Actor Christopher Samuel Carroll is heading back to town after a lightning trip to the Edinburgh Fringe with his one-man show, The Cadaver Palaver, reports arts editor HELEN MUSA.

The title is already a bit of a joke on language and Carroll, who loves to play with words, calls it “a thrilling tale of derring-do (and don’ts)”.

It revolves around the moustachioed adventurer, Bennett Cooper Sullivan, a fully-fledged character of his own devising, in direct address to the audience.

Carroll mixes the Jacques Lecoq tradition of physical theatre, in which he was trained, with a love of literature to tell a tale that in part pays tribute to Sherlock Holmes, Jules Verne and Oscar Wilde, “with more than a dash of Indiana Jones,” he says.

He’s been jaunting all around eastern Australia, performing the show in Sydney, Adelaide and Melbourne, where he also revived his show Smoke Screen with Canberra-raised actor Damian Baudin. 

When I catch up with him via Whatsapp, he’s in Edinburgh, where he says, there might be more than 3000 shows altogether in The Fringe.

This year the event sees a respectable Canberra contingent, with Marcel Cole’s Charlie Chaplin show, Chenoeh Miller’s Six Women in Front of a White Wall, burlesque identity Jazida, and musician Alice Cottee also performing. 

Luckily, he’s been located in the Summerhall arts complex, which he says is a good venue, while camping in various relatives’ houses. 

When I speak to him, he’s staying in a village 45 minutes outside Edinburgh – while he did get a grant from ArtsACT, it’s not enough to pay the over-the-top hotel tariffs during the festival season. 

The Irish actor will soon be back in his adopted hometown Canberra and we’ll get to see what the critics have been raving about as part of a mini festival, The Independents, being staged by the Canberra Theatre in the Courtyard Studio. 

“By the time I bring it to Canberra, I will have already performed The Cadaver Palaver 37 times this year, so I feel like I’m in top form,” he adds. 

The audience, he says, can expect “a real rollicking tongue-in cheek, slightly unbelievable adventure.”

One Edinburgh critic described his hero as “an early prototype of James Bond, putting the ‘cad in cadaver’ [as] each improbable escape is joyously topped by the next”.

Bennett Cooper Sullivan, Carroll explains, is a gentleman adventurer who’d much rather be in far-flung parts of the globe, but has to come back to Britain and raise the funds to go away again. 

He’s come across an undocumented genus of Papaver (poppy) which he hopes to have recognised by the Royal Society, a gateway to becoming the toast of the town and getting invited to afternoon teas in society. 

While in London, an old friend mentions a seafarer who has gone missing, so he embarks on a mission to find him, which takes him to Edinburgh (of course), where he gets embroiled in the craze for all things Egyptian which was the rage in the 19th century.

“I’ll transport the audiences from Canberra to Edinburgh, ” Carroll threatens, but not a word more will he tell us except that they’ll just have to be there to see exactly what happens.

The Cadaver Palaver, Courtyard Studio, September 12-14.