Edinburgh Fringe 2017 – as it happens

REVIEWS: Skip to: Penthouse, Just Don’t Do It, You, Me and Everything Else, Boris and Sergey, Goblin Market, One-Man Apocalypse Now, Mimi’s Suitcase, No Miracles Here, The City, BlackCatfishMusketeer

Monday 21st August: Phew. 32 plays in 8 days and that’s my lot done. But don’t go away, because I’ve still got more reviews to catch up on, such as La Vie Dans Une Marionette.

This is a charming little piece from the family section of the programme. As we enter, we are greeted by a woman who says we are all beautiful in an accent that is supposed to be French. Well, more like an absurdly fictitious French accent, but that’s okay, because the fact they’re really from New Zealand is a running joke throughout. In fact, the entire thing parodies the classic black and white movies of France – the only thing that was missing was “Fin” at the end. After she give her run-through of ‘ow to be a good audience or bad audience, we go into the story, where our silent hero gets a delivery of a life-size marionette. From what we can tell he’s a lonely man, left by his one true love when younger, and this puppet is his only friend to him.

I’ll get the problem out of the way: it’s tough to get what’s going on here. This wouldn’t normally be such an issue, but this show is aimed at children 7 or above, and I can see little chance of kids that young to follow this. Okay, silent plays aren’t the easiest things to explain, but in this play we establish that the man and his marionette are silent but the moon that comes up every night can talk. I would have given the moon a much stronger role as a narrator – she says “You are all beautiful” quite a lot, but it was a missed opportunity to make the play easier to understand.

However, it is a strange delight to explain to punters that this play the man and the puppet can’t speak but the moon can. The puppetry effect of pulling hidden strings was done very well, and the music used for the dance sequences was gorgeous. This is more experimental that I’d normally recommend for a family show, but given time I think we can see a lovely and accessible family-friendly show come from this. In the meantime, you can enjoy this for what it is.

Sunday 20th August, 10.15 p.m.: One more review before I call it a night, and that’s Victim from Bruised Sky productions. This play is a sort-of follow-on from a previous play Villain, about public vilification, but don’t worry if you haven’t seen that play, because this one is a good stand-alone play in its own right.

Louise Bereford plays Tracy, a prison officer wanting to do the right thing, but pressure at home from a sick father and useless husband are taking their toll. Louise Bereford also plays Siobhan, a long-time inmate happy to be on the inside after doing away with an abusive partner, now building a status for herself on the inside as the prison fixer, especially with smuggled mobile phones where she always stay one step ahead. But Siobahn isn’t the most notorious inmate – that is a new prisoner who stood by and allowed her baby to be ritualistically murdered by her partner.

Bereford does a slick job switching between down-to-earth Tracy and confident but intimidating Tracy. It does take a couple of scenes to establish she’s switching between the two, and there maybe an avoidable bit of confusion at the beginning (when Siobahn talks about a treat her late parter was planning for his new woman, followed immediately by Tracy talking about a treat from her husband), but that was only a small issue. Most of the time, it’s a well-written script from Martin Murphy of power games that Siobahn masters. But there are no unambiguously good or evil characters here: Tracy has integrity but also her weakness; Siobahn is ruthless but sometimes understands the personal demons of other inmates, even if she’s working a plan to her advantage.

It’s hard to know how this compares to Villain without having seen it – I gather that play did very well – but Victim is a good play that give a lot of insight into the murky world of prison fixing, explaining how even decent people can get sucked into these schemes. Whether or not you know the original, this is well worth a visit.

Sunday 20th August, 6.15 p.m.: Grr. Was supposed to do a review of another play on the train home, but Virgin Trains East Coast’s wi-fi provider has other ideas.

So in the short amount of time I have, I don’t have time to write a full review, but that’s okay, because I’m going to recommend The Friday Night Effect. I will say why later, but honestly, this is a play that is best seen cold, with no clues given by anyone else on what to expect.

Will try to get another review out later because I’ve still got a lot of catching up to do.

