Blimey. It’s a news-heavy month this Feburary. Better get right to it because I run out of March to write this up in.
Stuff that happened in February
Oh, my aching hands. Here’s what you’ve kept me busy writing up:
More woes at Brighton Fringe
It turns out I wasn’t connected to all the Brighton Fringe rumour mills. I’d known for some time Caravanserai wasn’t coming back, probably because Brighton Fringe couldn’t run a venue without letting costs go out of control. Now it’s gone public that Spiegeltent and Sweet aren’t being part of Brighton Fringe either. They are still running at the same time in May and June, but they are not registering with Brighton Fringe. (I admit, I did hear rumours of Spiegeltent doing this, but I’ve heard things like this touted so many times I didn’t pay much attention. I’d assumed that with Caravanserai being the focus of so many grievances, the main source of aggro was now resolved. But apparently not.)
This means that Brighton Fringe 2024 is going to be very messy. At close of registrations for programme launch, we have 556 Brighton Fringe registrations. That’s low. This could be an artificially low number, because with no paper programme to meet a deadline for, it’s not such a big deal to register late, but it would have to a big last-moment surge to turn things round. At the time of writing, Spiegeltent have launched their own not-Fringe programme, but I haven’t had time to analyse this yet. I will be analysing this a lot more as Brighton Fringe coverage ramps up, because the implications are too complex to go ito here.
A lot of this is going to ride on how the fringe media chooses to cover a fragmented Brighton Fringe. Will Sweet and Spiegeltent still get the coverage, or will they be sidelined? For my part, my own decision is that, for now, I will treat Spiegeltent and Sweet the same way as if they’d been part of Brighton Fringe proper (a bit like I did with Warren Outdoors in 2020, albeit under different circumstances). However, after this, I expect all parties to make reasonable efforts to resolve their differences. I’m not interested in blaming the other side as an excuse to not make a reason effort yourself – I want to know what you are doing. But we can start having that debate in July onwards. For now, I expect a truce. Get through this, don’t get in each other’s way, and any blame games can wait.
I try to keep news about me or this blog to a minimum. I’ve never wanted to make this about me, I want it to be about the theatre I see. However, this is a rare occasion where I need to write about what I’m doing. The main reason I have persisted with the reviewing for so long as that I do get a lot of appreciation for this, and consider myself as doing a service. But I must never lose sight of whether I am really doing people a favour, and one question that must be addressed in Edinburgh Fringe.
Before you get too excited about any earth-shattering bombshells: I intend to carry on reviewing at Edinburgh Fringe. Although Brighton is a close second, Edinburgh Fringe offers by far the great variety of theatre in one place, made possible to a large part by the culture that all are welcome. Nevertheless, one cannot ignore the crisis of expense. It’s always been a problem, 2022 and 2023 were particularly bad, but the ban on short term lets now in place could well push up costs even more. However, I will defend to the death the rights of individual artists to decide for themselves what’s best for them. For many artists, my advice is that Edinburgh Fringe is not the right festival for you and you’re better off doing something else – but it must be your own choice. I am streadfastly opposed to imposing this choice on people, nor will I penalise people for making a different choice to what I recommend.
However, what concerns me about Edinburgh Fringe is that people are taking part not by choice. As I have said before, we have a big problem with many arts organisations going talent scouting at Edinburgh Fringe and nowhere else. This means – and I have observed this myself – many artists who cannot comfortably afford Edinburgh and are gambling with more money they can afford to lose still do this Fringe because the think they have no option but to go there if they want a hope of making it. Until now, I have been challenging the arts industry on this, and especially challenging those who complain about the unfairness and expense of Edinburgh whilst refusing to gives artists a fair chance by any other route. But I’m wondering whether we are reaching the point where even the availability of reviews in Edinburgh – compared to a perceived dearth of reviews at other fringes – is doing more harm than good.
The other issue I’m facing is that I am increasingly struggling to accommodate all the review requests I get. I’ve been fully accredited press since 2021 – and I am grateful to Edinburgh Fringe for this, I could not be sustaining this coverage without – but the volume of review requests I’ve been getting is going up and up and up. And I’m honestly not sure how to filter this. I give priority to acts I’ve seen before and liked, but should I prioritise other acts on how good other reviews are? Probably not, I want to give a break to acts without reviews, not just big up already successful ones. Make choices on how good the press release sounds? I could, but I like to be go into most productions not knowing what to expect. But I can’t say yes to everything. I’m reaching the point where I’m missing stuff I want to see (not on review request lists) because I’m squeezing in too many reviews.
So here’s a new rule I’m introducing to both make it easier for me to choose what to review and (in my opinion) be a bit more responsible with what I encourage:
From 2024, priority for Edinburgh Fringe reviews will go to acts that have already performed at smaller festivals (for acts based in England and Wales).
As you may have guessed, I’ve seen that 2024 is fast approaching and I’m in a panic. So I’ve been catching up with a lot of reviews. Now it’s time to get everything about Edinburgh Fringe in one place. And if you’re in a hurry, I can give you the usual disclaimer: you will find hardly anything here that I haven’t already written in my live coverage. On the other hand, everything you find here will be in a more sensible order and more concise.
Edinburgh Fringe 2022 had a big preamble. It was the first proper-scale fringe since the lurgi, and though the relaunch was ultimately a success, it was messy. This time round, most of the arguments have been smoothed over. The Fringe App and Fringe Central are back, the arguments over favouritism for bigger acts and bigger media have been de-escalated, talk of the Big Four doing a breakaway is getting quieter – and after worries of the fringe growing and growing and growing past the point of sustainability, 2023’s size was about the same as 2022. (For the details of what this meant, see the live coverage on the 28th August, 8.30 p.m.)
The only real controversy has been around cancel culture. I am very against cancel culture regardless of which side is under fire, although it’s fair to say that what happened in 2023 is minor compared to the disgraceful events of 2014 when people were targetted for what they were rather than what they said. First there was the business with Joanna Cherry at The Stand – but I guess it was only a matter of time before somebody resorted to the Law, she did, and she got her way. Then there was Graham Linehan at Leith Arches. This one I’m a little less sympathetic over. Comedy unleashed has a track record of provoking outrage for the sake of it, and Graham Linehan’s behaviour off-stage has such sheer nastiness I would not be comfortable letting him near workers in any venue I was responsible for. But Leith Arches didn’t say “No, you have a track record of harassing trans people”, they said “You, you don’t share our values”, which, at the very least, puts on you thin ice over breach of contract. No legal action came of that, but with all the allegations currently surfacing around Russell Brand, maybe we should worry less about who has opinions we don’t agree with, and more about what’s actually threatens the safety of other people at the venue. (See live coverage on 18th August for more details on my thoughts.)
There was also some controversy over using the building currently used as Greenside Infirmary Street as a year-round Edinburgh Fringe base. But that situation has moved on and I’ll get back to this in coverage for next year’s fringe.
All right, let’s turn attention to this one. There’s still legal tusslings going on, but it looks like next year will be the first Edinburgh Fringe whilst a ban on short-term lets is in place. This has a lot of support from within Edinburgh, and to be fair, there are good reasons to be in favour. Such is the demand for accommodation in Edinburgh, buying to let is a lucrative business. It is even viable to charge a piss-taking rent for August and leave the property empty another eleven months. But every property rented out this way is one home less for someone who lives in Edinburgh. And Edinburgh home prices are stupidly high. It is quite understandable that Edinburgh locals would put this ahead of how this affects the Edinburgh Fringe.
But what effect will this have on the Edinburgh Fringe? One important clarification is that it’s not an outright ban on all lets; renting out your own home is considered to be legitimate. But how will that rule pan out? How will everything pan out? Will Edinburgh Fringe really lose out? Will Edinburgh really gain? The simplistic model is of supply and demand: if demand remains the same and supply decreases, prices go up – in this case, from what’s already a very high base. But is this simplistic model correct? Here, just for fun, are twelve different scenarios of how this might pan out.
1: All goes to plan
The Scottish Government and Edinburgh City Council confound their critics. The housing market is brought under control, but the adverse impact feared on Edinburgh Fringe and its performers is much less than feared. Even the staunchest critics within Edinburgh Fringe circles now accept this is an improvement.
Welcome to Edinburgh Fringe 2023. There use to be a time when we could into a fringe without an update of all the changes that happened last year. 2022 was a wild ride, with celebrations over a swift recovery quickly sullied by numerous arguments over accommodation costs, media coverage, and controversial economisations such as the Fringe App and Fringe Central. And many of these argument rumbled on throughout the fringe and So I was expecting to be opening this with yet another long list of what’s changed in light of all of last year’s arguments.
In the end, however, 2023 seems to be steadying the ship. The problems over accommodation costs have not gone away, but fears this might spiral out of control as participant numbers spiral out of control have abated after registration numbers stayed reasonably level (give or take a margin for the effect of late registrations). Fringe Central and the app are back. That’s by no means all the arguments settled, but it’s not on the crisis levels of last year.
But … is this the calm before the storm? One thing that will be coming before next year’s Edinburgh Fringe is a ban on short term lets. That will have an unpredictable effect in 2024 and beyond – most people are expecting a substantial reduction in the size of Edinburgh fringe, but even within that parameter there are a lot of possibilities.
So let’s enjoy this one while we can. This is as calm as things are going to get.
Plays run the full fringe (at least Friday 4th to Saturday 26th) unless otherwise stated.
Safe choice:
We start with picks that I think are surefire as can be. Most of these plays I have seen before; those that I haven’t seen I have extremely good reason to hold high hopes for. The same caveat applies to all these categories: read the description (either mine or their publicity) so see if this is the sort of thing for you. But all of these have wide appeal, and if you like the sound of this, it’s my firm call you’ll like this.
The Brief Life & Mysterious Death of Boris III, King of Bulgaria
I saw this in 2020 just before the ‘rona hit, and I praised it then, but if anything this play is even more relevant now than it was then. In the intervening years, one of the sillier battlegrounds has been over who gets to tell history. The typical argument is that history is told by one group of people pushing a simplistic narrative through an ideological lens, therefore we’re going to push our own simplistic narrative through our own ideological lens – and the reason to believe our version is usually that we REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY WANT TO BELIEVE it’s true. This is, of course, all bollocks. Nobody has a right for their preferred interpretation of history to be accepted as fact – and in real life, history is usually messy, complicated, and morally ambiguous. And that’s certainly the case in the history of Bulgaria during World War Two. King Boris III stood in the way of the extermination of Jews in Bulgaria – but the price of their survival was high. Much higher than you think.
And this is the end of my Edinburgh fringe coverage, and the end of my coverage for the 2023 fringe season. As always, I will get all of this collated into roundups as soon as I can, once I’ve had a change to recover.
The summary of Edinburgh Fringe 2023 is as follows:
After all the controversies of 2022, Edinburgh Fringe 2023 has proceeded reasonably quietly. Some of the less popular economisations of 2022 have been restored, such as the fringe app and Fringe Central. Other rows, such as alleged favouritism of higher-profile media, have been smoothed over, or at least not flared up in public again. 2023 can be considered a no-news fringe. And after 2022, no news is good news.
The only thing that emerged as a controversy was various rows over cancel culture. Before the fringe began, there was famously the row over The Stand cancelling a talk from Joanna Cherry, only for them to capitulate in the face of legal action. (I get the impression that The Stand were divided over this issue, and the legal notice merely enabled the other faction to say “I told you so”.) In the end, that talk was quite uneventful and boring. Then came Graham Linehan being cancelled from Leith Arches. There is a stronger case against Linehan, but Leith Arches may still have left themselves open to legal action by saying he was getting booted for not sharing their values. Or he might just be happy to score martyr points. We’ll know where this is going in a few weeks, I guess.
Ticket sales are up 11% on last year for a fringe about the same size (depending on how you measure it), although that’s still behind the peak of 2019 – not that there’s any real push to return to 2019 numbers. The accommodation crunch hasn’t gone away, although there doesn’t seem to be any reliable indication on whether this is better or worse than the situation in 2022.
However, all discourse on Fringe size and accommodation costs is about to be turned on its head. From next year, a ban on short term lets comes into effect in Edinburgh. There are supposed to be safeguards in place for who can and can’t let out their properties in August, but nobody seems sure how this is going to work out in practice, never mind what effect it will have on the Edinburgh Fringe. What we do know is that Edinburgh Fringe have previously forecasted a dramatic reduction in their size, although it is unclear whether they still think this.
And one other upcoming controversy is the upcoming Fringe Community Hub, partly because it’s not clear what benefit this would bring Edinburgh or the Fringe, but more that it would mean taking over a building currently used by Greenside as its main hub. What is not clear, however, is when this transition would actually take place. Unless Edinburgh Fringe are stupid enough to eject Greenside and not go through with the plan, this change could still be years away. And God knows what shape Edinburgh Fringe will be in by then.
I’m not quite finished writing about Edinburgh; I intend to write my thoughts about short-term lets sooner rather than later. Until then, thanks to everyone who has been following me for the last month. You can now all relax.
Tuesday 29th August:
Okay, here we are. It’s the moment I’ve been building up to. What is Pick of the Fringe?
I’ve made the decision to get pickier with Pick of the Fringe. Previously, I’ve been loosely using this for anything I would have rated as four stars or above, but I’ve seen Edfringe shows quoted as “pick of the fringe” so often I’ve have to get stricter. I’m now setting myself a limit of no more than one third of what I saw. And in order to keep to this limit, I’m having to be strict on the category of theatre. There were some shows I loved for the comedy or music, but to make it to the list you need to score highly on theatrical devices needed to put together a story.
Anything I saw earlier this year at Brighton or Buxton Fringes is eligible for Edinburgh pick of the fringe if it performed there too – I almost never see something twice in the same year, so this gives shows I saw before Edinburgh a fair chance against those I saw at Edinburgh. Shows which didn’t really really have appeal in theatre category are generally excluded, although they may have recommendations in other areas.
Enough pre-preamble, here we go. Lists are in alphabetical order so being middle of the list is as good as the top or the bottom. We have:
Pick of the Fringe:
Bite Size Bits ‘n’ Pieces Casting the Runes Havisham The Last Flapper The Madwoman Mr. Fox Please Love Me Spin Wildcat’s Last Waltz (Ike Award – seen at Brighton)
Honourable mention:
Alexander Klaus, the one-legged shoemaker Atalanta Ay Up Hitler Character Flaw Diana, the untold and untrue story The Importance of being … Earnest? Junk Monkey Nation (seen as Buxton Fringe) Otto and Astrid’s Joint Solo Project Rites of Passage Tom Moran is a big fat disgusting liar We’ll Have Nun of it
One final thing to mention is a couple who missed out but maybe shouldn’t have. Apart from 2022 (when I permitted anything from 2020 onwards given the lack of Edinburgh Fringe activity in 2020-2021), I’ve only been allowing performances from earlier in the year. However, there do seem to be some groups who hung fire from 2022, which I didn’t have time to see again. So had I allowed pre-2023 performances, The Brief Life and Strange Death of Boris II, King of Bulgaria would join Pick of the Fringe, and The Hunger would join Honourable Mention.
Congratulations to my pick of the fringe, and thank you to everyone who made the effort. And wherever you finished, all of you now deserve a rest.
Monday 28th August, 10.30 p.m. – Diana, the Untold and Untrue story:
And we’re on to the last review. One announcement before this one: unfortunately, there were three performances I saw on press tickets where I did not publish reviews, in line with my policy of not publishing reviews where I feel I’m not in a position to say anything helpful. As always, if you know that was you and you would like private feedback on what I didn’t like, you are welcome to ask.
But the last one does not disappoint. I put Linus Karp’s new show down as a wildcard, but I’d heard so many good things about it, I was quite happy to have this round off my fringe visit. Linus Karp’s previous show, How to Live a Jellicle Life, was, deliberately, as weird and random as the infamous 2019 film, except it was weird in a good way. If you like the humour there, you’ll also like the humour here, but this is a lot more structured and organised, and it pays off.
It starts with a view of heaven (you know, blue sky, fluffy clouds, angelic singing and whatnot), and Diana’s voice. You’ve all heard other people tell her story, but now it’s her turn to tell her own untrue story. Various supporting characters are played throughout the performance by members of the audience, chosen by various means, and me begin with Mr. and Mrs. Spencer feeling a bit saucy. One bit of implied rumpy pumpy later, and Diana appears, already dressed as debutante to die for, honey. And for the next twenty years she is the sassiest awesomest incrediblest royal-to-be ever to walk the earth.
In case you haven’t already guessed, the running joke throughout this performance is the late People’s Princess’s absurdly high opinion of herself – taking all the hyperbole said about her after her death and cranking it up beyond the point of ridiculousness. Prince Charles appears as a cardboard cut-out, but the villain of the piece is of course the terrible wicked Camilla, now a terrible wicked creature from the deep that speaks only in hisses, puppeted by Karp’s partner-in-crime Joseph Martin. But we’re not buying into absurd conspiracy theories about the Duke of Edinburgh ordering the execution. Prince Philip is a powerless consort to the Monarch, all attempts on the life of an inconveniently alive daughter-in-law would be orchestrated by the Queen herself. And not from a poxy white Fiat Uno but with lots of explosions. Do keep up. Queenie is played on video by Geri Allen, who I almost mistook for Olivia Coleman.
And yet, even though the entire show is themed around taking the piss of the idolisation of Diana, it’s still done with a lot of love. One thing Diana did that earns the most respect in her legacy was treated people with HIV or AIDS with kindness, at a time when there was still a huge panic about people carrying the disease (not to mention the ongoing moral panic over gay people in general). This is treated with a lot of genuine affection, with the song “You’re a friend of Di” occupying a prominent spot in the performance.
The liberties Diana takes with her story do get more flagrant as the hour comes to a close, with her miraculous escape from the tunnel and the final showdown in her revenge dress not even the most outlandish bit. But if you were expecting any accuracy you probably ought to re-read the title. It’s funny performance, and whilst the production is way more complex that the Jellicle Life show, it was pulled off without a hitch, from audience participation to the many multimedia elements. Some shows I’ve seen get a lot of hype but only have niche appeal, but this easily keeps wide appeal. A tour has just been announced, so if you didn’t catch it this August there’s chance to see it yet.
