Skip to: Kemble’s Riot, Plastic and Chicken Bones, Blue Blood, The Ballad of Mulan, Coleridge-Taylor of Freetown, Gruoch: The Lady Macbeth, Terrible People, Richard III, Character Flaw, Badass Be Thy Name, Identity Theft, Comedy
Oh dear. Just when you thought it was safe to go outside … the infighting has got worse. Last year the big controversy was over Caravanserai, a venue run by Brighton Fringe that was supposed to function as a revenue-earner. Unfortunately for Caravanserai, apparently Brighton Fringe lost control of expenses and the venue made a loss, which defeated the object. However, one small consolation from this was the absence of Caravanserai 2024 settled all the arguments, right? Wrong. Spiegeltent and Sweet have chosen to go their own way and run their events at the same time but outside of the Brighton Fringe programme. It is not clear exactly what prompted this, but it is clear this is going to make fringe month very messy.
For the time being, I am going to be covering the two breakaway venues as if they were still part of Brighton Fringe. The Warren Outdoors holds the precedent, when they ran separately from Brighton Fringe in 2020 (albeit for very different reasons – long story). No fringe organisation from Edinburgh to Durham should feel entitled to designated weeks where they get a monopoly on performing arts, and we should certainly not sideline those who are excluded – even if the reason for exclusion is being unable to work with the fringe organisers. However, it is not healthy to have multiple festival umbrellas competing for attention, and after this year I will expect all parties to make reasonable attempts to settle their differences. It might be that they agree to an orderly divorce. But should an agreement not emerge soon, I will expect a good explanation from all parties on what the problem is, what measures you took (blaming the other side won’t be good enough), and why it hasn’t worked out.
But I don’t want to get too bogged down with that. This is supposed to be a recommendations article. I will get through this soon, as soon as I’ve got the headline out of the way. Oh, and I’m performing at Brighton Fringe this year, doing a comedy game show out of all things. As usual, I won’t spend much time talking about that here, but if you want to read about a parody of the board game Cluedo, here is my best attempt to explain how this works. In line with practice in previous years, this means that all reviews from the venue where I am performing (Rotunda) will be embargoed until after Brighton Fringe finishes.
Right, let’s get the rest of this out of the way:
The fragmenting fringe
First of all, an important disclaimer: I am going to go into a lot of speculation here. I don’t live in Brighton and don’t necessarily keep up with the gossip between fringes. But with neither side having chosen to be any more specific than “the decision was not taken lightly”, I have no option but to look at what I know and try to fill in the gaps. Probably not the right time to go into claims and counter-claims now that Brighton Fringe about to start, but the information I have (either directly or stated in public on the record), the less guesswork I’m going to have to make.
What I do know is that there was a lot of aggro caused by Caravanserai last year. In my opinion, a lot of worries about unfair competition were overblown. For almost all venues, there was only one space of a comparable size, not that big a deal. However, the glaring exception is Spiegeltent. Their main space was in direct head-to-head competition with Caravanserai’s Luna Parc, and it’s quite understandable why you’d object to your main competitor being more closely affiliated to the central organisers. But Luna Parc isn’t coming back, so that’s solved? Evidently not. Why not? That’s harder to work out.
However, the one thing that I think might have been an issue is yet another new venue, Fool’s Paradise. In some ways, this can be considered a successor for Caravanserai: a central pop-up venue with a big space and a normal-sized space, plus lots of food and drink outlets. It’s not quite a like-for-like replacement though: for one thing, there’s noticeably fewer acts than Caravanserai had (less than half by my count). The big difference, though, is that this is not being run by Brighton Fringe, but instead being run by Head First Acrobats for both themselves and some other visiting acts. Is this sufficiently different to Caravanserai to appease the critics? Not necessarily. One thing that is the same is that the Brighton Fringe hoardings for acts to advertise themselves are around Fool’s Paradise – maybe this and possibly other associations was still too much.