Sunday 20th August, 12 noon: Phew. That was a big day yesterday. A six-show day, including a late-night Boris and Sergey that finished at 2.30 a.m. I’m really too old to be staying out that late, but I have to do it occasionally to prove the point that I can do it if I want to.

Anyway, let’s get on with the snap reviews before the backlog gets any bigger. It’s back to Malaprop Theatre; I originally scheduled myself to review one of their plays, but after BlackCatfishMusketeer impressed me last week, they’ve earned themselves a bonus review. And so I saw LOVE+. The other play may have been a love story facilitated by technology, but the story was very much grounded in reality. This one, however, goes into a more fictitious future where a woman falls in love with a robot.

This is a cleverly-written script here, from someone who understand how computers think. The woman as a bot, who is both a housekeeper and companion. Unlike a human, bot never tires of work and also understands everything the woman wants. Not through empathy as a human would understand it, but more like the way social media does it. We never know much about the woman’s life outside this relationship, but we can guess that she finds human-human relationships too complicated. But the question this play raises is a strange paradox: is someone who has everything you ever wanted really what you want? No matter how well bot adjusts herself to the woman’s desires, there’s no getting round the fact that she’s doing that because that’s what she’s programmed to do. And bot’s biggest strength of knowing someone so well is also her biggest weakness – human being just don’t like being predicted this accurately.

There is only one thing about this play that I didn’t like, and that was the breaking of the fourth wall towards the end of the play. Breaking the fourth wall can be necessary if you need to make a point that can’t be told in the play, but this comes at the expense of disrupting the story you’re telling. In this case, I didn’t think this was necessary – the questions about whether a robot can feel love in the same way a robot can feel temperature was a good one, but this could easily have been worked into the script. They don’t need to break the fourth wall – the play is easily capable of saying everything it needs without.

Apart from that niggle, LOVE+ is a really interesting that complements their other play well to take todays love/technology mix to the next level. And I really liked the way Brefinni Holohan played Bot, with an understated but perfect mix of methodical robot movements and human-ish warmth. Summerhall’s best specialty, I’ve always thought, are plays that mix art and science, and Malaprop’s double-bill couldn’t have been a better choice. More like this please.

Saturday 19th August, 5.30 p.m.: Big moment. The second Ike Award of the fringe has been given. And it goes to pretty much the last play I’d expect to get this. I have given a fair few positive write-ups of some plays with little or nothing I found at fault, but they’ve stayed within tried and tested formats. That’s not enough for my equivalent to a five-star review. For this, there has to be little or nothing I have to fault and it needs to be something different. And the play I just saw that fits the bill is Cockroached.

At first glance, this appears to be yet another zombie apocalypse story. I’ve nothing against zombie stories as such, just that this is surely the most done to death trope ever. But that’s not what this story is about. Instead, this is a tense tale of power and mind games. Taylor arrives back at his place, a fancy dress shop where he’s holding out against “those outside”. On a CB radio, a voice comes on asking for Max, and Taylor answers. On the radio is another survivor. She won’t give her name and she’s guarded over where she is. But who is she really? And who is Taylor really?

When the entire play involves one person talking to a CB radio, you’d be hard pressed to do without making the play look static. But Theatre63 rises to the challenge, and the combination of Ruby Etches’s directing and William Proudler’s superb script means there’s never a dull moment, and Taylor and his unseen contact drifting between distrustful co-operation and psychological warfare. On top of the, Proudler also manages to provide a perfect musical score for this apocalyptic world. Plenty of plays and films of this nature say it’s not about the zombies, it’s about the survivors, but trust me, you’ve never seen anything like this story.

For the sake of completeness, I am obliged to say that the version I saw is only shown on alternate performances; in the other performances, the two swap round so that Taylor is now a woman and the radio voice is a man. As far as I can tell, the story will work about the same the other way round. Theatre63 did draw attention to this being a non gender-specific production. I am of the opinion that it is rare you can do a straight gender-swap in a play without a loss of plausibility – normally, if you want to avoid gender imbalance or gender stereotypes, you need to think about this first before your ideas stick. Cockroached is an exception because it’s set in a world where all societal norms go out the window. But don’t see this because it’s non gender-specific. See this because it’s one of the best hidden gems in this fringe.