Monday 28th August, 8.30 p.m.:
And we have the end-of-fringe stats. It’s 2,445,609 sales (excluding data coming in after 12 noon today). That compares to the equivalent figure of 2,201,175 for 2022, which works out at an 11.1% increase. That figure is line in with my expectations.
There was an increase of 12% reported for Brighton Fringe; and whilst I don’t have any fringe-wide figures for Buxton, the news I heard from individual venues combined with my own observations suggest an increase of at least 10% there. It’s always tempting to retrospectively shape observations to explain stats, so I’ll refrain from stating any definite reasons why numbers have grown; however, one thing that likely counted in the favour of all the fringes is Covid becoming an increasingly distant memory. Even if few things stood in the way of performers in 2022, there was anecdotally a lot of older performers still reluctant to risk it last summer. It appears that this deterrent is finally fading – although we do still need to consider that some fringegoers out of the habit of regular visits have ceased attending for good.
We also now have official figures for the final number of registrations, including post-programme registrations. At the time of programme launch, there was a minor shock result with registrations going down, with 3,132 in 2022 falling to 3,907 in 2023 (down 1.2%). However, there was a flurry after post-programme launch, so it now stands as 3,334 in 2022 rising to 3,553 in 2023 (up 6.5%).
This means two things. Firstly, it means that 2023 was either bigger or smaller than 2022 depending on whether you count post-programme registrations. For practical purposes, it probably should count, but for the purpose of the bet between Brian Ferguson (predicting a rise) and Robert Peacock (predicting a fall) – where we never agreed on how this was to be measured – I’m going to declare it an honourable draw. Secondly, the figure of sales per registration rises from 660.2 to 688.3 (up 4.3%).
Normally, that would be an indication for growth at next year’s fringe. But 2024 is not going to be a normal year. We have the unpredictable ban on short term lets coming in. The end-of-year report didn’t say anything about revised estimates contrary to earlier expectations (only a generic pledge to carry on trying to support artists), but previous forecasts were for a dramatic fall. I’ll probably post some possibilities of where this might lead as a separate article – until then, happy speculating.
Sunday 27th August, 9.30 p.m.:
We’re about to go into the business end of the coverage, where I make a decision on who get to be Pick of the Fringe. No, I have not made a decision yet. Tomorrow should also be the day we get stats on Edinburgh Fringe ticket sales, although the full details may not emerge until Tuesday.
So now’s a good time to look ahead to next year. In the end, Fringe 2023 has been reasonably uneventful, and has boiled down to a (mostly successful) job of steadying things after the turbulence of the last three years. Next year, however, we have a ban on short term lets coming into place. It was supposed to come in this year over all of Scotland, but in Edinburgh it got delayed to October precisely to give Edinburgh Fringe time to prepare for it. But there’s no doubt it will go ahead as planned in time for August 2024. I’ve been sounding out the mood amongst locals and the practice of buying up properties specifically to rent out for Edinburgh Fringe is deeply unpopular. Even amongst those otherwise positive about Edinburgh Fringe.
It is my understanding that this short-term let ban is trying to target practices that are deemed unacceptable, whilst leaving alone practices that nobody has a problem with. If you own your own home in Edinburgh and you’re happy to move out for a month, you still can. One thing I’m not sure about it how this affects University accommodation. This is a very valuable resource to keep Edinburgh Fringe affordable, but there are (quite valid) complaints that international students cannot reasonably be expected to go home for the summer. Again, perhaps the rules can distinguish between UK undergraduates who don’t need rooms in August and other students who do.
What nobody knows is how these rules and safeguards are going to work in practice. Are greedy buy-to-let landlords really going to give up their annual cash cow if they can avoid it? Might they just post somebody to (claim to) live there for eleven months to carry on getting their August bonaza? Or any other loopholes? Or might the Scottish Government over-react in a bid to close these loopholes and end up banning perfectly legitimate subletting? In theory, less supply against the same amount of demand will raise prices further. But, quite honestly, nobody knows what effect this is going to have.
It is my understanding that when Edinburgh Fringe report their end-of-festival ticket sales tomorrow or Tuesday, they will also be giving some updated forecasts on what effect they expect the short term lets ban to have on the fringe. That should give us a starting point on what might happen. Whether the forecast have any bearing on reality, of course, is another question entirely. I’ll be interested to see if they provide any information on how they’ve worked out their forecast.
At some point, I think I might do one of my speculative articles on what might happen. But, it’s just for fun. You guess is as good as mine. Fringe 2024 is going to be a lot more unpredictable than this year.
Sunday 27th August, 4.00 p.m. – Be My Guest:
This is a review where, to be honest, I’d really need to watch this again to do a properly fair review. Be My Guest is really the sort of performance where you need to be properly briefed in advance what it’s about. Of course, the Edinburgh Fringe doesn’t always work like that. People on the hardcore end who see five or more shows a day can easily have forgotten everything about what they’re going to see next other than where it is and when it is (remembering title optional). So I found myself watching the last of many plays I saw this fringe which written by the performer and about the performer. Unlike the others, however, this is much more ambitious, much more abstract, and performed through the medium of clowning.
There is one thing I should give credit for, and it’s something long overdue, and that is just how much talent is required for clowning. The key to good clowning is to make it look easy, and the easy mistake to draw from this is that because it looks easy, it is easy. You only need to see what happens when someone underestimates how much practice it needs to appreciate how much of a difference it makes. Monia Baldini has this practised to a tee, and also engages with the audience through the performance. It’s at times quite a risky performance too; quite a lot of things could be uncomfortable to the audience, but she gets this right and stays on their right side.
However, I’m not certain the performance is achieving what it was supposed to achieve. It was only after I’d seen the performance and I went back to the original blurb that I remembered what the key concept was supposed to be. The “guests” referred to in the title are the alter-egos that live inside you, and the six characters Baldini are playing are: The Hostess, The Artist, Venus, Shelion, The Tragic Actress, and Herself. Unfortunately, I got completely lost there – I sort-of picked up the concept of different characters, but not who they were. I must declare at this point that I missed the first couple of minutes of the play (sorry, scheduling went slightly pear-shaped), and I might have missed something that would have explained this. But when a performance is so heavily dependent on an abstract concept, you do need to think about what happens if your audience doesn’t pick up the important bits at the beginning. It’s a good idea to drop refreshers into the script so that anyone who’s getting confused can catch up (and indeed a couple of performances I saw earlier this fringe used this to good effect). But if you want everybody too keep track of which character’s which, you’re going to have to work hard.
There is another way of looking at this though – does the audience actually need to understand what the performance is meant to be about? A lot of performances on the fringes of the fringe are enjoyed specifically for being random, and that seems to have been the appeal here. And – again – in hindsight, the end of the fringe with my attention flagging was not a fair slow for this play; were it not for the fact it was impossible, I’d have liked to watch this again to get a better idea of what it was meant to say. Provisionally, I do think there’s a divergence between what the audience are enjoying and what the audience are supposed to be picking up; but whether that matters is up to you.
Saturday 26th August, 11.00 p.m.:
We’re into the winding up phase now. Two reviews to go, but before then, an update on an earlier bit of news.
I turned up briefly to a media drinks reception and got chatting to someone from Edinburgh Fringe about this new Fringe Community Hub, set to be where Greenside Infirmary Street currently is. Previously, it was implied (indirectly) that this would be in place from next year. Now, there seems to be less certainty. This is now being described as a “long-term” project, which could be years away.
It is my understanding that the Festival Fringe Society are co-ordinating with Greenside, and will make sure nobody moves out until the Fringe Community Hub (or workmen) are ready to move in. This should be achievable; the precedent is help by Underground Venues at Buxton Fringe. 2013 was supposed to be the last year at Pauper’s Pit and the Barrel Room – in the end the last year was 2016. However, the developers had the courtesy to keep in touch with Underground Venues and made sure they didn’t have to move out until they were absolutely ready to bring in the builders.
I hope the Festival Fringe Society will do the same with Greenside. In effect, this means that by the New Year they will need to have decided one way or the other if they intend to have a Fringe Community Hub in place by August 2024. As well as a matter of courtesy, it’s a matter of basic sense, because it would look VERY bad if they ejected a venue from its key location (or if uncertainty forced Greenside to move on) only to end up not using that place for the following fringe. In 2022 the Festival Fringe Society pissed off a lot of people due to difficult decisions over saving money, but that was probably unavoidable. It would be a different matter to make enemies over something you didn’t have to do.
But I’m still hopeful they won’t make such an unforced error. There was one other thing I chatted about, but that’s on another subject, so I’ll get back to that tomorrow.
Saturday 26th August, 6.00 p.m. – The Big Bite-Size Breakfast Show (2):
I did promise I would pick out some highlights for the Bite Size plays once I’d seen all three sets, but I must confess, this year I’m finding it difficult. Out of all the things I’ve seen that do ten-minute plays, Bite Size has always blown the competition out the water (although a lot of ten minuters I see elsewhere are more like writer development and so maybe not entirely fair to compare). This tie round, however, although everything has been to a high standard, we’re close to a dead heat, with very little to choose between them. So these highlights I’m picking are mostly chosen on whims, and I might have changed my mind by tomorrow. We have:
The Improv Class:Close run with all the others, but this one is my firm call. I’ve already given my spoiler-free recommendation, but now that we’re near the end I can say a bit more. We are in what appears to be an improv class with an instructor who has clear favouritism to one participant over to the other – but it’s actually something very different. It’s preparation for a father with the onset on Dementia, and whatever he say goes; you just have to run with in in real life’s cruellest variant on improv.
A Rare Bird: A play where a woman sees an a bird expert at her local university about a magical book she’s opened that is slowly transforming her into a bird – but given the humdrum state of her life, she’s pretty much decided it’s got to be an improvement on her current lot. And the prospect looks very tempting.
Promotion: Two women up for promotion find themselves in an Escape Room game to see who gets the job. At first it looks like this looks like an office politics play relatable to anyone who knows someone who’s been in the same job for age and behaves like they own the place – but the real villain in this is someone more obvious.
Dating with Dostoyevsky: A woman in a cafe followed by the ghost of her ex-boyfriend who died in a gas explosion. Ex turns out to be a bit of a dick, and gets a bit narked off when a random guy in the cafe turns out to share her love for Russian literature. Ghost’s last-ditch attempt to scare her off with a warning he might be a murderer leads to the final twist, which I really should have seen coming.
Also a special mention for Inevitable, where a man, facing the prospect of a date with a girl he likes, overthinks things to play out every single possible outcome. I feel SEEN.
One thing that is notable is that nearly half of the plays were written by three members of the cast. Probably not too much of a surprise – after all, they’ve had four years to write plays – but they’re easily up to the standard of the others. I’m especially impressed with Thomas Whishire’s scripts which are consistently good.
The only thing I do miss are the kind of scripts they had in the early days which took on some wildly surrealistic concepts that can only work in ten minutes. Ah well, all good things must come to an end eventually. Other than that, good to see a comeback, and it’s just like they never left.
Friday 25th August:
Just want to pick up on one thing said at the start of the fringe, which probably seems like a lifetime ago ago. The festival launch of Assembly, I gather, has been getting some weariness in recent years when its artistic director, William Burdett-Coutts, goes on a rant about something or other – something that, some people feel, unfairly takes the spotlight away from the acts you’re supposed to be showcasing. However, I do have some sympathy over the subject of this year’s rant. In 2021, when many Edinburgh Venues chose to refocus on London (what with Scotland taking ages to decide if theatre was allowed any more), Assembly opted to run a big venue for Coventry for its City of Culture year. Unfortunately, Coventry City of Culture went bust with Assembly owed a lot of money. It’s understandable why Assembly would be aggrieved over this.
I do have some doubts over whether the situation for Assembly really is as bad Burdett-Coutts claims. They certainly don’t seem to have had any trouble putting on a full-scale Edinburgh venue in 2022 or 2023. It isn’t necessarily a good idea to throw the most money at the largest enterprises – we learned this the hard way at Brighton Fringe, where The Warren took the lion’s share of the emergency funding for ultimately no benefit, whilst a fraction of the money might have save The Rialto which could have been a much greater benefit. The other factor – and this is not a dig at the Assembly but a comment about the commercial venues overall – is that I’m not sure losing one of the big four would be that big a loss. Their artistic output is all quite similar, and should one of them go bust it wouldn’t be too difficult for the other three to carry on filling this role. Nor would it be that difficult for other venues to move into George Street, Assembly Hall, and George Square. Lose a venue such as Traverse or Summerhall, however, and you’d have a case for saying no-one can replace that.
However, I still think it is for the best for Assembly, along with all other creditors from Coventry City of Culture, to be compensated in full. Obviously serious questions must be asked over how this venture came to go bust, and if fund were misused the people responsible must face the consequences. But the last thing we want is to put arts organisations off collaboration with future Cities of Culture (Bradford in 2025, more in future years). Who’s going to want to invest a lot of money in a pop-up venue if there’s a risk an organisation you have no control over goes bust and loses your money? There are times we need to teach a lesson the hard way not to invest money is risky ventures, but this ain’t it.
So ultimately I have to agree with what William Burdett-Coutts wants, if for a completely different reason to the one he gave. We might be able to manage without a quarter of the big four, but loss of confidence in City of Culture would do a lot of damage. And that is the bigger picture we should not lose sight of.
Thursday 24th August – Cowboys and Lesbians:
This is a play with two parallel stories. In reality Nina and Noa are two girls at sixth form where nothing much happens in their lives. They have vague fantasies about their teacher, but all of the interesting stuff seems to be happening to everybody else. Meanwhile, in the wild west, where a damsel in distress trapped by her controlling brother needs a rugged stranger to take her away. The location is unspecified, because Nina and Noa are British, and as all Brits know, there’s only four parts of the USA: New York, Florida, California, and the bit in the middle named “Yeee-hah!” Getting Nina and Noa’s characters together in the Western is simple enough, getting Nina and Noa to admit their feeling to each other is harder.
The story is quite a slow burner, especially one of this side of reality. You have to wait quite a bit before the plot driver where Noa gets asked out on a date by another girl. To some extent, this is a deliberate choice. There is a tendency for stories about same-sex relationship to need to have something about it that defines it as same-sex, usually homophobia. Why can’t you just have a story about two teenagers getting together? However, with the imagined Western story also having little in the way of surprises (most of the story being structured in cliches, of course), we’re left with little to move the story along.
There were actually a couple of promising threads in the daft Western, such as Mary-Ann who rebukes the pastor trying to tell her that she deserves a better man because no better man looked that way. Comments on homophobia are played out in the Western world. But sadly these threads end before they’ve begun. What I thought was the missed opportunity, however was using the western story as projections. Surely the best way to learn more about Nina and Noa is if the characters they play in the western story are based on themselves more than they’re prepared to admit, or give themselves away as the girls they want to be. This was brought in towards the end of the play, but I think it could have achieved more if this was done earlier.
I’m not sure I picked up everything I was suppose to pick up here. The press release speaks of “the stunting and harmful effect of overwhelming heteronormativity and queer tragedising in mainstream movies, TV and theatre,” but I couldn’t work out what in the play was supposed to be talking about that. But, hey, I’m not the target audience for this, and since it’s been getting good review elsewhere, maybe the target audience got something I missed. The performances are good, and the two of them pull off the transition from ordinary sixth-formers to multiple larger-than-life characters in the West, without which the whole thing would fall apart. If the point of of this was that love stories in same-sex relationships can just be ordinary, that’s what it does, and the crowds drawn to this were after that, it did the job.
Wednesday 23rd August:
As is customary for the day after a fringe binge, my brain is flat and not yet in a position to embark on reviews. I hope to be moving again tomorrow.
One thing I will quickly plug though is Aidan Goatley’s 10 Films with my Dad. I don’t really review stand-up comedy because I wouldn’t know where to start. (I loved Alasdair Beckett-King’s set last year, but I didn’t review that because everything I could have said would have been subjective.) But I will raise the lovely ending of this routine. Aidan Goatley’s humour is generally wholesome, but the ending of the original of his 10 Films series is an inspiring moment of making time for your family. I’ll say that the Blue Brothers are involved, but if you want to know how, I’m going to make you go and see it. 7.40 p.m. at Voodoo Rooms.
And now, something completely different. Yet again, we’ve had Dave’s list of top ten Edinburgh Fringe jokes, and as usual this has been met with derision. This year, however, there’s been a of of scorn for the winning one-liner: Lorna Rose Treen with “I started dating a zookeeper, but he turned out to be a cheetah”. Some people think it’s not funny, but humour is subjective. I’m more of the camp that this joke doesn’t make sense. How can a zookeeper turn out to be an animal in the zoo?
However, in all fairness, I don’t think the problem lies with either the joke or the judging process. I just find the entire concept to be fundamentally flawed. I can’t think of a single one-liner in any list from any year that made me chuckle when I read it. But those jokes weren’t written to be read on a list of top ten one-liners; they were written as part of a stand-up routine. Maybe Lorna Rose Treen’s joke does work as part of the actual set, maybe it doesn’t. But with the hit rate of these one-liner lists being 0% (more or less), I cant believe these same jokes are getting a 0% for real in the Edinburgh Fringe venues where they’re being delivered.
Frankly, judging a comedy routine by a single joke seems as arbitrary as trying to judge a novel my a single sentence. A better approach might be to judge funniest moments instead of funniest one-liners, with a bit of context given as to the build-up of these moments. However, I’m coming to the view that these lists of one-liners are doing more harm than good – and judging by the scornful responses this time round, I’m not sure I would want to win this. Sorry Dave, but if it comes to a choice of a top ten jokes list as it’s currently done or nothing at all, I think I’m going for nothing.
Tuesday 22nd August, 10.00 p.m.:
And that’s it. TIme’s up. A total of seven days present, 35 performances seen, and I’m now on the train home after the end of my third and final visit. Thank you once again to everybody who trusted me with reviews. I will aim to get the remaining reviews written up by the end of next weekend. Priority will be given to shows that I think would benefit from an early review the most. Before writing any more conventional reviews, here’s a couple of shows that deserve a shoutout for very different reasons.
