poppy Nakamura-Reid

Illustrator & keeper of Bartholomew

Poppy draws the programme ornaments, tests every game on the oldest phone in the office, and holds veto power over any act whose jester she deems "insufficiently sincere". She has exercised it twice.

House Rules

The customs that keep the Dispatch honest

Free means free

Every act on our bill is playable in full without spending anything. If a game asks for money at any point during our three-week run, it leaves the programme — quietly, but permanently.

No commissions, no favours

We accept no compensation from studios, run no advertisements, and link to nothing for reward. The Dispatch is paid for out of our own pockets and the occasional bake sale.

Words, not numbers

A curtain call tells you more than a score ever could. We describe how the house felt when the act ended, and we trust our readers to take it from there.

❦ Visiting Fremantle? The office door is green, the knocker is a bell, and visitors are welcome on Friday afternoons ❦