There is one other factor that may have been a problem. Until recently, there were three things both Edinburgh and Brighton had to distinguish them from some venues running concurrently: a programme, an app, and a website. Brighton Fringe have cut both the programme and app due to cost-cutting, and the website did have a number of usability complaints that weren’t addressed last year. With two missing and a third iffy, one might ask: what is the purpose of a Fringe umbrella organisation? The most obvious answer to that is that it give hundreds of artists in the smallest venues a fair chance to be noticed over those programmed into the bigger ones. But that’s not a great incentive for the bigger venues.
Whatever the reason, Spiegeltent is running the same time as Brighton Fringe, in Brighton, but not as part of the fringe. And that makes things very very messy for most of us. Whatever hassle you had navigating Brighton Fringe’s website still has to be an improvement on navigating two different sets of listings and collating a schedule in your head. Now, in theory, there’s nothing to stop somebody (either a venue inside of outside the fringe acting unilaterally, or a media outlet) putting together their own collated listings. However, as far as I’m aware, nobody has done this. A lot will depend on how attached audiences feel to a particular venue. As the de facto hub for cabaret at Brighton Fringe, Spiegeltent can probably count on a loyal audience without having to worry about wider Brighton Fringe publicity. If they can’t, that could be trouble.
The other big question is how this affects media coverage. As a member of accredited press, I can tell you it is very useful to have Brighton Fringe as a central point of contact – much better than the horribly fragmented system at Edinburgh. I’m continuing to include Spiegeltent and Sweet for now, but that’s extra effort. Will other media outlets make the extra effort too? A big test will be when the reviews start coming out: will Speigeltent shows be included as much as they were before? The outcome of that could have a lot of influence of who negotiates Brighton Fringe 2025 in a position of strength and who’s in a position of weakness.
But that’s enough of that for now. There’s all sorts of details I haven’t discussed yet, not least the more complicated situation for Sweet Venues. That can go in the live coverage. We’d better get a move on with recommendations.
Safe choice:
So, you know the rules now. For those who don’t, ALL categories of recommendations are conditional on you being interested in what’s being described, but for safe choice, if this does look like the sort of thing that appeals to you, I’m confident you can’t go wrong with this. Some are plays I’ve seen before, and some are from companies I’ve a lot of confidence in – and all have wide audience appeal.
This year, I’ve identified four safe bets.
Kemble’s Riot
I have made many safe choice recommendations over the years, but few recommendations can be as fond as the headliner for Brighton Open Air Theatre. This theatre was the project of Adrian Bunting, who made a name for himself with this play. It runs a programme over all the warmer months in Brighton and not just the fringe, and in 2020 suddenly became Brighton’s number one venue for obvious reasons related to being outdoors. Sadly, Adrian Bunting never got to see this. He died within a month of being diagnosed with cancer, and his final weeks were spent designing this venue. He also found the site and donated his life savings to this legacy. And what a legacy it is. (Full story here.)
But as well as leaving us this venue, he also left us with a smash hit play which is both a lot of fun and quite profound, about the Old Price Riots of 1809: a much-forgotten moment of history when audiences rebelled against ticket price increases at the Covent Garden Theatre. Sound a bit boring, how do we make this interesting? Simple: you the audience get to be the rioters. Depending on which side you’re sitting, you can either heckle the actors on stage for the ticket prices, or heckle the hecklers and tell them to shut up. And, in the meantime, John Kemble standard firm against the rioters whilst the actress sister Sarah Siddons want to go back to being loved.
Kemble’s Riot remains one of my all-time favourite shows I’ve seen on the fringe circuit, and if you’ve never seen it before, now’s your chance to do so, because you’ve never seen anything like it. On at Brighton Open Air Theatre on the 3rd – 5th May at 6.p.m. Fri/Sat andf 1 p.m. Sat/Sun.