I’m aware there has been the odd debate over censorship at Edinburgh Fringe, but those examples are far and few between. Sometimes, it helps to put things in proportion, and even the nastiest cancel culture stunts pulls over here are nothing compared to the systemic censorship orchestrated by the Chinese government against its citizens. Even unflattering opinions about the Chinese Government expressed in another country can get you landed in jail. For this reason, I encourage people to see Olivia Xing: Party School, where a “party school” is not a high school from a shit frat comedy, but schools run by the Chinese Communist Party teaching how brilliant the Chinese Communist Party is. I don’t review stand-up comedy because I don’t know where to start, but this needs a mention for the courage of doing this at all. Olivia does a lot of talking with passion and conviction over the increase in authoritarianism in both China and the USA. She is worth listening to, and maybe, just maybe, there are lessons from this that apply to Britain too. Maybe even at the Edinburgh Fringe itself. 8.30 p.m, Just the Tonic at the Grassmarket Centre.
The other thing that earns a shout-out carries no risk of jail for wrongthink, but it might as well given by how terrified 95%+ of fringe artists seem to be to go anywhere near it. Some people, I swear, bang on and on and on about about every worthy subject such as racism bad and climate change bad and Tories bad – but they suddenly forget their principles and fall silent the moment there’s the tiniest chance that standing up to something obviously wrong night cause some of their friends to think less of them. But if it must fall to one person to have the courage to stat why anti-Jewish conspiracy theories are bad, I’m quite happy to leave it into the capable hands of Marlon Solomon. I saw Conspiracy Theory: A Lizard’s Tale, a show that focus on the insane conspiracy theories of David Icke. To an outside observer, that might seem batshit but harmless, like the flat earthers, but it actually gets quite nasty for one reason: most conspiracy theories usually end up with people blaming it on the Jews, regardless of what the conspiracy is. Nothing he says is particularly contentious, and anyone who’s been following this will have a pretty good idea of what to expect. But if you haven’t caught up on this, this is an articulate, engaging and humorous look at the dangerous world of conspiracy theories. Sadly, the people who should see this the most won’t, but perhaps the rests of us can wise up to this sooner. 1.40 p.m. at PBH Free Fringe, Little White Pig.
That’s all from me tonight. From tomorrow, it’s time to clear the remaining review and tie up some other loose ends.
Tuesday 22nd August, 6.30 p.m.:
There’s nothing on my recommendations list starting in week 3, but in my Durham Fringe shoes I have one show to mention. This is Chance from Sightline Productions, who did rather well at Edinburgh Fringe last year with Cottage. Chance follows the story of a teenager constantly shunted back and forth from normal education to special education by a system that doesn’t seem to know (or be willing to learn) what to do with him. Running 1.15 at Paradise at the Vault with last performance on the Sunday.
Err, that’s it.
Tuesday 22nd August, 1.00 p.m. – Ay Up, Hitler:
Before starting on this one, I do need to declare an interest here. Gamma Ray Theatre were very helpful to me last year in my investigations over The Warren, with their first-hand account of a group caught up in the venue’s collapse in 2022 (with, as it happens, the same show). I am aiming to review this with the same level of impartiality as everyone else; you can decide whether or not you believe me.
The other reason I chose this one is that this was the subject of a minor moral outrage when it got to Edinburgh. A comedy where Hitler and his chums fled Berlin and settled down in Yorkshire is no edgier than The Producers, but that didn’t stop some people getting furious over how offensive this must be to Jews. I know a lot of people in the arts who are Jewish or part-Jewish, and none of them have a problem with this – the more cynical side of me wonders if the people being offended of other people’s behalf are doing this is a substitute for standing up to things Jews actually have a problem with. But, whatever, I don’t know all the Jews in the world, maybe some Jews I don’t know do find this objectionable. So I was going to re-iterate my standard defence of “If you don’t like it, don’t watch it”, but actually, I don’t need to. There is a serious message attached to this play – and for reasons I will get to, the message only works as a comedy. (Warning: when I get to that reason, it will be a spoiler.)
But that’s jumping ahead. Let is start at the beginning. Going full-on Yorkshire with flat caps and Yorkshire dialects, we are introduced to Himmler, Gobbels and Goering, who break the secret that they actually fled Nazi Germany when the going got tough. But of course they wouldn’t up sticks to God’s own country without the main man, Adolf himself. Out goes “Heil Hilter” and in comes “‘Ay Up Hitler”. Hitler is less of a natural at blending in with the locals, still going around with Swastikas and toothbrush moustache, but no-one’s noticed for decades.
Oh, did I mention that they’ve also cracked the secret to immortality? Couple of down-sides to that one though. Eva Braun (was going to be played by Suella Braverman but she got a bit too enthusiastic about the Nazi bit of the role) also get the serum, and has never forgiven Hitler for promising he’d commit suicide straight after her. Winston Churchill also torments Hitler by pointing out that he might have done some bad things himself, but because he kicked Hitler’s butt, he gets a free pass on everything else. But the biggest problem is that nobody seems to want a fourth Reich. Adolf’s furious fist waving isn’t working, there’s no lost world war to blame on anybody, and this new woke culture is ruining everything. Jesus, these days you can’t even lay out in detail your plans for a new Final Solution without without the PC Brigade calling you a Nazi.
If there isn’t something to pick fault with, it’s a lack of structure. Until the end, the piece does feel like a collection of funny scenes, but none are essential. I understand why they felt the need to break the fourth wall when they did, but that confused things a little. However, the over-arching theme is poking fun at subsequent populist brands of racism, anti-Jewish and otherwise. Nobody is left out of this.
The most memorable part, however, is the ending. This is where we meet Boris Johnson (one of my favourite comic roles, holding two union jacks which talking bumbling sound-bite bollocks) and Donald Trump. (Side note: when this was done at Brighton Fringe, it was two PMs ago and Boris Johnson was Prime Minister. Adapted of course, but my, May 2022 seems like a lifetime ago.) There is a long-standing rule that the best way to distance yourself from a public figure you’re parodying is to portray the character as a loser. And until know, Hitler has been portrayed as a bumbling fool. But Boris Johnson and Donald Trump are also bumbling fools. And they did quite well out of it. And this is what the whole thing has been leading up to: a bumbling fool is a lot more dangerous than you think. And so, Ay up Hitler‘s appeal is not for the cringe comedy, as it would have you believe, but the chilling cautionary tale at the end.
Tuesday 22nd August, 10.00 a.m. – Tom Moran is a big fat disgusting liar:
One of the problems of this explosion of fringe shows of people talking about themselves (and based on the sample I’ve been getting through review requests, there certainly has been a rise) is that it’s next to impossible to pass judgement on the show without also passing judgement on the person who made the show. So far, I’ve managed to cover all the ones I’ve seen without needing to personalise it too much. However, within this category I have two pet hates. One is people who take what is clearly somebody else’s story and making it all about themselves (“that’s enough of hearing about this terrible thing about someone else, let’s talk at length about how it made ME feel”). The other is people who talk frankly about some really shitty things they’ve done to other people, but obviously aren’t really sorry – instead, it’s all about how this make me an interesting and complex character. Once I’d established Tom Moran was indeed talking about himself – and the title gives us a clue of where this is going – I was hoping it wasn’t going to be one of these.
But this is not a guilt-free confessional. It’s more like the opposite. The lies he refers to are mostly lies he told as a child who learned very quickly what you need to do to get the affection of your parents, teacher and church (being Ireland). It escalates to convolutes ways to pull sickies in the face of increasingly sceptical parents, and probably the worst thing confessed to was telling is parents he was being bullied by another kid (who was an arsehole but innocent of the crime charged). But from this point, it’s not about the lies that escalate, but the shame that escalates.
There is another thread to the story: the words “big”, “fat” and possibly “disgusting” are not metaphors used to describe a liar, but something more literal. It’s only 15 minutes into the set during the cat-and-mouse sickie game Tom mentions he was overweight. Unlike Spin, this was not a body positivity statement and Tom himself is open about just how dangerously overweight he was. That’s not mentioned again and we can safely assume that’s old news, but the escalating guilt goes on to dominate this story. He delivers a very convincing portrayal of an increasing gulf between how others see him and how he sees himself. And more more he becomes aware of the gap, the more shame he feels. Details of adult life are kept sketchier – the reason Moran gives is that he’s not yet made his peace with all of this – but by now the shame seems to be taking a life of its own.
I should give a caveat to this review, and indeed all the reviews I’ve seen of people talking about themselves, which is that I am assuming in good faith the stories I’m hearing are truthful. You don’t have to go into every detail, but I reserve the right to revisit any review if I find out somebody has been leaving out details that throws the whole story in a different light. That caveat established, the frank confessional is delivered well. It is scripted to arrange the story into peaks and troughs, and the lighting and sound used to support this is very effective. And the moral of the story is that it’s better to have one person believing in you for who who are than the world believing in you for what you’re not – as famously sung by the Muppets. And compared to the Big Brother contestants mentioned at the beginning who want to be loved for the caricatures they make themselves into, you can give me that any day.
Monday 21st August, 5.30 p.m.:
We’re off. 3 seen, 6 to go. As is customary, I will probably hold off writing any reviews until tomorrow. Should I write any reviews today, It’ll be because I’m raving about something.
Before we get stuck into reviews, now’s a good time to talk about the Playbill Cruise ship. It’s pretty much impossible to walk around Edinburgh without seeing adverts for a cruise ship that’s going to be in Leith Docks for two weeks next year for fringe visitors. This might seem like a daft idea, but there’s actually some sense to this. The problem Edinburgh has is that there’s an insane amount of demand for accommodation one month every year, and relatively little demand the rest of the time. This is a deterrent for anyone thinking of providing more accommodation – it’s not really worth the upfront investment to build/convert something that only brings in an income in August, unless you plan to charge through the nose that month. A cruise ship, on the other hand, can be taken to Edinburgh when the demand is there, and go back to cruises the rest of the time. Also, quite conveniently, there are now trams from Leith to the city centre.
Before you get too excited, however, I think this is going to be of more benefit to punters than performers – more specifically, punters wealthy enough to consider spending two weeks in Edinburgh on hotel prices. I’ve checked the prices, and it’s way outside the budgets of most of us mere mortals. I get the impression this is a luxury-end cruise liner which is keeping all the luxuries for the two weeks in Leith. Great for people after luxury stays, also good news for people in high-end hotels who might see the fall in demand bring prices down to something less insane. But for performers (and theatre bloggers), it will probably do little to address the supply/demand problem there.
In site of those scepticisms, I’m still in favour of this. Anything that’s done to reduce the pressure on Edinburgh accommodation has my vote. Even if only relieves demand on the most expensive accommodation, cheaper hotel prices might in turn take some switchers from digs/hostels/pods, and indirectly relieve some supply/demand there – marginally.
And if it works, maybe we’ll get more ships, covering a whole range of price bands. The worst it can do is be of no benefit. So it might be an unaffordable novelty for most of us, but there’s no harm giving this a try and see where it leads.
Monday 21st August, 12.30 p.m.:
Now, before we continue, there is a regrettable entry in the Chrisontheatre correction column. I have been trying to keep track of which recommendations on my list are beginning and what’s coming to the end, but I missed the deadline for the end of week 2. The Grandmothers Grimm and Call Mr. Robeson ended last weekend, but they finished on Saturday instead of Sunday, and by the time I realised it was too late. At least one of these has been selling out and doesn’t need my help, but apologies anyway for this oversight.
Actually, shows not running on Sunday has been catching me out quite a bit. One thing that struck me about my review schedule is how many shows don’t run on Sunday – and some requests have ended up missing out because of this (although at Edinburgh, one show’s loss is always another show’s gain). I can understand why you might need to do that if you’re running a single week – it’s logical to keep Sunday free for tech rehearsals is you’re starting on Monday. But even many shows opting for a full run are skipping Sundays. The conventional wisdom used to be that you’d start off with Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday in week 2, maybe again in week 3, and maybe Wednesday or Thursday in Week 1. (Monday and Tuesday in week 1 still remain busy at the traditional 2 for 1 days.)
Clearly something has changed in the eyes of performers and venues. But what? I’d always assumed Sunday beats Monday as a show day, but somebody doesn’t think so. What is the reason? Answers on a postcard please.
Monday 21st August, 7.30 a.m.:
Here I come, one more time. My last two days are going dropping from 5 performances per day to a slightly more relaxed 4.5 performances per day, and will have a slightly bigger emphasis on what I enjoy seeing over what I’m taking a chance on. Yet again, I’ve had to get up super-early for a super-early train, but I’m on it. That’s the final precarious bit of my itineary done, which means I’ll be making it to my final Bite-Size set.
See you soon; in the meantime, here’s one of my favourite pictures from last time.
Sunday 20th August, 9.30 p.m. – Otto and Astrid’s Joint Solo Project:
And finally from visit 2, I saw a character comedy. Otto and Astrid has previously been compared to Flight of the Conchords, and that’s a good summary of their humour for people new to this like me. So the premise is that Otto and Astrid are a pop duo called Die Roten Punkte, but after artistic differences they have decided to go their separate ways. They have to do a performance together though, because Astrid can’t get public liability insurance. Which is harsh but fair, because Astrid is the very embodiment of a public liability. She is a so much of a drummer diva she who makes Miss Piggy seem positively undemanding. Guitarist Otto, meanwhile, desperately wants to be seen by the world as a moody goth/emo type. But this is obviously an act, he’s really a complete softy who missed the comfort of performing with his sister.
In theory, this hour is going to be divided into two halves: Otto first, Astrid second. Yeah, right. Astrid does of course come barging in during the second song to set up. Astrid knows that Otto couldn’t get anyone for his new band, but Astrid’s band are also not coming, after having a quick meeting and opting to run a mile. Well, there’s no harm playing in each other’s songs. Let us be absolutely clear, they are NOT, I repeat, DEFINITELY NOT playing as Otto as Astrid – they are simply doing the backing for each other. Oh, and they know each other’s songs perfectly, having been glued to listening to each other practice, but this is ABSOLUTELY NOT to be taken a sign that they really want to play together again, okay?
Although this is a comedy act, the songs are actually pretty decent numbers in their own right. Otto and Astrid are proper musicians who perform tightly as a band, and (as is the case with most comedy songs) the tunes are just as good as any non-novelty song. Most of the songs have comedy lyrics, but the occasional song has quite serious lyrics. It’s funny because of the setting it’s being played in, but played by a different musician some of the songs could have been seen in a more serious light.
And do you know what? This is a surprisingly lovely hour, of a comedically messed up brother and sister who bicker and squabble but are really inseparable, however much they claim otherwise. And that’s really hammered home during a hug with lights down when Otto thinks no-one is watching. This is really comedy more than theatre, but it was still one of my favourite moments. This is still running up to the end of the fringe at 7.25 p.m. at Assembly George Square.
At that’s visit 2 wrapped up. Visit 3 is tomorrow. For the last time this year, here we go again.
Sunday 20th August, 7.00 p.m. – Brain Hemingway:
Every writer dreads writer’s block, but do you know what’s even worse? A special kind of writer’s block that manifests itself in the room you’re in as American 20th century novelist Earnest Hemingway. Our lead character, played by writer Erin Murray Quinlan, just can’t make any progress on her musical, and the theatre the commissioned her is running out of patience. And as inner voices are guaranteed to do, this voice is given her a right old put down, except that is starts off in Hemingway reciting his most famous quotes before moving on to telling her how she’s wasting her time.
I think it’s fair to say this play might respect Hemingway for his work, but certainly does not respect him as a person. As always, I’ll leave it up to argue whether or not the depiction is fair, but being divorced three times certainly isn’t a good sign. It seems that the take-home message is that out of all the famous authors who could be your inner voice, you’ve really drawn the short straw if you get Earnest. He’s an insufferable character, whose high opinion of his own work is only matched by his disdain for this author’s efforts. Hemingway is played by Erin’s own husband, giving her one withering put-down after another – some listing out of Hemingway’s life, some based on real quotes to her. It seems one or both of them are a real glutton for punishment here. Quinlan has also done a lot of research into his life, covering his travels, his works, various acts of cruelty against his wives, and finally, his suicide which – so he claims – was his choice as he’d run out of ways to be creative.
The problem with plays about writer’s block is that by their very nature they don’t have much of a story. The default plotline is that the writer spends ages trying to find a way forwards and nothing happens, until the end where a breakthrough may or may not be made. And, unfortunately, Brain Hemingway does suffer from this. What you really need to do is look for opportunities to introduce something extra. The obvious candidate here is the life of Earnest Hemingway. Erin Murray Quinlan clearly knows her stuff inside out, but this comes at the price of assuming we the audience have the same background knowledge. The other thing worth considering is the journey of this author. Why is Hemingway such a big deal to her anyway? The most likely reason I can see is disillusionment. Maybe she started off enamoured by his prose, and become progressively more jaded as she learned more about him in real life, and possibly how his real-life persona crept into his work. Whatever you consider, I very reliable playwriting rule is that your characters should change during a play. Exactly how they change is up to you: it might be an event that changes somebody’s outlook for good, it might reveal a different side to a character over the course of an hour, or we could learn how a character used to be different person. I don’t know how closely Quinlan wants to stick to real life (either her own or Hemingway’s), but there’s a lot of choices open.
The song “I won’t hold on,” however, is genuinely moving. Written to be sung by Hemingway’s first wife in a previous musical, where she has finally realised any further attempts to save the marriage are futile, this puts a whole new level of emotion into the play. That is where I think the strongest opportunities lie in the play. The concept of a writer with a very specific tormentor in chief is a sound concept – but I’m sure there’s opportunities to add something to this and bring it to another level.
Sunday 20th August, 4.00 p.m. – Atalanta:
I won’t tell a lie, one third of the way in to this musical I was growing sceptical. Atalanta in loosely based on the autobiography of one of the first female editors of a newspaper. It is 1969 and Sarina Lemonde is a new editor at the Atalanta Post. The paper is struggling financially, and everybody is hoping that the arrival of a film star will turn the fortunes around. It does, but not in a way anyone was expecting: Miriam is Sarina’s estranged mother, and perhaps as means of apology she puts in a big cash injection into the paper to secure its future – on the condition that Sarina owns controlling shares and becomes the company’s new president. That’s a promising enough opening, but the problem was that the opening is also cluttered by a sequence of seemingly unrelated events – none of which appeared to have any contribution to the direction the story was going.