Saturday 19th August, 9.30 p.m.: And that, it turns out, was my only gap in all of yesterday. Currently 7 reviews in the backlog. Yeek.

Let’s get another one out the way then. I finally saw Lists for the End of the World, which has been under development in the north-east for some time and I finally took the opportunity to see it. This is a very unusual one to review because it pushes the definition of theatre to the limits, and with it pushes the rules of reviewing theatre to the limits too, but I will try. So, first thing to get out of the way is that the end of the world doesn’t actually feature anywhere in the play. Instead it’s just lists. Really, one hour of lists.

But for a concept that might seem dull, it works a lot better than you might think. FanShen theatre’s preparation for this play was literally asking people to fill in lists, from the light-hearted to the more poignant. At one point, we hear an alarmingly long list of “Places I’d hide a body”; someone, it seems, has been thinking about this too much. When it gets to lists such as “Things I’m afraid of”, we get things from people opening up and telling their thoughts they wouldn’t normally reveal.

The trouble is, for all this hard work researching people’s inner thoughts, I don’t understand the purpose of doing this as a play. There’s only so many ways you can read out a list. FanShen do put variety into this with a variety of staging and theatrical devices; some of these were appropriate, such as the dark quiet setting for “Things that keep me awake at night”, but some other devices, such as singing a list to Mambo Number Five, felt forced. I am normally the first person to bemoan unimaginative productions that don’t use opportunities for sound and lights, but here even I felt this was staging effects for the sake of it.

So here’s a suggestion I’m going throw in: do this as a book. A book just of these lists if you like, but there’s opportunities to put in fitting artwork if you so wish. The thing is, the point of lists is something you can go back and check again, and you don’t get this opportunity in a play. Once you hear something that you don’t take in, it’s gone. That’s a shame. These lists say a lot about people, and they deserve to be remembered. You can have that idea for free.

Right, where are we? Six reviews in the backlog, after three to be added by the end of today. Looks like another long day today.

Friday 18th August, 4.30 p.m.: Observant readers will notice there’s been quite a gap since my last update. This is because I’m currently in hardcore mode with five plays per day, and even this barely covers everything I need to see (both review requests and things I wanted to see anyway). I’ve got to the stage of the fringe where people say “So what are you seeing today?” and I answer “I don’t know”.

But reviews must go on, but the next one is easy because it’s Replay. Short answer: what everyone else said.

Long answer: Replay is the latest play to come under the banner of Dugout Theatre, but this time, artistically at least, it’s Dugout’s play in name only. Dugout have earned a great reputation of plays in all sorts of surrealistic settings, usually to music, from an Ocean’s Eleven-style heist in the Fens to four survivors of an apocalyptic flood on board a Swan pedalo, but this solo play written and performed by Nicola Wren has no songs and is very much down to earth. But don’t dismiss this as someone riding on Dugout’s coat-tails of success – she came into this fringe with a good reputation in her own right, and Replay was another excellent performance and play.

She plays a Police Constable very much married to her job, on a routine call on day with her well-meaning but overbearing colleague. It’s just a normal visit to support a woman whose husband killed himself the other day, and yet she feels sick and has to vomit in the street – the effect, she assumes, of the dodgy prawns she ate the night before and the old coffee in the house having limescale. Wrong. An indeterminate amount of time ago, her brother James killed himself. But that was such a long time she’s surely over it now. Then she gets birthday present in the post. An old present sent again, a happy birthday tape originally sent by James, is going to keep these memories at the surface.

“But why is the poster for the play a man with a cassette for his head?” I hear you ask. Well, no, you probably didn’t ask that. But you should. You see, this is a memory of the day when her child self went to visit the brother she adored, now at University in London. A ride on the simulator in the Trocadero and being bought an album (James, obviously) mean a lot when you’re ten. The only hint what what’s to come is her father quipping that James better not be having an off day. But clearly at some point it was never more than days.