Plastic and Chicken Bones
This only barely qualifies as theatre, and was describes as some reviewers are much closer to storytelling. But what a story it is. Malcolm Galea plays “Dryskoll”, a time-traveller from the future who has been glitched into our present day. He does body-swapping time-travel all the time, but on this occasion it’s gone awry. He tells us about the idealised future he comes from where nobody has to die thanks to the benevolent and all-powerful AI “Zimmy” who rules the world. Bit by bit, however, we learn more about this. The environmental catastrophe and more that stands between now and the idealised future. The mission of Dryskoll’s that went wrong, the cracks in the facade of the future – and finally, questions over whether an accident was really an accident.
You could call this derivative – almost all the themes here have been done somewhere before, with Black Mirror and Brave New World featuring heavily. But Malcolm Gelea makes the story his own thanks to some very tight writing and some stupendous world-building that makes up this story, and when I saw this last time the memories of the not-so-bright future stuck with me for a long time. This earned overwhelming praise last time and it’s high time for a welcome return. You can see this at The Lantern on the 9th – 12th May at 9.00 p.m. (5.00 p.m. 9th).
He is also bringing a new play he’s written, The Trials of Magnus Coffinkey, this time going from a fantasy setting to a sci-fi setting, and this time a female two-hander. Same venue, 16th-19th May at 9.00 p.m.
Blue Blood
I missed this last year, and annoyingly the timing of my performances means I’m going to miss this again. But all of Blue Devil’s recent productions have continued to run across London and the south east long after Brighton Fringe wraps up, and Blue Blood is no exception. Many of Blue Devil’s plays are LGBT-slanted retellings, but there’s always enough in their stories to be of interest to everybody.
This play is based on a book with a little-known title of Israel Rank: The Autobiography of a Criminal, but is better known as the 1949 film title Kind Hearts and Coronets. The story involves Gabriel Jones being disowned and disinherited by his family. And being only ninth in line to the titles and estate, there’s no chance he’ll be getting his fortune that way, unless … well, perhaps Gabriel has been getting too many ideas from Game of Thrones. Suffice to say, the play’s tagline of “How to kill you way to the top” is there for a reason. Just a one-off performance this time round, at Brighton Open Air Theatre on May 15th at 7.30 p.m. Two-hour performance, but doubtless worth the two hours.
The Ballad of Mulan
I’m working directly with Michelle Yim for my thing, but this earned a promotion from Bold Choice to Safe Choice long before any talk of working together. Grist to the Mill (Ross Ericson and Michelle Yim’s in-house productions for the Rotunda) has a set of several solo plays, and this year it’s two of Michelle’s plays of different East Asian stories. One is an interesting pieces about real East Asian woman from the last century, but the strongest story of her whole repertoire is the ancient legend of Mulan, who according to lore disguised herself as a man, joined the army, and rose to the ranks of general. Rather than the Disney treatment of a syrupy inspirational story, however, Ross Ericson’s script is a lot more like a World War One play, with Mulan’s own story mixed in with the camaraderie of the soldiers she mingles with and the horrors of the battlefield.
This fringe, you can see it at The Rotunda on May 7th, 8th & 21st, all at 6.00 p.m. Alternatively, if you’d rather see the true story of Lizzie Yu, you can see The Empress and Me on May 14th, 15th and 22nd, again at 6.00 p.m.
Bold choice:
Next on the list, some more untested plays. Occasionally, it’s a play with more specialised tastes; most of the time, however, it’s more untested material. Most new plays are bold choices before they get to safe choice. As with safe choice, it depends a lot on what appeals to you, and even it appeals, it might be a gamble. But should the gamble pay off, you might be amongst the first to see something great.