Well, hold on. Atalanta is actually rather good. All of those seemingly irrelevant events we saw at the start are there for very good reasons, and it’s building up to one of the most intricate plots I’ve seen in any fringe show, musical or otherwise. Whether it’s because of the way she got the job or because she’s a woman, she goes into the post with a lot of enemies. Sometimes Sarina needs to be ruthless, but most of time she survives by winning the support and respect of her peers. The things we saw at the beginning that didn’t appear to have anything to do with the plot come back to bite Sarina: the marriage of convenience she has with her husband; an unexplained plane trip to France; an indiscretion that wasn’t her fault but nonetheless makes her a target for blackmail; and, ultimately, how another fleeting indiscretion combined with the allies Sarina built up works in her favour.
As I mentioned before, the problem with musicals at the fringe is that, unless you specifically write the songs to advance the plot, it goes on hold every time a song is running. Even with a 90-minute running time, this doesn’t leave much time to tell a story, which I think is why so many of the key events at the start of the play feel rushed. I spent a lot of time playing catch-up, but what’s critical is that I could catch up. Tip for writers: always allow some slack in your script, so that if audience missed something important in the play the first time round, there’s time to catch up later. This is what’s done here, and it spelt the difference between getting lost completely.
Edinburgh Fringe has been a good showcase for Harvard Dramatic Club, but I’m not sure the time constraints do the musical justice. Another 20 minutes could do a lot of good for the rushed exposition, enabling us to know more about Sarina’s complicated family arrangements and the fraught relationship she has with The Post‘s board and a competing form of nepotism. I understand this is a shortened version of a longer musical, so maybe this has already been done. Decent showing for the Edinburgh Fringe but it’s outside the fringe where I can see the most potential being unlocked.
Saturday 19th August. 10.30 p.m. – Lash – A Pulsating New Play About Going Out Out!
Lash is a play about a young man whose sole purpose in life is to finish work at Friday and then go out and get hammered and take drugs. Because he can. And he doesn’t see anything else going from him, on the conveyor belt of birth school work retirement dead. So, for this review, it is a bit unlucky for writer Jack Stokes and performed Philip Stokes (his son) that I saw this this the day after Bits’n’Pieces, which covered very similar themes in a bigger-scale play to a great standard. But there’s good things to say about this one too.
The story is that Sonny is going for another Friday night out on the lash, and go to a completely different world from work where it doesn’t matter how he behaves. Unfortunately, on this occasion, many of his work colleagues have chosen to go to exactly the same pubs and clubs he’s going to. Also, unbeknownst to him – and I’m not sure whether this counts as good news or bad news – some of them are just as much a bunch of piss-heads/coke-heads as he is. A lot of the story is the observations of the people around him. Sonny is better behaved than some lads, and is particularly disdainful of the homophobes and mobs of Andrew Tate-wannabes he encounters on his night.
However, there are some aspects of Sonny’s character that don’t really ring true. One of the problems which I’ve kept raising is putting manifestos of the writers’ views where it’s not plausible. It is conceivable that a lad on a night out might think the aforementioned Andrew Tate-wannabes are a bunch of wankers, but he also goes on to blame this behaviour of colonialism (more or less). That’s something I could believe coming from a guardian columnists – it’s not such a plausible piece of philosophy from a lad on the lash every Friday. Also (and maybe this is an unfair comparison based on one reviewer’s viewing list but …) after the powerful build-up and jarring switch from hedonistic party to tragedy, the climax of this play – falling on something sharp that might have been a knife but wasn’t – felt a bit of an anti-climax.
I have nothing to fault about the production values though. The late slot was ideal for this kind of show, and the co-ordination between performer, club lighting, sound scape and club music – something that’s far from straightforward. The pace is managed well and Philip Stokes is always engaged with the audience. In a head-to-head with Bits’n’Pieces, I’d have to rate Saltire Sky as the winner, but it puts in a decent second for the sometimes crazy and sometimes dark world of the lads’ night out.
Saturday 19th August, 5.30 p.m. – Spin:
I know, I know, we’re all sick of hearing about that year, but amongst the many crazes brought along in 2020 such as sourdough and conspiracy theories, there was the rise and rise is Peloton, which turned the exercise bike from a masochist pursuit at the gym to a ultra-cool lifestyle statement. Kate Sumpter plays an unnamed cycle instructor in a fitness centre, except it’s the 2020s and those words are cool enough. This is a “Spin Studio” and I didn’t catch what her job title was but it’s probably something equally pretentious like “Spin Inspirer”. Bangin’ choons start playing, we’re off, and she tells us all how amazing we all are, and then she goes into her own internal monologue about what this is like for her.
It starts off with her observation for the types that come here: from the social media whores after the perfect Instagram shot; to the bloke who rips off his T-shirt in the middle of the ride for no reason at all. Then her mind wanders to her greatest ambition: earning promotion to the coveted rank of “Spin Mega-Guru” (again, maybe not the exact words but you get the idea). For that, year, fitness levels and ability to be an instructor matter a bit, but what they really want from you is an inspirational back-story. She goes over her own back-story of how she used to be bullied for her weight and felt insecure, until Spin gave her a purpose, which she’s now passing on to those around her. But she’s giving away more than she realises. It becomes increasingly she’s forgotten any purpose in life other than the exercise bike. It’s become so much of an obsession, that being overweight makes her life so far a failure, but if she achieves her exercise goals she’ll be vindicated.
There was one thing I was unsure of at this point. Where exactly is this taking place? Is a Spin Studio one of the online exercise thing, or is this more like an in-person gym? Context suggest the latter, but then why is she revealing her inner thoughts to customers who absolutely cannot know that? However, it turns out she’s in neither of those places. The horns she was wearing in the poster and the flashing red lights might give you a clue of where she actually is – but it’s actually not that place either. I won’t say where she is because it’s more fun to work that out yourself, but it relates to the moment the bubble burst. Her obsession, affecting both herself and those around her, have unforeseen consequences. And a clever finish keep you guessing to the end.
If I have one criticism, it’s the same one I’m making for many plays I’ve seen at Edinburgh Fringe: show, don’t tell, please don’t squeeze in everything you have to say in a manifesto at the end. Our fitness fanatic friend may have had a revelation, but she’s not ready to list all the views of the author about this subject. And, in all honesty, this isn’t needed: there’s more than enough in Kate Sumpter’s writing to make the case without. But it does slowly bring in a message about how obsession with exercise peddles by marketers isn’t that difference from the way eating disorders can be put in fashion. One of the easiest tests when you’re seeing five shows a day is which ones stick in you mind the longest, and this is emerging as a clear winner. Running until the end of the fringe at 2.20 p.m., Gilded Balloon Patter Hoose.
Saturday 19th August, 11.30 a.m. – How to survive and thrive in an impossible world – with a piano!
There is a very long back-story to this project. Steve Bonham, one half of this duo with Chris Lyndon, came up with the concept when receiving treatment for cancer and saw how exhausted and stressed the NHS staff were. It began as a book (same title minus “with a piano”) written during lockdown, and this live performance offshoot came later, developed with hospitals in Derby and Burton.
In one way, it’s good to see something rise up the ranks by an unusual route of wellbeing sessions within the NHS. But there is one effect of this that you must be aware of: this does feel a lot more like a workplace health and wellbeing presentation than a theatre piece. There’s detailed roll-banners at the back, extensive background information in the programme and website, and I get the impression that the audiences in the two hospitals – where a wellbeing session would not be out of place – would be a lot more familiar with this. To give credit where it’s due, as a wellbeing presentation it seems to do the job well enough. Steve and Chris are engaging with the audience, it’s aimed to be fun, and there’s none of the condescension I’ve heard from various horror stories of bosses who use wellbeing session as a substitute for looking for anyone’s wellbeing.
However, this is billed as theatre, and judged on those terms, it struggles to show what it’s meant to be about. It suffers from a common problem of “concept overload”. There’s songs, background stories, conversations with an obstinate phone, audience participation, any many other things, but in an hour-long show there’s not really a chance to develop any of these and make them stick in the memory. One particular frustration is that the piano billed in the title doesn’t get that much use, when it could have been the defining feature that puts it all together.
My advice for a fringe show is to pick a few things to focus on, rather than touch lots of things. In this case, I would have lived true to the title, and structured it heavily around music and songs, probably with the five principles to live by at the other defining theme of the play. However, there is a planned tour coming up outside of fringe constraints, where Steve and Chris will be in a better position to have audiences more like the ones in the hospitals where this was developed. In which case, your call. If you think it’ll work as it is markets as a wellbeing show instead of theatre, then go for it.
Friday 18th August:
Right, can’t put it off any more. Time to discuss the elephant in the room. The Graham Linehan business. The update on yesterday’s news is that Comedy Unleashed found another venue, which also cancelled on them (not specified where but Comedy Unleashed isn’t arguing over that cancellation), and they ended up doing it outside Holyrood. Nor a particularly impressive audience, but I’d say the audience was about the same size as a typical Leith Arches audience. To be honest, however, this was going into the realms of publicity stunts. The bigger question is whether Graham Linehan and Comedy Unleashed carry of their threats to sue Leith Arches.
This is not the first cancellation controversy this fringe. The Stand has already capitulated against Joanna Cherry. In the end, the event that went ahead was pretty boring (there were some claims and counter-claims about her treatment at the event, but nothing significant), but Joanna Cherry got her way because case law has decided, rightly or wrongly, you can’t discriminate against someone simply for belief. However, there is a much stronger case against Graham Linehan. It’s not just his views; he has a track record of harassment against trans people (and people who don’t agree with him in general). We can debate individual allegations, but what is completely reprehensible is going on to a trans dating site in order to post images on trans people on line with derogatory comments about appearance. Edinburgh Fringe is an open festival but venues can take who they like. Speaking as a sort-of venue manager who has occasionally taken companies with trans people, I would not be comfortable having Graham Linehan in my venue. Hosting someone with views considered offensive by other people is one thing; bringing along someone who was at risk of harassing other people in the venue is quite another.
But the problem is, Leith Arches didn’t say “No, you can’t perform here because you have a track record of harassing trans people”, they said, “No, you can’t perform here because we don’t support your views.” Good grief, you’d have thought they’d have learned from The Stand not to do that. Perhaps if it goes to court, Leith Arches will claim that what they really meant was that they were concerned for the safety of their staff – but I’m not sure how kindly the courts react to adding reasons retrospectively. Even if Graham Linehan doesn’t have a case on protected beliefs like Joanna Cherry did (and there’s no way protected beliefs would excuse his despicable actions on that dating app), Comedy Unleashed may still nail Leith Arches on plain old breach of contract. If there wasn’t a cancellation clause for offensive material (and Comedy Unleashed would have to have been pretty stupid to have agreed to such a contract), they are going to be on very shaky legal ground.
The real problem, however, is that Graham Linehan doesn’t want a gig in an Edinburgh Fringe venue – he wants to be a martyr. Cancellation is a surefire route to martrydom; the correct way to avoid this is to not book that comedian in the first place. Now, one of these days I may go into more depth about Comedy Unleashed and why they’re not the champions of free speech they claim to be, but the short version is that they’re notorious for booking people as controversial as Linehan for shock value, and this is is known by anyone who’s been paying the slightest bit of attention. For God’s sake, Leith Arches, how could you have not known who Comedy Unleashed were? And how could not look at the graphic they’d supplied you without having a good idea who the “surprise famous cancelled comedian was going to be”? I don’t envy the position Leith Arches was in when they realised who’d they’d booked, but it took a staggering amount of naivety to get to that situation in the first place.
Meanwhile, other comedians and politicians are doing well out of being cancelled. Jerry Sadowitz’s entire three-show run is already sold out. Joanna Cherry’s event got masses of attention. Graham Linehan might not have got a big crowd for his impromptu set, but he did get a sympathetic hearing and mostly softball interview from journalists who don’t know any better what he’s really like. We can discuss the ethics of programming to moral purity another day. But for Christ’s sake, do pay some attention to what you’re programming the first time round. You’ll do your cause no favours by programme first and cancelling later.
Thursday 17th August – Junk Monkey:
Now it’s over to Seemingly Wholesome Productions with a solo play from Olivia McLeod from Australia. Olivia (also the name of the character) tells a story alternating between past and present. It begins at age ten when she had a moment of triumph. beating of tough competition to get her first boyfriend. Fifteen years and a substantial turnover of boyfriends later, Olivia is to her surprise head-over-heels with a girl she met on a train called May. After striking up a conversation, she discovers she’s an opera student, and following a lot of social media stalking establishes she has a recital tonight. Now all she has to do is guilt trip a work colleague into taking her shift tonight, forget the attend the event she promised her boyfriend, miss the deadline for the job she had weeks to apply for, guilt-trip her housemate into coming with her as a pretext for meeting May tonight, and a whole lot of other shambolic decisions. But it’s all for love, isn’t it?
However, I must warn you that if you were expecting an inspiration story that the secret to Olivia’s happiness is that being with a woman, this isn’t the way the story goes. A few flashbacks to Olivia’s past and past boyfriends reveals what the problem is. Olivia is constantly making rash decisions over the new love of her life. She gets over-excited at the thought of a new love, allowing wild speculation of imagined futures to go out of control (something she’s already doing with May), and on the rare occasions where she hasn’t made a poor choice of boyfriend, makes poor decisions that lead to break-ups. And she doesn’t seem to have learned any lessons this time round.
The good news for Olivia is that her pretext to bump into May again works, and even better, they get invited along to an after-party – which, somewhat out of character for a classical music recital, is a hedonistic riot involving karaoke, drugs and orgies. (Thinks: where are these parties and why was I never invited to them?) The bad news is that May has the wrong things in common with Olivia: she is also shallow and self-centred. And Olivia is about to find out the hard way this isn’t a good trait to share.
It’s a good monologue, with tight writing both in the delivery and the ill-fated 12-hour timescale the main story unfolds in. Olivia does remain a sympathetic character – even if you’ve stopped wishing well a terrible idea, you still hope that she might learn from this. The one thing that might have been done better is something I’ve said about a lot of productions this fringe, which is doing more “Show, don’t tell”. Olivia has a sudden realisation at the end that she’s gets over-excited about the prospect of a new love and doesn’t think things through, but if this could somehow be written into her train of thought whilst embarking one disastrous relationship after another that could be stronger – although I accept that would be difficult to write. Well delivered, engaging – just don’t except the LGBTQ+ equivalent of a Richard Curtis tale.
Wednesday 16th August – Havisham:
The Graham Linehan debacle won’t be going away any time soon. I am keeping an eye on this, but my comment will have to wait. We must get on with these reviews.
So now I move on to Havisham, created by Heather Alexander as her follow-up to Room. Having already seen her do a fine Virginia Woolf, I expected her to be as ideal Miss Havisham, and it does indeed work. An elderly Miss Havisham is in her wedding dress, and it stuck in a cycle of trauma. Once more, she must relieve the early years of her life, from childhood the the fateful wedding day. The obvious question on everyone’s lips, is what made her into the cruel and vengeful spinster we know today? Why did she turn bad?
The obvious motive for her revenge plot could only be treatment at the hands of numerous men throughout her life – innocent Pip, after all, is to be punished for the crimes of other men that he would never have done himself. The backstory in Great Expectations is that she was swindled out of her inheritance by her husband-to-be and her illegitimate half-brother conspiring together, but this goes all the way back to a neglectful father, with a lot of people who wronged her in between. It begins with separating her from a beloved doll and goes downhill from there.
The other half, however, is more a part of Alexander’s imagination. The religiously conservative society she is brought in relentlessly calls her a “bad girl”, almost always over things that either don’t matter or things done to her. There is a cleverly-introduced parallel to Medusa, originally mistaken by Havisham to be an angel – as time goes on she identifies more with a fallen woman turned bad by what was done to her. Only Havishman’s aunt shows any signs of kindness – but unfortunately she spends too much time globe-trotting to look after her niece when needed. Ultimately, there’s a lot reasons why she ends up living down to expectations.
I do need to mention that at this first performance, part of the ending was lost due to the final tech cue being played early by mistake. It didn’t actually matter that much, because the themes at the end are covered enough earlier in the play to fill in the gaps. However, the more I revisit the plot of the original, the more I wonder about ending the story at the wedding. I’m not saying there should be a blow-by-blow account of the rest of the story, but there is an important bit where Havisham originally adopts Estella (someone she met earlier in this play) wanting to protect her – the plan for revenge came later. But most of all, I think this could have done with the final chapter of Havisham’s anguish. Her plan to break Pip’s heart works – but it doesn’t make her happy. Perhaps the worst feeling of all is guilt. Maybe this can find its way into a post-fringe longer version. But it’s worth seeing as it is for a portrait of the making of Dickens’s most prolific tragic villain.
Tuesday 15th August:
Oh great. Just got back to have a relaxing day, when I foolishly thought to myself we’d not had any controversies yet and might make it to the end of the fringe without one. Oh no, you naive fool. It’s Jerry Sadowitz mark 2. Except this time the subject of cancellation is Graham Linehan. Now, in my opinion there’s a much stronger case against Graham Linehan than there is against Jerry Sadowitz or Joanna Cherry, but venues never seem to learn and another one. has made the same mistake as Pleasance and The Stand: if you’re going to cancel artists, don’t book them in the first place. I’ll go into more details another day, but the short version is that Leith Arches has given Graham Linehan the martyr status he craves at Edinburgh Fringe. Idiots.
But that can wait. I need to get on with a backlog of reviews. I hope to have caught up by this weekend; and, as always, press ticket reviews (most of what I see) get priority. I will also try to prioritise runs that are finishing soon. Thank you again for putting trust in me giving an honest opinion of your shows; thank you also for bearing with me.
This is the time that I would be giving a list of recommendations starting this week, but there’s actually a surprisingly short list. We have:
Nation: Saw the play at Buxton Fringe. The adventures of a man with varied adherences to the law hiding out in Paris and mixing in with the fringes of society. 12.30, Greenside Riddles Court until the end of fringe.
Havisham: Heather Alexander, who impressed we with the concept of a dramatisation of an essay with Room has a new play about Charles Dickens’s famous tragic villain. Saw this on the first night, review coming soon.