There is no moment of revelation in the play, no plot twists, no breakthroughs, just a woman getting on with her life, with a tragedy from years ago still leaving its mark. And that is the whole point of this thoughtful and moving play. Dugout Theatre proper can take some share of the credit here her the writing and directing, but this is Nicola Wren’s moment of glory. If Dugout’s name has introduced her to a new audience that never knew her before, that can only be a good thing.

Edinburgh needs to become evangelical

Vice-Pope Eric explaining the true meaning of the Edinburgh Fringe, yesterday.

COMMENT: The Edinburgh Fringe’s renewed commitment to open access is welcome – but they badly need to sell this benefit to other festivals.

In the legendary Brand New Monty Python Papperbok, there’s a panel discussion where Vice-Pope Eric explains the Catholic Church’s current position on sex and marriage. He explains that whilst their stance on sex outside marriage is well-known, what currently concerns them is the uncontrolled prevalence of sex within marriage. That’s not to say they oppose it outright – like it or not, it remains the best method for procreation; whilst they prefer Immaculate Conception to be used wherever possible, the Vatican has been forced to turn a blind eye to this matter, but only for outnumbering purposes mind, never for fun. When queried about where this was mentioned in Jesus’s teachings, however, his Vice Holiness admits that it wasn’t in his teachings as such, but it was an oversight they were quite happy to correct, by using St. Paul’s later writings and passing that off as Jesus’s own words quite successfully.

The relevance to the Edinburgh Fringe might not be immediately relevant here, but bear with me.

When Shona McCarty took over as the new chief executive of the Edinburgh Fringe, the first thing she did was stress her commitment to keeping the fringe open access. One year on, and it looks like she means business here. I’ve been a little sarcastic over the catchphrase “Alliance of Defiance” (a bit difficult to portray yourself as anti-establishment when you are the establishment), but I fully agree with the sentiment behind it: the true roots of the fringe is those original eight groups who turned up to Edinburgh in defiance of the International Festival who wouldn’t programme them and expected them to stay home. This story, along with the bit that these eight groups received no encouragement from the rest of the arts world, even appears on the website to all new visitors.

What’s worth watching: Edinburgh Fringe 2017

Skip to: Bite Size, Call Mr. Robeson, The Jurassic Parks, Police Cops in Space, Replay, Izzy’s Manifestoes, The Friday Night Effect, Gratiano, The House, Mars Actually, No Miracles Here, The Empress and Me, Labels, Your Ever Loving, Give Me Your Love, The Writers’ Room, You, Me and Everything Else, Boris and Sergey, Imaginary Porno Charades, The Dark Room, Doktor James’s Academy of Evil, Knightmare Live, Morgan and West, Murder’ She Didn’t Write, Notflix, The City, The Divide

Edinburgh fringe has already started, and I still haven’t written up these recommendations. Let’s get started then. Here’s a list of things coming up at Edinburgh which I can recommend seeing for various reasons. You can find the full rules for how I choose what to endorse in my Recommendations Policy, but the main thing to remember is that is a cross-sections of good plays, not an exhaustive list. In particular, for Edinburgh I have a rule that recommendations are only given to groups I’ve seen before. I’ve heard a lot of good things about other groups, but if I was to include them the list would get unmanageably long.

No major changes since previous fringes to report this time, so let’s get straight to it. All plays run the entire length of the fringe unless otherwise noted.

Roundup: Brighton Fringe 2017

REVIEWS: Skip to Gratiano, And Love Walked In, I Am Beast, Between You and Me, BADD, Scorched, The Ruby in the Smoke, Blink

All right, I know I’m nearly two months behind on this. No need to get so smug about it. I’m learning the hard way how much paperwork piles up when you go for a two-week holiday in May, and I’m still clearing the backlog now. But I can’t delay this forever, so let’s get a move on.