Coleridge-Taylor of Freetown
I saw Tayo Aluko perform Call Mr. Robeson a few years ago, and that was fascinating. Paul Robeson was a famous black singer at a time when anti-black racism was still running rampant in America, and became a bit of a hate figure – but it surprisingly didn’t have that much to do with race. Such was Paul Robeson’s fame and respect, he could stand up to segregated performances and get his way. Instead, he fell foul of the Red Scare, mainly because he thought the Russians were great in WW2 and didn’t get the memo that they were the baddies now. Although he was very resourceful and … well, the play give a blow by blow account.
So with that play standing for nuance and counter-intuitive bits of history, it will be interesting to see what he does with this play featuring Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, famed amongst other things for The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, possibly the most famous black historical figure you’ve heard of without knowing he was black. The story, however, is about his nephew, back in Freetown, in the midst of civil war. Oh, and just like Mr. Robeson, there’s singing in this. Showing on the 10th – 12th May at 7.30 p.m. then the 24th – 26th May at 5.30 p.m at the Rotunda.
Corrrection: Nope. Not famed for the albatross poem. That’s Samuel Taylor-Coleridge, not Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. The character here was famous as a composer, and whilst I assumed a composer did some poetry as well, on this occasion he doesn’t take the credit. Also, he was mixed race rather than black. Like I said, Tayo Aluko is good at raising the counter-intuitive bits of history.
Gruoch: The Lady Macbeth
Another fine performer with an excellent grasp of nuance is Caroline Burns-Cooke. She’s got a good back catalogue of solo plays, including And the Rope Still Tugging Her Feet and Testament of Yootha, but by far the best one of all was Proxy. It’s not too difficult to write a play about why Münchhausen’s syndrome by proxy is a bad thing, but much more challenging to understand what was cause a mother to do that. And Caroline Burns-Cooke gave a terrifyingly convincing portrayal of a woman with no other purpose in her life getting addicted to the sympathy for her supposedly sick daughter.
And this bodes well for an exploration of the original villainess, Lady Macbeth. Notorious for pushing her husband into regicide and mass-murder, taking her own life when things get out of hand, but how did she get like that in the first place? The motive hinted at here is an long-forgotten old score she wants to settle. You can see this on the 29th May – 1st June at Sweet Venues, in their new central venue of the Yellow Book.
Jane Postlethwaite: Terrible People
It’s in the comedy listings rather than the theatre listings, but Jane Postelthwaite is one of my favourite character comedians, even since I saw her breakthrough act in Made in Cumbria. But whilst that show was light humour in the style of The League of Gentlemen, this one might have a more serious edge. Who is a terrible person? Are these people closer than you think? And maybe, just maybe, it’ll go the whole hog and ask if you’re the terrible person. This is part of the LAMB big queer comedy weekender, but her humour has a wide appeal and should be fun – if sometimes uncomfortable – for everybody. You can see this at The Actors on the 25th – 27th May at 8.00 p.m. (3.30 on the 27th).
Richard III: A One-Person Show
Everybody keep going on about this show, but it’s never coincided with my visits. And I really know nothing about this performance other than these stickers saying “DEAD” which members of the audience keep getting. But this earns a promotion from wildcard to bold choice on the strength of Emily Carding’s previous performance. Carding has a stellar reputation as an actor and the huge emotional range performed as Sam in There’s a Ghost in my House almost made it to my best individual performance of 2021 (coming down to a very difficult tie-break with fellow Sweet one-person show Jekyll and Hyde). Annoyingly, I’m going to miss this yet again, but if you turn up at Sweet Venues on the 15th – 19th May at 7.00 p.m., let me know what it means to get a “DEAD” sticker.
You might like …
The next three ones are things that, like safe choices, are safe bets for those it appeals to, but they are allowed more specialist appeal. I have for you …
Character Flaw
Philippa Dawson’s play about what it’s like to have ADHD firmly remains a single-topic piece, but it’s done in an way that is both engaging and informative. There are, if you like, two audiences for this play. For somebody who’s neurodivergent, much of the material in the play is perfectly normal; for a neurotypical audience, it is a lot more about learning to see the person, not the disability (or rather the neurodivergence). At some point, the story goes seems to go into slapstick what-am-I-like scrapes; at other points, it shows how this can become overwhelming – but a key message that comes from this is how it’s part of who you are, and something to be “cured” of. And whilst I can’t speak for how a neurotypical audence perceives this, it left Edinburgh Fringe with the Brighton Fringe Award for Excellence. It’s on at the 9th – 12th May at The Actors (formerly the Marlborough) at 6.30 p.m.