And in my Durham Fringe promoter shoes, there’s only one of ours this week, which is Rompers. They’re a surrealistic sketch comedy duo with another duo called Cowstools. 11.05 p.m., Just the Tonic Nucleus, until Sunday.
Err, that’s it. And now, I might get a proper night’s sleep.
Monday 14th August, 11.00 p.m.:
And finally tonight … what does Edinburgh Trams to Newhaven mean for Edinburgh Fringe? Until last year, the trams went west of Edinburgh. Great if you’re going to Murrayfield Stadium or the Airport, not so great for destinations fringegoers might want. Leith, however, is a substantial population centre. There is currently a massive capacity squeeze for accommodation. Could Leith become an option, with performers travelling into Edinburgh on the new tram link?
Sadly, it’s probably not going to make that much of a difference. Accommodation in Edinburgh is already saturated across the entire city. Never mind Leith, people are already travelling in from outlying towns into Edinburgh to keep this affordable. Heck, there’s even stories of people opting for Glasgow. The one small benefit this will deliver is making travel to and from Leith/Newhaven easier for those going that way.
Where there might be an opportunity, however, is decentralising venues. There is very high demand for venues in central Edinburgh, and high demand drives up prices. Venues in the suburbs are out of the question for most people – artists like Saltire Sky whose reputations is good enough to draw punters away from central Edinburgh are the exception. But give an easy way of getting to and from Leith and maybe that’s a game changer. I have my doubts over whether the trams are any quicker than the buses, but what’s important is that tram routes are easy to understand. And for visitors to the city, that’s important.
Or it might be that the walk from Old Town to new Town to reach a tram stop will still be too much hassle for most people. And a tramway into the Old Town would be a bugger to build and is a long way off. Trams could potentially help the fringe in a lot of ways, but it won’t solve the capacity crunch with accommodation. Until that’s solved, everything else is small fry. Should it be solved, however, then we’re in business.
Monday 14th August, 10.00 p.m. – Bits’n’Pieces
Next on my list it’s Satire Sky, whose production of 1902 was a big hit in 2021. I didn’t see that until later because getting to Leith was too much of a hassle. Satire Sky have opted to remain in Leith for this follow-up, but luckily, it’s become easier to get to Leith thanks to the newly-opened tram extension. More about that and what it means for the Edinburgh Fringe later. There’s a good reason for the choice of Leith though: Saltire Sky are good at putting productions on in non-traditional spaces. Even when they did 1902 at The Laurels, they opted for a bar area over the actual theatre. This time they’ve gone for Leith Arches, which is the perfect spot for an underground rave.
Tommy, Mattie and Dougie are lifelong friends. The play begins with the escapades that the three of them got up to together. However, in their eyes, at age 25 they’re already over the hill. It’s now down all the way, hence why going out, partying, and taking drugs is the only real appeal in their lives. Out of the three, Mattie has made the most ill-advised decision in his life, ranging from relationships to abortive careers, but he finally sets his mind on being a fighter pilot. Tommy and Dougie vow to give him the best send-off before he goes, and to their delight discover that Edinburgh’s leading classical venue, Usher Hall, is holding an event until 5 in the morning of a leading rave artist. It’s a no-brainer.
Unlike 1902, which was written to work with no sound or light plot, here the things are integral. You do need to concentrate to follow all the words being spoken, but don’t worry if you don’t – you’ll pick up enough. Music slowly starts building up, with the excitement building up for the big event. Ushaw Hall has, somewhat unwisely, made no serious attempt to stop people taking drugs in the toilet. Matty gets tested for drugs once a week, but that’s okay, Google says MDNA is good because it leaves the body quickly, right? To understand why people would do something do dangerous, you need to understand what you gain from doing it, and this culminates in the sort-of-interval of this play where everybody’s invited to get up for a head-bang.
If there’s one thing you could criticise Bits’n’Pieces for, it’s a little derivative of Trainspotting. Writer Nathan Scott-Dunn chooses not to ape Trainspotting’s shock value (right decision, here it would have been sock value for the sake if it), but it does closely follow for format of explaining why taking drugs seems a good idea, and then showing why it really really isn’t. The second half starts with Tommy and Dougie reminiscing on the amazing night they had – but something is already badly wrong. One message of the play was meant to be about misinformation. I’m not sure I picked up all of that – this was one of few few bits where the talking got too fast to follow what it was about. However, the theme that does come across is the gutter press interviewing people, caring little about anyone’s welfare, merely looking for who’s best to vilify.
The stand-out performance is Christine Russell-Brown. playing a range of female characters. At one end is the hard-as-nails clubber, but the best performances were the mothers of Dougie and Matty: both protective of their sons in different ways; both face with devastating repercussions from that night out. But as with 1902, there’s great performances throughout the cast as well as the upstairs DJ. Bits’n’Pieces isn’t the easiest location to get to, but it’s well worth the journey.
Monday 14th August, 2.00 p.m.: Alexander Klaus, the one-legged shoemaker man:
Before reviewing this one, it’s worth a bit of disclosure about how my reviews work. Somewhat counter-intuitively, the content of press releases doesn’t have much effect on what I choose to review. I like to review a cross-section of what’s going at the Edinburgh Fringe, rather than the best of Edinburgh Fringe – as such, I don’t go out of my way to shortlist what’s the best. If several plays are competing for a timeslot, I might have a good look as a tie-breaker, but if you got my attention from an interesting title or publicity image (and your timeslot works in your favour), I might not have read the press release at all. Or I might have decided I’m going to see you based on the press release, but by the time of the performance have forgotten everything about it apart from time, venue, and (usually) title. I’m more likely to refer to a press release after seeing the play to check details or see what the intention of the play was. Anyway, all of this is a long-winded way of saying that you should assume I’m reviewing your play as someone who know nothing and doesn’t know what to expect.
This meant that I went into Alexander Klaus not knowing what to expect, and five minutes in assuming this was one of the many solo biopics on the fringe – and indeed, you can go a long way into this piece believing it to be the case. But Alexander (nicknamed “Sander”) is actually a fictitious character. The setting and historical events are real though, and writer/performer Christian Hege has gone through a lot of trouble to research this. Teenage Klaus loses a leg in the American Civil war, and ends up working for a shoemaker in New York. But when the Confederacy is defeated, the Union’s problems are far from over. The veterans return home, but the jobs aren’t there. Poverty is rife, safety at work is nonexistent, life is still cheap, and riots are frequent.
Where does “Sander” Klaus fit into this? For a lot of the monologue, it appears to be a story of living with PTSD. That, however, turns out to be only a feeder to the main theme. Klaus develops a side-line in making toys. When loses his beloved family and he embarks on a fruitless search to meet them, he ends up giving toys away as gifts. If you haven’t already twigged, read the name out loud again. The toys. The big white beard. The love for his own daughter stretching to a love for children in general – all at a time when one toy means the world to some children. Yes, this is a clever fictionalisation of a new Santa Claus origin story.
However, I do feel Hege held his cards too close to his chest here. The challenge with biopic plays (and plays that sound like biopics) is that this can end up with a focus on one event. Then the next event. Then the next event. Then the next event. My instinct is that the Santa Claus parallel should be introduced from the start. An elderly veteran who’s missing a leg is not that unusual – but what if he introduced himself by offering a toy to a needy child? There is a counter-argument that you will lose the opportunity to surprise the audience later, but my feeling is that a teaser to keep the audience interested in the rest of the play is more valuable. How is a man struggling to support a young family in New York a Santa Claus origin story? Still, even with the structure as it is, it’s a lovely concept. Hege paints an in-depth portrait of a city struggling with the aftermath of a civil war, and puts into it a welcome celebration of kindness.
Monday 14th August, 11.00 a.m.:
Now, here’s one thing I’ve suddenly realised. Anyone who was around last year will remember how heavily the Big Four were pushing edfest.com. The Big Four have been running a joint publicity and ticketing operation for years (the best known and most controversial being the “Edinburgh Comedy Festival” branding). However, last year some big names were added to this: Just the Tonic, Zoo, Dance Base and – most eyebrow-raising – Summerhall. With so much of the publicity being the best curated programme in Edinburgh. Speculation arose from people hoping/dreading this was preparing to break away from official Edinburgh Fringe with edfringe.com.
This year, however, it’s all gone quiet. I had a look to see what edfest.com currently shows. It’s still there, just not being so heavily publicised. The line-up has changed though. As expected the Big Four are still there. Zoo and Just the Tonic are also still there. However, Dance Base and Summerhall – the two most heavily curated venues – have left. And the unexpected change: theSpace is in. This is unexpected because theSpace is not a (fully) curated venue – much of its programming works on first come first served. I will stress this yet again: it is vital there are venues that programme that way. But it’s not somethig you would expect from a line-up that was making such a big deal of curation last year.
This doesn’t mean a breakaway won’t be attempted, but I think it does make it a lot less likely. I have my doubts over whether curation as per Big Four is that much better in quality than open programming, but if that was ever indented as a selling point, it isn’t now. And we can probably safely rule out a breakaway geared at turning Edinburgh into a vetted festival. That, I maintain, would be a huge step backwards for a festival that, for all its faults, plays a vital role in giving everybody a chance. And with so much uncertainty created during 2022, this is a complication I’m happy to do without.
Monday 14th August, 9.00 a.m. – The Importance of Being … Earnest?
I first reviewed this for Brighton Fringe 2021. It was supposed to a streamed version of the live show they were doing that year, but for various reasons I ended up looking at an early version to a smaller audience, presumably pre-2020. (To the best of my knowledge, Say It Again Sorry do not run highly-illegal lockdown-breaking events, but I’ll let you know if I spot Piers Corbyn in the audience.) It’s never quite the same as watching in person though, and also I’d been told the show has been updated since then. So I have now checked this out. You’ll need a pretty good memory to notice what’s changed, but the few things have have changed – particularly towards the end – are changes for the better.
The central premise, however, is the same. Algernon and Lane are discussing champagne and cucumber sandwiches, awaiting the eagerly-anticipated arrival of Earnest. Or rather (giving the cheers of the people who already know what to expect), the eagerly-anticipated non-arrival of Earnest – this actor has decided he’s got something better to do. Only one thing for it – someone from the audience will have to step in. In this case, it’s somebody who obviously doesn’t know the Oscar Wilde play at all. With no available copies of the script, the rest of the cast have to find various ways to prompt replacement Earnest through the play.
This is a miked up play – I generally don’t encourage this, although I accept that the logistics of this might make it necessary. But if you’re going to do this, it’s compulsory to have the bit where they forgot to turn off the mics in the wings – in this case, Cecily abandoning the performance before her first appearance in Act 2. Also absent are Dr. Chasuble and Miss Prism, necessitating more improvised solutions and more stand-ins with the audience. In the original version this ended up taking a life of its own, with the more and more members audience taking on roles invented on the spot, until the entire audience are on stage – but sadly you can only fit a finite number of people on stage and in this larger version this excess had to be cut.
There’s a couple of things the reworked version does better though. One weakness I see with most plays about putting on plays – even greatest hits such as Noises Off – is that they keep sacrificing character plausibility for gags. This version of Earnest? gets a lot more disciplined. Much as I loved Lady Bracknell’s question to replacement-Earnest of “How would you rate your ability to satisfy Gwendolynn in the bedroom on a scale from 1-10”, that isn’t really compatible with her character of a no-nonsense veteran actress (who has no problem with a tipple before performance, but just a tipple – unlike freshly-dumped Gwendolyn), so this has to go. The main change, however, is winding up the ending. Again, most play-within-play plays lose track of running a plot at the end. Now, however, we have a climax to the plot. Which Earnest do we prefer? Original Earnest or replcement Earnest? (Spoiler: original Earnest makes the choice very easy for us.)
There will always be a place in my heart for Three’s Company’s The Importance of Being Frank, with a similar level of audience interaction, only this time it’s a question to prevent a descendent of Jack and Gwendolyn starting World War Three. But this is the play that made it, and it’s in a similar spirit. For all the madcap chaos, it takes a lot of origination to carry something like this off. This is comedy first and theatre second, but it’s good fun whatever your level of Wilde expertise.
Sunday 13th August, 9.00 p.m. – The Big Bite Size Breakfast Show:
One thing I haven’t yet covered is the return of Bite Size. To recap, what started off as the smallest of small-scale productions in 2006 grew to become one of the biggest-selling returning events at the Pleasance. In the years leading up to 2018, they ran to near sell-outs in Queen Dome, and in 2019 finally moved to a bigger space. Then came that event. In 2022, when Edinburgh Fringe was mostly back to normal, Bite Size was not amongst the returnees. It seems this was one of the many groups that had fallen apart in the down period of 2020-2021. There was one cause for hope though: the founder Nick Brice did a talk on the Bite Size story, billed as a fundraiser for a possible return. And now, Bite Size are back, after a gap of three years eleven months.
One important change to Bite Size was the transition to a true ensemble company. In the early days the only constant force was founder Nick Brice. In the late 2010s, however, the same actors came back year on year and took an increasingly big role in the artistic direction. Crucially – in spite of the departure of long-standing stalwarts Billy Knowelden and Cassandra Hodges – most of the ensemble has held together. I’m not sure Bite Size would have had so much longevity without being this sort of team.
But … even if you can bring an ensemble back, audiences have a nasty habit of forgetting about you if you’re away to long. Could Bite Size hold on to their audience as well as their actors? It turns out the answer is yes. It’s hard to make an exact comparison is they’re in a different space from 2019, but my general impression is that it’s about the same. The photo above is from the Monday of week 1 – if any performances were going to sell out it was the 2 for 1 days, and it is. Rest of the performances appear to be close to full but not sell-outs. Looks like their reputation has a long shelf life.
One small but interesting detail I noticed is that they’ve kept the arrangement for the furniture for all 16 plays to be at the back of the stage. My understanding was that in 2019, this was done entirely out of practicality as that’s where their set was being stored. This time, however, I believe they are going through the trouble of arranging everything for each performance. I liked this touch, as the furniture at the back serves as a teaser for what’s still to come – and I guess the Bite Size team thought the same.
As usual, I’ll save my list of plays I rate the most until I’ve seen all three sets – I’ve currently only seen two. However, the one I will pick out now is The Improv Class. It looks like an Improv class from hell where the instructor has a favourite and the other one has to go along with everything he say. But there is more to meets the eye, and this takes dark turn I never saw coming. That’s part of menu 2, so if you only have time to see one, pick that one.
Right, 4 plays seen today, one to go. Time to move again.
Sunday 13th August, 4.00 p.m. – Rites of Passage:
This is an unusual play to review, in that what’s being performed is quite different from what was originally planned. Luntu Masiza and Oliver Van Dan Hende are RADA graduates who originally developed separate projects talking about the lives: one in post-Apartheid South Africa to Birmingham and again, and the on a journey starting and finishing with the French diaspora in Cambodia. There is no crossover between the two timelines, but it was decided to present both stories together, with the two of them observing and interacting with each other’s narration.
It would not be unreasonable to doubt the workability of two different stories in the same play – but this works much better than you might think. By accident more than anything, there is a strong common theme through both stories of teenagers and young men navigating worlds full of pressure to masculine ideal. The forms it manifests itself in vary hugely, but it’s rarely a force for the better. Oliver’s story begins with a proud moment for his father when as a child he achieves a seemingly impossible dive to retrieve a lost fishing spear, but after that it goes downhill. Whether it’s the same father later cajoling his son to settle differences by fighting, or posturing within an inner-city, the pressure to be a “real man” doesn’t do much good. Even when there’s pressure for something not traditionally masculine – in this case playing the cello – the ultra-competitive nature of a son doing his father proud is not healthy.
There are echoes of Athol Fugard in this writing. This might not be a coincidence – Luntu Masiza was directed by John Kani in The Island, and John Kani was one of Fugard’s principal collaborators. Either way, the South African part of the script has a lot of nuance over the complex relations to race. Immigration law in the UK (and the limbo many people are left in) plays a part in the story here, but a less expected thread is prejudice from Black British for Black non-British, which I had no idea was a thing. I’m sure Athol Fugard and co would approve.
There’s just one problem with with this. When you have two intertwining monologues, the expectation is always that they will eventually interact. What happens when Luntu and Oliver’s paths finally cross. Instead, just as things are starting to get really interesting … it ends. Probably not much you can do about that, because you’re yet again constrained by real life. (I suppose you could have the two of them agreeing to collaborate on this project, but I wouldn’t recommend it as it would probably come across as self-indulgent.) Other than that, it’s a good job done, and an impressive standard of writing.
Sunday 13th August, 9.00 a.m. – Mr. Fox:
And the very last review from visit one is something I’ve been trying to catch for a couple of years. Polis Loizou’s piece did very well at Buxton Fringe 2021, and after missing so many interesting-looking Off-off-off-broadway plays in previous years, I was determined to catch this one. Spolier warning for this one
This is a solo play and story within a story – with a difference. Mr. Fox itself is a little-known piece of folklore (not to be confused with Fantastic Mr. Fox, unless the nemesis of Boggis, Bunce and Bean has kept a sinister past very quiet). Lady Mary lives a luxurious life in her home with her brothers. She is intelligent, capable, and also going a good job of working her way through the entire aristocracy. Until she meets Mr. Fox, for whom she falls head over heels. And then, days before the wedding, she grows a little suspicious of the fact he knows so little about her true love, and so does a little bit of investigating.
The Mr. Fox story itself is told in Loizou’s own style which is easy to recognise. The narrator he plays, however, is also a shady character. Confronts by a journalist or blogger or something over a scandal he’s implicated in, it quickly becomes clear he has a disdainful attitude towards poor people. Also women, although to start with, it’s possible his contempt to with one particular woman who got in his way; by the end, however, it’s enough to make even Andrew Tate say “Whoah, steady on, that’s a bit much.” At the end of the Mr. Fox tale, with his plot exposed, and plotting to murder your sister generally looked on dimly by aristocratic gentlemen, Mr. Fox gets his comeuppance. But, just a second – did our narrator just say Mr. Fox is the victim?
Yes, Polis is an engaging storyteller of the folklore, but his real strength of this is the character he plays on stage who starts off talking calmly and rationally, but who turns out to be completely insane, especially towards the end when he’s obviously guilty and he’s digging himself into a deeper hole. There’s only one thing that doesn’t quite make sense, and that’s the way the story within the story is focused on an sympathetic towards Lady Mary (as per the original), when the person telling the story turns out to not be on her side at all. We’ll have to put that one down to artistic licence. Other than that, this does not disappoint, and its acclaim earned at Buxton Fringe two years ago is deserved.