New to this roundup is the Ike Awards. I will be writing about this properly when I have a bit more time; if you want to know why I created these awards and who this Ike is, you can find that in my live coverage of the fringe (along with my instant reviews of the plays). For now, the short version is that an Ike Award can be considered equivalent to a five-star rating. It’s a bit like the Brighton Fringe Argus Angels, except they’ve good as stopped reviewing the fringe this year. So, Ike has replaced the Argus Angels. So there.

The one thing you won’t be seeing in this roundup is a list of stories about the fringe as a whole like last time. Last year was a very significant year for the Brighton Fringe, mostly down to the appearance of Sweet Venues, a second supervenue to complement The Warren, and also a huge rise in registrations, partly but not entirely driven by the appearance of this new venue. This year, however, it’s been much more of a “no change” festival. There was another rise in registrations: not a huge one, but enough to suggest last year’s surge isn’t going to recede. Sweet and Warren largely stayed as they are. The only notable difference was the absence of Republic, a large Spiegeltent-style venue on the beach, which I can only suppose couldn’t compete against Spiegeltent proper. The most interesting news that surfaced during the fringe was pop-up venue “Shiny Town” being cancelled after being refused planning permission – at first, it seemed odd that a venue would commit to being in the fringe before they had the go-ahead, but apparently this ran into all sorts of red tape and I’ve drawn a blank over who was at fault.

Beyond not just the end of the road

In a region that rarely looks beyond Newcastle for culture, The November Club gave a shining example of what happens when you do with Beyond the End of the Road.

It’s my eternal bugbear: the mindset ingrained over much of the region’s cultural scene that the north east is Newcastle. For all the talk about cultural engagement, for years in Tees Valley and County Durham this amounted to importing all the talent from Tyne and Wear. Usually writers based in Newcastle telling stories based in Newcastle. On the rare occasions the plays were set in places beyond Tyneside, the depictions were generic north-east suburbs with only the basic nods to the local area – there was a time at the Gala where it was virtually guaranteed you’d have a reference to getting cut off by the tide at Holy Island. In recent years, things have started edging in the right direction, but still the most depressing thing is the numberpeople in the north-east who complain, quite rightly, about nationwide funding and attention favouring London at the expense of the rest of the country. It’s depressing because the same people seem fully aware that exactly the same thing is happening between Newcastle and the north-east – and don’t appear to have a problem with it.

But amongst the Arts Council’s National Portfolio Organisations in the region, there is one group that won’t settle for bringing in everything from Newcastle, and that’s Northumberland-based The November Club. Beyond the End of the Road is set in rural Northumberland in a town known as “place”. Far from treating this village as another Tyneside suburb, this place is distinct from the distant city not only by the surrounding countryside but by its isolation. A bypassing is being built around the place (yes, this play on words is a common theme here), and in charge is a someone apparently part workman, part narrator and part oracle, seeming to everyone’s backstories. Coming to the place are two outsiders, one seeking refuge from an unhappy marriage with a sister she barely knows, another come to give his brother advice on how to run his farm, unsolicited but very badly needed.

What’s worth watching: Buxton Fringe 2017

Aaargh. I’m on my train to the Buxton Fringe launch and I still haven’t done my Buxton recommendations. Better hurry up. Apologies if you’re waiting for a review, that will have to come after this.

Anyway, Buxton Fringe 2017 is here. The most unpredictable for a long time, due to the loss of a key venue that formed a focal point for the whole fringe. For months, there were questions over whether a new venue would take its place. And when we found out the answer, the were there were questions over what this would mean for the fringe. But the development no-one saw coming was the arrival of an entirely new managed venue. Suddenly, all bets were off.

So, before I dive into recommendations, let us begin with this and look at what this could mean for the festival.

Odds and sods: June 2017

Welcome to another odds and sods. It’s been an eventful month and- … what’s that I hear you say? “You didn’t do an odds and sods for April like you’re supposed to?” All right, fine. That was my plan, but at the end of April I was busy preparing for a holiday, and then my Brighton Fringe coverage started, and by the time I had a moment to catch up it was already halfway through May and getting a bit pointless. There, happy now?

Anyway, I’d better do a June update because quite a lot’s happened this month that needs talking about.