Police Cops: Badass be thy name
Police Cops is a long-running series of parody shows, beginning with a parody of every 1970s cop TV show ever made. It was then followed with with Police Cops in Space which is a parody of – yes, you’ve guessed it, every 1970s sci-fi TV show ever made. All of these started off with a three-strong comedy ensemble The Pretend Men who were praised for their high-energy performances and slapstick humour. Such is the success that the original one has now been upscales to a musical with a bigger cast. But if you want to catch the original three-hander format when you still can, you can see Badass be thy name, which branches out into mismatched evil-fighting duo – in this case, a vampire-slaying priest and a 1990s raver from Madchecter. In this category rather than safe choice because it’s not really one for intricate theatrical plots – just very very silly. You can see this May 23rd – May 25th at Fool’s Paradise at 6.30 p.m.
Identity Theft: What to expect when you’re not suspecting
Another lesser-known act now, also very much a clowning one. I saw Stolen Table last year with The Lost Play of Barry Wayworm, featuring a plot that wouldn’t last five minutes on Cinema Sins, but getting away with it because of the clowning from the outset. And amongst the ensemble of five, Agnes Carrington was the stand-out performer. She’s back in this follow-up, possibly playing the character of Bernadette who is here to warn you about identity theft the the traps you can fall into, although knowing them, the trap is just as likely to be a cartoon 100,000 weight falling on you as any kind of fraud. Stolen Table, by the way, are with me with this. They even have a content warning stating: “Do not attend if you’re unprepared to ingest a strong dose of what I like to call Reality.” You can see it at May 11th – 12th at Bar Broadway then May 19th, 21st, 27th & 28th at Rotunda, various times.
From the comedy
Just a quick run-though here. Sorry for this last section being late, but I don’t have much of a comedy readership. So here’s a quick summary:
Crime Scene Improvisation: One of the most popular improv shows at Brighton Fringe, most distinguished by the democratised may of naming the murderer by majority vote. Also notable for their ability to make their mistakes funny. May 11th and June 6th, two performances both dates at 3.30 and 6.00, Komedia.
Dave Bibby: Baby Dinosaur: Saw this at last year’s Buxton Fringe and loves it. Wonderfully wholesome show superficially about creating a One-Man Jurassic Park, but really a homage to the hard work and joys of being a father. One performance only, May 25th, 6.45 p.m. Caxton Arms.
Finlay and Joe: Past our bedtimes: Saw their previous show in Edinburgh, where they automate their sketch show with an AI that is definitely not going to try to take over the world. Their show is very family-friendly and very nerd-friendly. May 15th – 17th, 8.30, Laughing Horse at Temple Bar.
Stephen Catling: Beehavrioural Problems Something Something Autism: A more niche appeal than most comedy shows, but I have an obscure enough sense of humour. Also, it is important that shows like this flourish in open festivals, free from the influences of programmers deciding on our behalf how we are to be represented. May 18th 9.15 p.m. then May 25th 7.45 p.m, Rotunda.
Imaginary Porno Charades And, finally this. An imaginary porno is a witty pun of a porn parody, such as Annie Get Your Cum or Orgy and Bess. Done as charades. And in case you go to shows expecting it to be taken in an unexpected direction in the third act: that is the whole show. 17th, 24th and 31st May, 10.30 p.m.
And that it finished. Sorry it took so long to complete this – my scheduling went a bit pear-shaped. I’ll start earlier next time, I promise.
Chris Neville-Smith's blog on theatre 