Saturday 12th August, 9.30 p.m. – Casting the Runes:
Phew. Another 5-play day today, which I want to start writing up tomorrow. Before then, let’s see if I can wrap up what I saw last time round.
So, let’s move on to Box Tale Soup. You need an excellent track record to go straight to Safe Choice in my picks, but Antonia Christophers and Noel Byrne have done plenty over the last few years to show that they’re safe bets. They first made their name for themselves with the gentle Austen story Northanger Abbey, but even that showed potential for a side-interest they have in gothic horror. This has become more prevalent in their recent productions, and their latest production has embraced the suspense and tension like no other.
Casting the Runes is probably the least well-known of all the stories Box Tale Soup has adapted into their signature format, but it was still an idea choice for them. Originally a short ghost story written in 1911, it follows Edward Dunning a lecturer and sceptic dedicated to debunking the supernatural. He’s made many enemies, but unfortunately one enemy he was mistaken to make was Mr. Karswell. The last enemy of Mr. Karswell, John Harrington, died under mysterious circumstances – and as time goes by it increasingly looks like he placed an ancient curse on both men. Only his last victim’s brother is on to his occult ways – can he find a way of outwitting Karswell before it’s too late?
In common with many of their adaptations, Christopehrs and Byrne play the lead two parts, with puppets playing the supporting characters. Noel Byrne plays Edward Dunning, and Antonia Christophers plays what’s now John Harrington’s sister. The two of them are very much working to their strengths here, but it pays off handsomely. It starts off very much in the easily explained rational world that Edward Dunning is used to, but progressively makes a transition to the stranger – at first, within the realms of trickery, but as time goes on, it become less explainable through rational thought and increasingly moves into the supernatural.
This isn’t quite the first time Box Tale Soup have done this play. It’s been done before, but the reviews weren’t that great the first time round. I get the impression that this play, unlike their others, is very critical on getting some stage effects right (see this and you’ll understand why), and perhaps the first time round it wasn’t quite pulled off. But this time round it was pulled off flawlessly, with an exquisitely-executed jump scare towards the end. It’s a bold concept, and you really need to know what you’re doing to pull this off, but Box Tale Soup certainly do.
Saturday 12th August, 3.45 p.m:
I’ve now had my first visit to Greenside Infirmary Street. Greenside is amongst what I consider to be ten major venues. In Brighton and Buxton there had been lots of changes in the last decade; and yet in Edinburgh, this is rare. It is news when a major venue moves out of its main location, and this is one of those moment. 2023 is the last fringe where Greenside operates out of its main hub on Infirmary Street. Next year, the building (known as the South Bridge Resource Centre outside of August) is probably going to be part of this new Fringe Community Hub. And not everybody’s happy with this.
Some of the criticisms are ones I consider unfair. Why spend £8 million on a fringe hub? Why not the artist?. A subsidy to artists would, I think, have been a mistake. If you divided that money to artists over 10 years, that would be about £250 per entry – which is peanuts for an Edinburgh Fringe budget. Worse, Edinburgh Fringe exists in an equilibrium. Throw money at making it affordable, more people can afford to go, demand squeezes supply any more, prices go up, and you’re back to square one. And when it’s gone, it’s gone. Hence the case for making a capital investment: something that is a one-off expenditure, maybe a costly one, but once you have it, you have it for good, delivering benefits. At least, that’s the case in theory.
What it unclear is exactly what benefit this delivers. The South Bridge Resource Centre is already a community hub. At least one of the groups that is resident there is going to be staying in the fringe community hub, and other groups could too. I really like the idea of Edinburgh Fringe giving something back to the community the other eleven months of the year – but I’m struggling to see what the Fringe Community Hub is giving that the South Bridge Resource Centre doesn’t.
The one thing that does appear to be of a benefit is a permanent location for Fringe Central. Anyone who’s taken part in Edinburgh Fringe in any capacity knows how useful as resource this is, but they’ve never managed to secure a permanent location and it keeps moving about. So yes, a reliable Fringe Central location will be a good thing – but I’m not convinced the hassle of relocating Greenside is worth it. Apart from Fringe Central, I’m not sure exactly what they’re trying to achieve. The most cynical interpretation is that the Government and Edinburgh Fringe decided on a capital investment once, and tried to think of something to do with it later.
Who knows, maybe the best thing for Edinburgh Fringe would have been to invest in the alternatives to Edinburgh. Or I might come back in 2024 and see benefits I hadn’t realised were coming. As always, we’ll see.
Saturday 12th August, 8.30 a.m. – Character Flaw:
Apologies, lengthy preamble needed on this one.
I might be going easy on performances where perfortmers talk about themselves, but I made an effort to see this one. Much as I’m wary about calling pieces “important”, I’ve said before that it’s important that neurodivergent people get to talk about themselves in theatre – and it’s especially important to do this in open festivals such as Edinburgh. Curated programmes are liable to be curated to whichever depiction validates what the programmers already think, but in the open festivals, eveybody is free to tell it like it is.
The other thing to declare upfront is that I’m revewing this from the perspective of someone on the autistic spectrum (which will come as no surprisen to my regulars who are used to be banging on about this. Phillipa Dawson’s performance is about ADHD rather than autism, but there’s a nit overlap between the two, and some people are diagnosed with both. In fact, one of the reason I wanted to see this was to get an idea of what’s different and what’s the same. Short answer: this is going to be a complicated one to unpick. But that’s enough about me. We are supposed to be reviewing a play here.
So … Character Flaw is a rare example of a performance that is classed as theatre, but could also have been classed as stand-up comedy (albeit heavily choreographed stand-up comedy). Pip arrives on stage late for her own show – the message from the outset that organisation is not Pip’s strong point. Pip goes into stories of various mishaps brought upon by her wandering mind, frequently involving not listening to platform alterations, not reading labels about plant/cat poison (don’t worry, the cat was okay) and leaving baths running. A character introduced early on is Pip’s wandering mind. In fact, a lot of the script is controlled by the voice in her head changing the subject to something completely different in mid flow.
The danger of this type of self-deprecation is that, if you’re not careful, you can end up validating stupid prejudices. However, Character Flaw does more than enough to steer clear of this. Dawson wisely rounds out her on-stage character to be more than a neurodivergence, with her list of things to achieve also playing a heavy role in the story. Late on, however, the performance makes a big point of steering away from “Oops, what am I like?” when things really do get overwhelming.
From a theatre perspective, of there’s one thing I would change, I would bring the themes at the end forward a bit. We don’t, for example, hear much about the positive side of “hyperfocus”. The bit at the end about going on medication and losing the inner voice does potentially carry a powerful message that taking away that bit of you is more like taking away the whole person – my hunch is that a lot more could be said that. But we are working within the constraints of real life, and if it doesn’t work that way, it doesn’t. Like many autobigraphical monologues, it’s a memoir and manifesto first and play second, but it does what it set out to do, both in the script and the production values. Worth seeing.
Friday 11th August:
We are approaching weekend 1. This is becoming an unofficial “half-way” point of Edinburgh Fringe, because lots of slots in spaces are split into two: one show running weeks 0 and 1 (usually starting on Wednesday in week 0) and another for weeks 2 and 3. So normally I would be posting alist of what’s finishing this week.
Surprisingly, however, there’s only one thing in my pick list that’s ending this weekend, and that’s Mr. Fox. This is a story-within-a-story from Polis Loizou of wealthy heiress Lady Mary who marries a mysterious with a lot of a skeletons in his cupboard (and I’m not necessarily being metaphorical here) – but the man telling this story has secrets of his own. Review coming, in the meantime you can read one from Richard Stamp. Last performance on Saturday, Paradise at the Vault, 4.55 p.m.
Ending slightly later (Wednesday next week) is Salamander, set in the 1980s when the Police finally start reaching out to sex workers trying to gain their trust – but the sex workers are used to looking out for each other, and there’s also a woman with troubles who you didn’t expect. Sold very well last year, Assembly Roxy, 6.55 p.m.
And in my Durham Fringe shoes, a reminder that we’ve got five of mine ending this weekend: The Rotting Hart (ends Sunday), Hysterical Artefacts (Saturday), Drop Dead (Saturday), Ramalama Ding Dong (Sunday) and There’s a Monkion in my Attic (Saturday). Scroll to 6th August, 11.30 for details.
And finally for now, one bit of breaking news that Edinburgh Fringe are reporting 1 million ticket sales so far. To draw a meaningful comparison, we really need to know to number for this time last year, but Edinburgh Fringe calls this “optimistic”. Stay with us as we find out if this gets backed up by data – and maybe a revisit of the discussion on whether more sales is actually a good thing.
Back tomorrow. See you soon.
Thursday 10th October – Please Love Me:
So now we’re on to the first of the heavyweights. Five years ago, Clementine Bogg-Hargroves was embarking on her fringe journey at the Greater Manchester Fringe; last year, Skank was one one the biggest hits. So now comes a follow-up, and the thing I hadn’t realised: this is her own story. There creation in Skank, it seems, is more autobiographical than I’d previously assumed.
I have two anecdotal observations about autobiographical performances this fringe. The first is that there seem to be a lot of them this time round – three of the ten performances I’ve seen so far are of this format, and I’ve lost count of the number of press releases of shows in this format. The other observations – and this is just anecdotal and might be wrong – is I’m detecting some weariness over this. Last year, grumblings were limited to the more jaded and cynical reviewer; I’m now seeing this go more mainstream. What this does mean if that if you’re going to go down this route, you’ve got to work harder to make it stand out from all the others.
Superficially, the distinguishing features of Please Love Me is the pole-dancing. The real distinguishing feature, though, is something more fundamental. It’s about two related things: a popular culture that sets you value by how hot you look and how much sex you’re having; and the disdain you got from large swathes of society for doing exactly that (or when you’re dealing with people who go to strip clubs, basically both at once). Rather than a blow-by-blow account of her life, this story is told entirely within these two themes. If you’ve seen Anna Jordan’s Freak, there are heavy parallels here – except that this is real life.
Many autobiographical plays make the mistake of turning it into a score-settling session. This, however, takes the approach of just telling this as they are, and let you make up your own mind. Her own faults are not glossed over. Usual caveat applies: we are only hearing one side of the story, the on-off boyfriend who frequently features may have a different version of events. However, at face value – he does seem like a bit of a wanker. She admits to being unfaithful early in the relationship, but what follows comes across as a nefarious way of using her guilt to keep control over her. “Please love me”, she wants – but the problem with doomed relationships is that hope springs eternal. Long after it’s obvious to everyone else that you need to end it (and we will see no shortage of reasons why).
Slut-shaming plays a heavy role in the story too. Apart from the guilt trip, there’s also the attitude of the strip club where she worked. I frankly wasn’t expecting the clientele of any strip club to be anything other than complete wankers – but it was still galling to hear how they lived down to expectations. And there’s the even worse place to be than a strip club, which was sadly not that surprising when you think about it. I wouldn’t blame Bogg-Hargroves if her intended message was a request to not be a complete wanker, but that’s not really the point. The purpose of this is to be loved for what she is. This is best viewed as the companion performance to Skank – but we now know the origin story of that hit play is darker than I assumed.
Wednesday 9th August – Late Bloomers’ Tales
Before I commence on this review, I should first give a recap on what being a “theatre” reviewer actually means. There was a time when I looked at the theatre sections of the fringe programmes and nowhere else, but I quickly learned it wasn’t that simple. Some shows billed as theatre are more like comedy, and some shows in other categories I would have counted as theatre – including some of the best performances I’ve seen. And so Late Bloomers’ Tales is in the cabaret section, tagged as theatre and music.
Anna Vanosi is both a singer and actor, with all of her performances being heavily and entirely music based. This show is some songs intertwines with some accounts of her own life of being a “late bloomer”. We hear stories of how her sister was designated as the pretty one from an early age, going backpacking in her thirties amongst all the tweens, and the different world of her grandparents who fell in love at early ages and stayed together their whole lives.
There are two challenges to performances talking about your own life on stage. The first is that lots of performances do this, and you have to work VERY hard to stand out from all the others. (I wasn’t actively looking for this myself, and 3 out of 10 shows I’ve seen so far are of this format.) The other issue is that, most of the time, real life doesn’t actually lend itself that well to theatre. In fiction, you can choose and order events to ramp up tension, plant early clues to become relevant later or pretty much any writing device you like – but with real life, you’re stuck with what you’ve got. The sister designated as the pretty one would have been a promising hook in a conventional play – but in the script that’s the last we hear of it. The bit about Anna’s grandparents is nice and sentimental, but there’s nothing earlier in the play to lead up to this. The stories will, however, be relatable to anyone who considers their lives to have not gone down a straight path. I for one express full solidarity to anyone going backpacking in their thirties.
But the strength of Late Bloomers’ Tales lies firmly in the music. I am a theatre reviewer and not a music reviewer so I don’;’t have much to compare this to, but I was really impressed with both the arrangements and the vocal performances of the musical numbers. Some are well performed conventional jazz standards, some are alternative takes of well-known jazz tunes – but by far the best ones were arrangements of tunes whose originals weren’t actually jazz numbers. Vanosi’s performances of Skin and Make Your Feel My Love were not only wonderful to listen to, but made to sound like they’d been written as jazz standards all along. Late Bloomers’ Tales performed at theSpace last year, but this year it’s at the Jazz bar which is so much better suited to this. Recommended for the music, and the last two performances are tonight and tomorrow at 8.30 p.m. Or if you’d rather just have the music, there’s a couple of performances of her jazz trio at 4.00 p.m. on the 15th and 27th.
Tuesday 8th August – The Madwoman:
I came across the Miles Sisters during the hybrid fringe of 2021. That year, only the most determined performers and punters turned up in person, which meant a lot more appeared online. One of the ones that I really liked was The Little Glass Slipper, performed by the Queen of France and her Friend, where Marie Antionette casts herself as Cinderella on the night of the storming of Bastille – and it soon becomes clear she’s too naive to understand how much she’s alienating society. Sadly, that play is probably too complex to bring to the Edinburgh fringe. But instead we have a solo play also set in revolutionary France, and once again the theme of naivety plays a heavy role.
Meet Anne-Josèphe Théroigne de Méricourt (Cara Johnston), locked away in an asylum writing the words of an opera nobody will hear. Although not as famous/notorious as Marie Antionette, she was quite a cause celebre of her day. The first than that struck me, after the enforced unsexiness of Zelda Fitzgerald, in this asylum Méricourt is permitted all the make-up she wants – only slightly dampened by her black teeth. After all, it’s 1817, where toothpaste and dentists haven’t been invented yet.
As with Zelda Fitzgerald, the full story of Theroigne de Mericourt is far too complex to put in one play. This is a bit more of a free-form telling that The Last Flapper, with imagination sometimes used for dramatic purposes. One request I do make is to be completely upfront about any liberties you’ve taken with history. It’s fine to fill in the gaps, pick sides when details are disputed, or simplify events to keep an audience’s interests, but if you do that, I think you should say so. This comment is not specifically for this play – lots of plays take much more flagrant liberties, and I think it would be good practice across the dramatic arts to be transparent about it.
However, whilst there may be some short cuts over her biographical details, there are two historical backdrops that are very believable, both very relevant to her life. The first is how social mobility works in pre-revolution France – in her case, rising from peasantry in Belgium by first becoming a travel companion of a wealthy but but lonely woman, and later as the mistress of a wealthier English gentleman. (Spoiler: when it comes to pooping the question, she’s beneath him for marriage material.) The second is the French revolution, and more specifically the Reign of Terror that followed. Contrary to the simplistic version of the guillotine, being wealthy didn’t spell doom, nor did being a peasant promise safety. Eventually, the guillotine was dealt out of basically anyone not showing sufficient enthusiasm for previous guillotinings. The theory advanced here is that she may or may not have been mad, but the reason she was declared mad was to save her from a mob set on her execution.
I personally would have run this play for 60 minutes rather than 40. Although this is a nice self-contained monologue, there’s so many biographical details that are whizzed through that could have provided a lot more interest. I’d have to save seen a lot more about how she became a poster child for the revolution and how she fell out of favour when the revolution spilt into factions. And we didn’t hear much about how, during her time in the asylum, the entire rise and fall of Napoleon and the return of the French Monarchy occurred. Hopefully outside of fringe constraints we can see more of this. But what Cara and Courtney Johnston have clearly carved out for themselves is a colourful and visually striking style of tales of innocence and naivety over one of the most unforgiving chapters of history. And long may this continue.
Monday 7th August, 9.30 p.m.: We’ll Have Nun of It
This was originally a Durham Student Theatre production that I saw an online version of in 2020 and is now at a Big Four Edinburgh Fringe venue. For those of you unfamiliar with progression of student productions to Edinburgh Fringe, most of them appear at theSpace or Greenside. You should never read too much into which venue a show is programmed into – after all, I’ve seen some great shows in both of the venues I’ve mentioned. But to go straight to programming in a Big Four venue for what started as a student production is a big coup.
We’ll Have Nun of It is based on the experiences of director/writer Rosie Dart’s grandmother who emigrated from Ireland and attended a Catholic convent school in the 1950s, as well as the composer-writer whose mother also attended Convent school.
The reason for getting programmed into Underbelly probably comes down to the productions values. I did have trouble following the 2020 online version (which, to be fair, was an informal video recording from the year before which suddenly became the only form of streaming available), but the live version shows just how good it is. There’s an on-stage ensemble of five, all signing in harmony, playing their instruments, and often switching between instruments between scenes. What’s more, Sister Sister productions makes all of this look easy. But trust me on this, it’s not. And the fact that an until-recently student production has pulled something off on the same level as fully-professional productions is remarkable.
Annoyingly, however, the musical talent extravaganza on show comes at a price. The problem with musicals is that during musical numbers, the story stops. Songs are good for characters expressing how they feel, but offer little other opportunities to advance the plot. And the plot itself is multiple parallel threads of different girls’ stories: one girl taking interest in the magazines of a fledgeling feminist movement; another coping with the death of her mother back home and her father taking a new woman; and, most notably, the girl who notices something isn’t right when the most touchy-feely Father in the school takes too much of an interest in her. When the little time allocated to dialogue is divided further between these stories, there’s little time to give these plot threads more than a cursory glance. The other issue with switching between multiple stories is it’s difficult to keep track of which story we’re currently on. For this reason, I would resist the temptation to use musical instruments to represent other items. I kept up with what was going on, but only just. Other audience members might not have been so fortunate.
I think We’ll Have Nun of It would have the most to offer outside of the fringe environment where there isn’t the pressure on time and there’s freedom to go into more depth. The other option would be a fundamental rewrite with songs that constantly advance the plot, but that’s a very difficult one to pull off and I wouldn’t recommend it unless you’re feeling very reckless. Sister Sister productions are dripping with musical talent, but at the moment the story is too constrained to live up to its full potential. But make this a full-length musical, and who knows? In the meantime, the hour-long version is showing in Underbelly Cowgate at 3.50 p.m.
Monday 7th August, 6.30 p.m.:
I am picking up some early signals that sales at this Edinburgh Fringe are good. Don’t read too much into the number of sell-outs today – the Monday and Tuesday of Week 1 are 2 for 1 days, which are very popular with Edinburgh locals. But based on the accounts I’m hearing so far, the mood is that sales are up.
Treat anecdotes with caution; anecdotes have been wrong before, only the figures released at the end of the fringe are conclusive evidence. But the anecdotes I’m currently hearing are in line with observations from other fringes. Brighton fringe was confirmed as up, and I’m confident Buxton Fringe’s figures were up to (although that’s hard to confirm due to the lack of a centralised ticketing system). And the fact that the fringes have held their own during the height of a cost of living crisis can probably be treated as good news.
Monday 7th August, 4.00 p.m. – The Last Flapper:
Having seen my first day of shows, it’s time to get these into reviews. The first one is the story of Zelda Fitzgerald. Before her a remarkable comeback as Princess of Hyrule and getting that Link kid to rescue her every few years, Zelda was known as “the first flapper” thanks to the celebrity life she and her famous husband had. Now her husband is dead and she is committed to a mental institution with schizophrenia.
One of the tricks of a good production is an initial appearance that gives an immediate message. In this case, the first thing we notice is that this Zelda looks like the opposite of a flapper, in a dress that “suits all occasions”. The reason is that her religiously conservative family get a lot of say in which institution she gets put in and its ethos, and it later becomes clear that her family never approved of her Gatsbyeqsue lifestyle. With her doctor having failed to turn up for a weekly appointment, Zelda takes the opportunity to look at her own file. From the way she talks rationally, you might wonder if she’s actually mad at all – might she have been put away by a husband wanting her out the way? But then the voices come – and this is a handy theatrical device to start talking about the past.
There are vast numbers of books written about both F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, and it would be impossible write a comprehensive account of their lives in an hour’s play. Instead, any depiction is going to be edited highlights. The publicity for this play made a heavy focus on the treatment of women in mental institutions. I’m not sure that’s an entirely fair summary – in the 1940s you were buggered if declared legally mad regardless. (And, let’s face in, the 1940s you could do a lot worse than John Hopkins Hospital.) But it does nonetheless portray the powerlessness of an entire system stacked against you. A family who considers you an embarrassment, and (whilst alive) a famous and powerful husband who sees you as a liability, and medical authorities who are impossible to argue with.
What the play has heavy parallels with is the characters from F Scott Fitzgerald’s books. Scott and Zelda in their heyday could have been lifted straight out of The Great Gatsby – who were in turn heavily inspired by the societies they moved in. The two of them were just as hedonistic and liberated as the characters from the books – unfortunately, they also had the parallels of infidelity and self-destruction. Zelda’s mission to kiss every boy in her Alabama home town after her engagement, and Scott’s descent into alcoholism when his career’s not going so great, and numerous other thing paint a romance that was just as doomed as Jay and Daisy’s.
The thing that makes this play shine, however, is Catherine D. DuBord’s performance as Zelda, going through the whole range of emotions. From the joy of an exciting engagement to the way she’s trapped now, and always an underlying frustration of a system that doesn’t take her seriously, DuBord captures all of it. In the interests of accuracy, I do need to state that most historians now believe Zelda was probably bipolar rather than schizophrenic. Also, the play’s publicity states she has hours left to live, but there’s not really anything in the play that alludes to the fire that is going to come. However, neither of these things really matter. This is a revival that stands or falls on the strength of the performances, and DuBord nails it. You can see this at Greenside Riddle’s Court at 1.45 p.m. until the 19th.
Sunday 6th August, 11.30 p.m.:
And my first day’s visit is done. Card crisis mitigated, five performances seen, of which four are for review.
So now a brief break from my theatre reviewer shoes into my venue manager shoes. The City Theatre Durham hosted 14 acts last week, of which several are going to Edinburgh Fringe. The following are currently running:
The Rotting Hart, a queer horror set in rural Spain at the time when homosexuality was punishable by death – if the werewolves don’t get you first. 7.00 p.m. Scottish Storytelling Centre.
Aaron Simmonds: Baby Steps: Wheelchair-user Aaron Simmonds on the challenge he set himself to stand up. 4.25 p.m., Pleasance Courtyard.
Hysterical Artefacts, an improvised show as a museum team show an artefact shows by you and gives a renactment of the famous event with up to 100% historical accuracy. Like when plucky Harold fired an arrow into William’s eye. (N.B. “Up to 100%” includes the number zero.) The Space @ Surgeon’s Hall, 10.15 p.m.
Drop Dead, a black comedy where relatives are invited to commemorate a not-yet-departed gentleman for a meticulous funeral rehearsal. What can possible go wrong? The Space @ Niddry Street, 9.30 p.m.
Ramalama Ding Dong, Roshi Nasehi’s experiemntal multimedia piece about racist chanting she and others experienced. Summerhall, 9.55 p.m.
With the City last year rather than this year, but Hooky Productions are doing There’s a Monkion in my Atticon Bludabus at 9.40 p.m. No kidnapping of Benedict Cumberbatch this time, but be careful what the Monkions ask you to sign.
All run until next weekend, except Aaron Simmonds which goes the whole fringe.
Right. Bed time.
Sunday 6th August, 7.30 p.m. – Dave Bibby, Baby Dinosaur:
Well, today’s been quite an adventure. Massive panic this morning when I realised I’ve left my bank card at home. Not possible to withdraw money from a bank on a Sunday – apparently, HSBC thinks we spend our Sundays going to church and praying. Somebody has now kindly lent some money, so that’s all sorted, except navigating a fringe that almost entire works on card payments now.
Anyway, there’s one more performance from Buxton Fringe I want to get review in time for Edinburgh, and it’s Dave Bibby’s show, which can best be summarised as what was supposed to have been a meticulously performed one-man Jurassic Park – but then along came a kid and Dave didn’t have time to plan that sort of show any more. But don’t worry – maybe with the help of the audience we can complete this after all.
It’s a very interactive show – no-one gets shown up, but there’s a clipboard passed round with lines that may or may not have been in the original Spielberg film. Interspersed with this, however, are accounts of being a comedian also bringing up a baby son, soon to be a toddler son. As with most comedy giving real-life events, some caution should be paid and anecdotes may have been embellished. However, a strong contender for wholesome moment of the year is Bibby’s dinosaur-obsessed child playing the part of the Tyrannosaurus Rex. (Also, if your first teenage crush was Ellie Satler but you’re now married, Dave Bibby might have the solution for you.)
However, you might notice as we approach the end of the hour that we’re not even halfway through the film yet. Without giving too much of a spoiler, there’s one thing worse for your arts career than bring up one kid, and you don’t need to be Sherlock to guess what it is. It looks like Dave Bibby’s one-man Jurassic Park will never be finished, unless …well, it’ll make sense when you need it.
This is in the comedy category for both Buxton and Edinburgh, and firmly belongs there, so don’t expect any tightly-directed re-enactment, but that’s not the point. It’s ultimately a celebration of how losing your creative time to family time is worth it. It’s running until the 20th on the Free Fringe, and it’s a pity it’s in an 18+ venue as it’s a very family-friendly show. But for a show based on a film where dinosaurs eat people, it’s one of the loveliest shows out there.
Sunday 6th August, 11.30 a.m.:
Sunday 6th August 10.00 a.m.
Okay Edinburgh, here I come.
Saturday 5th August, 9 p.m.:
Phew, almost completed What’s Worth Watching. All the plays are done now – I just need to do some quick descriptions of my comedy picks.
Before I get too stuck in the fringe though, I want to address the big elephant in the room from last week, which is the acquittal of Kevin Spacey. This has come across as a betrayal to many people, and it might well be that he’s got away with sex crimes. I personally felt there was more evidence against Spacey than there was against Rolf Harris, and Rolf Harris was convicted. However, I have no option in this horrible situation to respect the verdict of the jury. Those of us following the media coverage are only following edited highlights; the jury listened to all of the evidence. When I have more time I might go through the evidence in more detail, and if I have reason to believe it’s wrong, I will say so.
But you can’t convict somebody simply to prove a point. Validating the experiences of victims and sending a message that you can’t get away with this are powerful points, but dispensing the the need to prove guilt is too high a price to pay. Nor should we be judging guilt solely on the number of accusers. Yes, it does take a lot of courage to come forwards knowing you may not be believed, but if you change the rule to X accusers guarantees conviction, you can expect a lot more accusations with no knowing what’s genuine and what’s malicious. One of these days, I might go through the evidence in detail decide for myself if I think the verdict was justified, but until now I’ll have to respect the people who’ve already done that job.
However, it is important to remember what the verdict actually means. Not Guilty merely means there wasn’t enough evidence to prove guilt beyond reasonable doubt. The jury may have thought he was guilty on the balance of probabilities. It’s even more to remember that a not guilty verdict is not proof any of the accusers were lying – not unless a criminal conviction is later secured against a confuser (and I can’t see anywhere near the evidence needed to suspect someone of perjury). Finally, it should be remembered that it is possible to do stuff that is utterly morally repugnant but not actually illegal (Noel Clarke is probably a good example there). You can argue that for people in position of power, lack of conclusive proof isn’t good enough – they should be taking reasonable measures to show they’re not abusing their power. It would be quite valid to argue you can’t be both an artistic director and a pick-up artists.
However, I suspect the big loser in the saga is going to be the Old Vic. Had Spacey been found guilty, the testimonials would have raised questions over whether the Old Vic was covering up – but I think a not guilty verdict could be even worse. The Old Vic’s own investigation said Spacey was a predator and everyone else was blameless. If Spacey really is innocent after all, he could sue. If he’s guilty but unprovably guilty, he might sue anyway – I don’t see how else he could clear his name in the court of public opinion. One thing’s certain: if a lawsuit does go ahead, things will get very ugly, very quickly.
Or, Kevin Spacey might not need to do anything. Can a Hollywood legend restart his career with suspicions of rape still hanging over him? Precedent says yes: Roman Polaski’s career carried on like nothing had happened, and he was a literal convicted child rapist on the run from the law. Or Kevin Spacey might be motivated by payback. I honestly don;t know what’s going to happen next. It could fizzle out quietly – or it could be the biggest shitshow to hit a theatre.
Saturday 5th August, 3. p.m. – Nation:
Before I head to Edinburgh tomorrow, I want to catch up on some of the performances I saw at Buxton Fringe. Annoyingly, I don’t have time to do a Buxton Fringe roundup between the end of Buxton and the start of Edinburgh (unless someone can lend me a Tardis), but it’s only fair to give a verdict on those shows heading the Edinburgh in time for the big run. I’ve got three to do, and I’ll start with a story from P J Vickers. I saw the first ever public performance at Buxton.
This is more storytelling than a conventional play – you could listen to this as an audio piece and have almost the same experience. Nevertheless, the story creates an in-depth portrait of the fringes of Parisian society. The narrator has left Britain, having needed to make himself scarce after some unspecified messy business, and proceeds to get himself into equally messy business in France. Not because he’s looking for trouble, as such – if anything, he’s getting into trouble for being a stickler for the rules. Especially traffic rules. His first job delivering leaflets falls through because he insists on following parking regulations, and he also gets into numerous scrapes through dogged insistence of rights of way at pedestrian crossings (something that French drivers are famously ambivalent over). On other rules, he’s seemingly more relaxed.
The narrator’s adventures, however, are only half of the story. The other half is life in a semi-underworld of France. Numerous characters come and go with little impact on the main story, but adding up to portray the society he’s wound up in. The setting for this is the aftermath of the 2015 Paris attacks, although to be honest it doesn’t make much difference – this is France, riots happen all the time, with perhaps the only difference is the Police being more paranoid and trigger-happy than normal, as befalls the fate of one associate. Other than that, there’s an air of chaotic normality, such as the local businesses boarding up their windows in advance of a protect they already know will be kicking off later.
I am obliged to mention that on the performance I was at, a bit of the story was skipped that apparently caused a key event later to not make sense. I know from experience it’s hard to avoid skipping your own text in hour-long monologues. However, there is a rule that if something happens in a play that’s important, you should make sure it’s mentioned twice (unless it’s obvious at the time it’s important). Otherwise, people who missed that bit get lost later. As such, I must advise that even when the script is delivered perfectly (and it should be it will be in time for Edinburgh), you do need to concentrate on this. So make sure you have a full-charged brain. Other than that, it’s a good piece of storytelling, where the real story isn’t the narrator’s story, but the numerous stories going on around him.
Friday 4th August:
Eek. Day one and I still haven’t written up my recommendations. Better make a start. Come over to What’s worth watching: Edinburgh Fringe 2023 to see what’s made it into my safe choice list and why. I’ll race through the rest as fast as I can.
In the meantime, I’d better give a bit more info on what’s running. Here’s my recommendations again, but show in Bold are running now, shows in Italics are starting later, and those in Bold Italicsrun the full fringe.
Here we are:
Safe choice:
The Brief Life & Mysterious Death of Boris III, King of Bulgaria The Big Bite Size Breakfast Show Casting the Runes Call Mr. Robeson (alternate days) Groomed Salamander Watson: the final problem Wildcat’s Last Waltz
Bold Choice:
ADULTS Bits ‘n’ Pieces The Good Dad (a love story) Havisham The Madwoman (starts tomorrow) Mr. Fox (starts tomorrow) Nation Please Love Me Trainspotting Live
You might like:
The Grandmothers Grimm The Hunger The Importance of being … Earnest? Tomatoes Tries to Kill Me but Banjos Saved My Life Police Cops: the musical
Wildcards:
14-18 Cyrano de Bergeac (starts Monday) 24, 23, 22 Diana, the Untold and Untrue Story It’s a Motherfucking Pleasure
From the Comedy:
Beehavioural Problems: Something Something autism Biscuit Barrel Dave Bibby: Baby Dinosaur Eleanor Morton: The Ill Advised Character Show (one perf only, 14th Aug) Finlay and Joe: Past Our Bedtime John Robertson: The Dark Room Murder She Didn’t Write Rosie Holt: That’s Politainment Shit-faced Shakespeare Showstopper!
Thursday 3rd August:
So, housekeeping time. Some of you are following this hoping I’ll review you.
Firstly, if you emailed me a press release on or before Tuesday evening, you should by now have received an acknowledgement from me. If you have not received one, please contact me straight away, as this probably means I never got your request in the first place. I am currently putting everything on a calendar, and I will work out schedules around that.
In the interests of transparency, I’m going to say a bit about how I make decisions on what to review. Once again, I’m aiming to be at Edinburgh Fringe for seven days – at the time of writing, I’ve confirmed 6-7 August and 12-14 August, with two days near the end to be decided. Even so, there’s no chance I’ll be able to review everything I’ve been invited to. I can normally manage up to five plays a day – any higher and I lose track of what I’ve seen. I therefore aim to prioritise plays where I’ll be in the best position to say something helpful.
The first thing I bump off the list is stand-up comedy, dance, and classic (pre-19th century) theatre. It’s not that I don’t enjoy these – simply that it’s so different from what I normally review that I wouldn’t know where to start. (If you’re lucky, I may still see you if I have a gap, but you’ll have to be very very lucky.) The next thing I deprioritise are plays that I think wouldn’t appeal to me AND have a different target audience. It’s too complicated to go into detail, but one example is plays pushing a point of view to a target audience who already agrees with them. I think these plays are a waste of time, but I know it’ll go down well with its target audience. I wouldn’t have anything useful to say.
Once I’ve got those off the list, experience shows I’m about to accommodate most of the remaining requests. Whether that is still achievable this year remains to be seem, as requests continue to pour in. Ultimately, however, a lot of this comes down to luck. Some plays easily get on to my review list because it’s the only option of what to see in that time-slot; but every year, for some reason, there’s always one time when I’m flooded with requests. This year, plays around 12 noon and 2 p.m. currently look difficult. But don’t try optimising show timings for review coverage, because whatever works one year will probably change next year.
Finally, one special note for publicists. I am grateful to publicists who send we big lists of shows where I’m welcome to take my pick of any of them. However, I couldn’t possibly see all of these without coming at the expense of everybody else. I therefore recommend that if any of your artists specifically want a review from me, they contact me directly – I appreciate it when it is my feedback, rather than anybody’s feedback, that I’m after. However, if I there’s anything of these lists that I was thinking of seeing anyway, I’ll snap it up.
And I think that’s all. Expect me to come back later when I inevitably remember something I forgot to say.
Wednesday 2nd August:
Although Edinburgh Fringe does not officially start until Friday, there is an argument to say that the real first day of the fringe is today. Plenty of acts are starting their “Week zero” performances with previews today. And if you are running only half the fringe, that usually means you perform until the Sunday of week one – meaning that the preview performances today and tomorrow for a significant chunk of your run.
In which case, I’d better get a move on with my recommendations. I’ll write up all of these in my What’s Worth Watching article as soon as I can, but let’s begin with the list. We have:
Safe choice:
The Brief Life & Mysterious Death of Boris III, King of Bulgaria The Big Bite Size Breakfast Show Casting the Runes Call Mr. Robeson Groomed Salamander Watson: the final problem Wildcat’s Last Waltz
Bold Choice:
ADULTS Bits ‘n’ Pieces Havisham The Good Dad (a love story) Mr. Fox Nation Please Love Me Trainspotting
You might like:
The Importance of being … Earnest? The Grandmothers Grimm The Hunger Tomatoes Tries to Kill Me but Banjos Saved My Life Police Cops: the musical
Wildcards:
14-18 Cyrano de Bergeac 24, 23, 22 Diana, the Untold and Untrue Story It’s a Motherfucking Pleasure
From the Comedy:
Beehavioural Problems: Something Something autism Biscuit Barrel Dave Bibby: Baby Dinosaur The Dark Room Eleanor Morton: The Ill Advised Character Show Finlay and Joe: Past Our Bedtime Murder She Didn’t Write Rosie Holt: That’s Politainment Showstopper!
Just a reminder that shows I worked with for Durham Fringe are not eligible for this list. However, I will step out of my impartial reviewer shoes into my venue manager shoes later to talk about what’s coming from there.
And finally, a reminder that this is not meant to be a comprehensive list. Even though there’s 32 acts here, that’s still only 1% of the programme. Consider this a cross-section of what’s worth watching. There are many great acts out there that I’ve never seen before. As for what’s joining my list of recommendations … stay tuned to find out.
Tuesday 1st August:
So, if you missed the obvious metaphor of the sardine tin, the news that has been dominating Edinburgh Fringe since the end of Covid is overcrowding. In 2019 – the last Edinburgh Fringe of 2019 – there were 3,841 registrations, which was widely considered to be too many. 2020 was of course cancelled, 2021 only went ahead at a token size, which brings us to 2022. Nobody seriously expected 2022 to be a full recovery to 2019 levels, but it still managed 3,131 registrations. Even so, this was considered by many to be too big. Notably, this was about the same size as 2014-ish, but no-one complained then. Why now? Because some landlords, chasing losses from 2020 and 2021, were ramping their prices up to absurd levels. And the laws of supply and demand suggested they might get away with it.
And so we come to this year. Difficult to objectively compare accommodation costs between years, but there was no sign of a respite – if anything, the piss-taking price hikes were getting worse. Would this put performers off? Early signs suggested no, with early bird registrations appearing to be ahead of equivalent figures the year before. And then, just before programme launch, the surprise news was that there were 3,097 registrations, which is as good as no change. Whether you were living in hope or dread of a return to 2019 levels, it is not to be.
Or is it? Brian Ferguson has been monitoring registrations after the programme launch. The conventional wisdom has been that registering after the paper programme has gone out is marketing suicide, but that might not be true any more. Some shows registered late and still had impressive sales thanks to social media marketing campaigns. As of now, there’s 3,640 entries on the web page. This is not quite a like-for-like comparison, as a show play at two venues appears twice on the website but once in the programme, but that’s surely a increase, and not far off 2019 levels (although 2019 may also have grown since programme launch).
There was a debate on Twitter sparked off by me where Robert Peacock and Brian Ferguson made conflicting predictions of a big fall or big growth in numbers, loser buys winner a drink. However, we never decided whether it was programme launch figures or start-of-fringe figures. There’s also a question of how figures square up if you are tallying up individual performances instead of registrations – that will probably not be known until the full stats one out at the end. Based on this, I think we’re going to have to call this a draw.
But but but but but … This could be a moot point. Something will be changing between this year and next year which throws everything into question again. But that’s a story for another day.
Monday 31st July:
Welcome to my month-long Edinburgh Fringe coverage. Apologies to anyone who was waiting for my preview – I’ve had a July packed with a Buxton Fringe visit, a sound design job and venue management for Durham Fringe. I may talk about any or all of those in the upcoming coverage, but for now I will prioritise getting a list of recommendations written up.
Say what you like about Edinburgh Fringe, but so far this decade, no Edinburgh Fringe has been predictable. The Coronavirus crisis may have gone away, but now there’s an accommodation crisis. And the effect on next year’s Edinburgh Fringe will be more unpredictable than this one.
But that’s jumping ahead. The main purpose of this coverage will be reviews. And I’m currently drowning in review requests. Tomorrow when I’ve had a chance to regain on some sleep I will start working through these. I’ll first be with you on Sunday 6th, but before then there’ll be plenty to talk about. Don’t go away.
COMMENT: There is still no end in sight to the crisis that prices people out of Edinburgh Fringe. If the arts industry cares about this, it should end the culture of Edinburgh being the only place to make it big.
As we head into Edinburgh Fringe 2023, we can expect the debate on affordability to flare up again. The one bit of good news is – after all the expectations of this coming – we are not back into runaway growth. Yet. And the one thing we’ve all agreed us that runaway growth is bad, and the #1 reason is the effect on accommodation prices. There’s only a finite amount of accommodation in one city, and when there’s more people wanting rooms than rooms available, you can charge whatever people are prepared to pay. This got a lot worse last year, with a possible cause being landlords chasing losses from 2020 and 2021 and realising they could get away with charging piss-taking amount. (And, of course, there’s the related issue of people in Edinburgh not having anywhere in to live because of all the houses bought up for the August rental market.) Next year, it looks like there’ll be a ban on short-term lets, but no-one seems to know what effect that will have on performers.
Edinburgh Fringe is not being taken over by Etonians with trust funds – mots of the people taking part are finding accommodation a real struggle. One example I have in mind was Triptych Theatre, who had a lot of success with Vermin. I remember, after first seeing this at last year’s Brighton Fringe, how worried Benny, Sally and Michael were about finding somewhere affordable. In the end, they found somewhere expensive-but-as-bad-as-it-might-have-been, and thanks to the success of Vermin (plus a second show that also did rather well) they managed to break even. But this is at the upper end of outcomes: breaking even. An average run would have been a big loss, a bad run would have been horrendous.
So why are people doing this when the financial prospects are so poor? Yes, I know many of us find a fringe fun, but nobody thinks fun compensates for a 10K loss. I’m increasingly coming to the view that people are doing this because they think they have no choice. For many people, Edinburgh Fringe is the only place you have a chance of being noticed, you only chance of moving on to the next step of your career. Indeed, this is how Tryptich Theatre got their their run at the Arcola Theatre. I think it’s fantastic that Edinburgh Fringe gives artists the chance to make it, whilst the rest of the time (pretty much) only those who get the nod are permitted a chance to prove themselves, and I will fight tooth and nail all attempts to bring gatekeeping into the Edinburgh Fringe. But it’s a staggeringly unfair deal. Nobody should be expected to risk five-figure sums in the hope of being accepted as a proper theatre-maker.
COMMENT: Some say it was hate speech, some say it way misunderstood – either way Pleasance mishandled the situation and Jerry Sadowitz has gained from the cancellation.
If you’ve made it this far past the Edinburgh Fringe without hearing about the Jerry Sadowitz fiasco, well done. For the rest of you, I’m sorry to have to remind you of this. But just when we thought that all of the arguments over the decisions made by the Festival Fringe Society were dying down, this blew up.
So, Jerry Sadowitz is a comedian who I’d never heard of and would probably continued to have never heard of were it not for a couple of performances at Pleasance EICC in the second weekend on Edinburgh Fringe. (Fringe Newbies: EICC is one of the biggest venues on the fringe, which the biggest of big name comedians perform at.) Out of the blue, the second of the two performances got cancelled. A bit of puzzlement at first, accompanied by some nerves – after all, the last known cancellation imposed on artists was one of the most notorious McCarthyite affairs in the history of the fringe. Then word got round about what it was he said and did that led to this. A lot of argument over what he meant, but on the face of it: holy shit. If anything was going to get you booted from a venue, this would.
The Fringe itself is open access, but the venues themselves are free to do what they want, and the decision to cancel was The Pleasance’s. This led to a big debate over freedom of speech at the Edinburgh Fringe. I gave some thoughts at the time, but now things have calmed down, it’s time to give some more.
A lot of the debate has been polarised by ideological leanings. For many people who’ve expressed an opinion one way or the other, it strongly looks like they made up their mind first and looked for argument to support their position second. So I should probably remind you at this point that I am myself very anti-censorship and pro-artistic freedom – although these comments, on the face of it, pushes my patience to the limit. You’ll have to decide your yourself if you trust me to be objective.
And finally, later than planned, I get my summary of Edinburgh Fringe into one place. And, boy, what a wild ride this was.
In a way, 2022 was the year that caught everybody out. 2020 was, of course, a dire year. Whilst other fringes found a way to struggle on, this one was outright cancelled. 2021 was even more of a panic, with suspiciously strict social distancing rules applying to live entertainment (but not bars) and the lack of financial help raising alarm bells that 2021 Fringe might be good as cancelled. In the end, some last-minute concessions enabled a small-scale version to go ahead that only to most determined of fringegoers attended. But by summer 2022, fears of Coronavirus were much receded. Time for a relaunch, Edinburgh Fringe home and dry right? Wrong.
In hindsight, there are two root problems we underestimated. Firstly, racing back to full strength isn’t actually that popular. Few people remember the record-breaking size of the 2019 fringe with much fondness, and a 2022 fringe that was 83% of the size of 2019 brought back worries of the old problems of Edinburgh Fringe returning. In particular, the supply and demand problem of too many people, not enough city, was pushing rents sky high. The other problem was money. In spite of numerous bailouts from the Scottish Government and other sources, The Festival Fringe Society was facing a big financial squeeze. The most visible part of the fringe was always the venues, but the Festival Fringe Society did a lot of stuff in the background that was mostly taken for granted. This time, we learned the hard way what happens when it’s cut back.
In my opinion, the fundamental mistake Edinburgh Fringe made was making was trying to please everybody. You can do everything you can to make the Fringe accessible to all and give everyone a fair chance of being a success. Or you can make Edinburgh Fringe the place to be for all the greatest acts in the world and pull all the stops to make it a springboard to go on to greater things. But you cannot do both, and most of the time, what you do to promote one comes at the expense of the other. If anything, attempting to please everyone resulted in pleasing no-one.
The main purpose of the roundups is to put things in one place, but first we need a list of what happened with the fringe as a whole. Brace yourselves.
What went down at Edinburgh Fringe 2022
My in-depth coverage of my thoughts as the fringe unfolded are in my live coverage. This is the summary – for more details, and what I wrote at the time, scroll to the relevant date.
Accommodation costs: (From 15th May during Brighton Fringe coverage.) The debate that dominated the Edinburgh Fringe in the run-up were the accommodation costs in the city. Normally, I put the expense of Edinburgh down to supply and demand, and with more people wanting to take part than the city can physically accommodate, expenses would inevitably go up. However, this time there seemed to be another factor in play. Anecdotally, there were reports of landlord whose main source of income was Edinburgh Fringe lets, who – having lost their income in both 2020 and 2021 – chased their losses with extortionate rents in 2022. Edinburgh Fringe tried to offset this by sourcing accommodation, but it was little more than a drop in the ocean. I heard more complaints about this than anything else in the run-up to the fringe.
Whether this actually stopped people going is unclear. 83% of 2019 levels suggests it wasn’t that much of a deterrent, although it’s possible this figure was artificially inflated by people from 2020 and 2021 delaying their plans to this year. Edinburgh Fringe says they recognise there is still more work to do here; whether they can actually find any more accommodation remains to be seen. I maintain that the root problem is trying to pack in too many acts into one festival and the solution is to spread the load over other festivals – but it looks like that won’t be happening just yet.
App: (Original coverage: 5th August, 10.00 a.m.) And then came the decision that, in hindsight, Edinburgh Fringe came to regret very quickly. Amongst the many economisations made this year, the Festival Fringe Society chose not to bother with an app. Unfortunately, they learned the hard way just how many acts see this at the most important service from the Festival Fringe Society. Why? Because the “Nearby and Now” feature – where the app lists performances starting in the next few minutes at venues near you – an important way of getting an audience. Now, the Festival Fringe Society said there was going to be a feature on the website that would do the same thing. But it was never publicised and, to be honest, I couldn’t get it work. And I test apps in my day job, so how is anyone else supposed to know how to use it?
Whether this did harm small acts is unclear – I’ve no idea if getting an audience through to app is just anecdotes or proper data. Personally, I think the Fringe’s biggest failure here was management of expectations. It is true to say that an app was not part of the advertised service from the registration fee, but without clearly stating it wouldn’t be there, lots of people registered on the assumption it would. Had they made it clear from the outset that not everything from 2019 would be around in 2022, there would have been fewer arguments. Anyway, Edinburgh Fringe is going to have an app next year – but Brighton Fringe has now decided to drop theirs. The decision is, shall I say, brave.
Media support: (Original coverage: 6th August, 3.00 p.m.) At the start of the Fringe, another decision was made that was, in hindsight, ill-advised. There were a lot of concerns that reviewers might not come back to Edinburgh, and even in 2019 about a third of shows ran the festival without a single review – which is a big problem if you intend to apply for funding. Edinburgh Fringe’s response was to provide free accommodation for some publications – but the problem was that instead of prolific publications such as Broadway Baby and The Wee Review, it mainly went to the Broadsheets. Broadway Baby ended up pulling out of Meet the Media in protest.
Don’t get me wrong – the Broadsheet reviews perform a function the dedicated fringe websites can’t offer: praise from a publication with a national profile can catapult a successful production into the big time. But the problem is that the broadsheets only review shows that are already highly regarded by arts journalists – it is up to other publications to review far and wide and give everyone a fair chance of recognition. These are two media strands performing different services, and ideally you should have both, but if it was the choice of supporting one or the other, this was the wrong call. The Festival Fringe Society should have prioritised what was the most use to the most acts – if the big venues want their biggest name productions in the national press, they have the means to provide their own support
Less flyering? (Original coverage: 14th August, 2.00 p.m.) A big thing was made of cutting down on paper, and getting rid of flyers was advocated by many people. Have to say, I was sceptical about this. It was pointed out (hats off to Richard Stamp) that Summerhall want flaunting their environmental worthiness with big neon lights saying “FLYER FREE” above the masses of paper that are their programmes. But, more widely, I think this misses the point that paper usage of flyers varies enormously. If you are out and about on the streets excitedly telling people about what you’re doing and believing it, it’s the talking that’s doing the marketing, not the flyer – the flyer is simply a reminder of what you pitched for later. Do it that way, and you won’t get round to using many flyers. “Flyer spamming” (as I like to call it), on the other hand, is a pretty wasteful process. I have lost count of the number of times I’ve had a flyer shoved into my hands and paid no attention to what was on it.
In that respect, I think there has been an improvement. It’s wasteful enough indiscriminately shoving flyers into people’s hands, but even more wasteful – not to mention stupidly expensive – to pay other people (who have nothing to do without you show) to hand out flyers for you. That practice, I’m happy to say, seems to be on the decline, and I hope it stays that way. In the end, however, the dustbin strike showed that there’s plenty of litter piling up in Edinburgh that’s not Edinburgh Fringe. Maybe flyers have been too harshly blamed after all.
Offensive comedy: (Original coverage: 13th August, 5.00 p.m. and 17th August) Just when it looks like the controversy at the start of the fringe had died down, a brand new one appeared. Jerry Sadowitz was supposed to be performing for two nights, but after complaints of the first performance, the second one was cancelled. The Pleasance weren’t clear on exactly what he said that warranted booting, but after some choice quotes about Rishi Sunak’s skin colour came to light, we had a pretty good idea. Sadowitz’s defence is that there’s a lot of “exaggerated irony and nonsense”. I’ve never really subscribed to the argument of he didn’t really mean it”, but it is fair to note that he considers himself to not be the same as the Jim Davidson / Cubby Brown / Bernard Manning crowd – and his fans seem to as well.
I will in due course write up my thoughts, of which I have a lot. However, the one obvious thing that springs to mind is – if the Pleasance thought this was unacceptable – why the hell they booked him in the first. He was already notorious for this sort of thing, and I don’t understand what he did this time round that was different. Why ban someone for saying exactly the thing you expected him to say all along? Whatever the reason, this led to a bit of inter-venue fighting, with the manager of Assembly being particularly scathing. Undecided on whether Pleasance were morally right, but they handled it badly. If Sadowitz is taken on by Assembly next year – and I suspect he will – he’ll have the Streisand effect on his side. I fear Pleasance will come to regret this next year.
Fringe Central: This was a side-story, but it still attracted a considerable amount of ire. Most of what you see at the Edinburgh Fringe is third-party venues. The most visible presence of the Edinburgh Fringe itself for punters is the Royal Mile (where they curate the street entertainment) and the box office. However, for performers, the biggest presence is Fringe Central, a facility for performers and press to unwind, network, and host events specifically aimed at them. Or rather, it was. It’s not cheap to rent this space, and when a shopping centre offered to rent out a space for free, they went with that. Unfortunately, that was in the New Town and nowhere near any fringe venue, and the role of Fringe Central was reduced to a place for the administrative tasks that absolutely couldn’t be done anywhere else.
Sadly, I don’t think there was much choice here – spending had to be cut, something had to go, and the only thing I think the Festival Fringe Society could have done better was expectation management. What I don’t understand is why Edinburgh University (who own the space Fringe Central normally used) didn’t just let them rent the space out cheaply. It’s not like that space was going to be used for anything else. Edinburgh University gets a huge windfall from the Edinburgh Fringe; I wonder if, for once, they got a bit too greedy and everybody lost.
Half-price ticket hut: (Original coverage: 12th August, 3.30 p.m.) If there’s one controversy that I felt was unearned, it was the departure of the half-price ticket hut as we know it. In before times, this was a separate ticket office for shows that reduced the price of an allocation of tickets on the day. It was deliberately kept inconvenient enough to stop people buying full-price tickets from holding out for half-price offers, but easy enough for people looking for something to see to take up. This year, with the physical structure for the half-price ticket hut falling to bit, the half-price hut and normal box office have, in effect, been merged.
I actually think this was a good move. The one change from the pandemic that isn’t going back is the rise of online sales, and it makes no sense to maintain the same level of in-person booths if they’re not being used. I’ve written about the mechanism elsewhere, but in effect the half-price tickets now have the same principle: enough of a faff to only be taken up by the people looking for this, but not too inconvenient to fall into disuse. In summary: move along, nothing to see here.
Sales: (Original coverage: 12th August, 3.30 p.m.) And finally, the numbers everyone was waiting for: the ticket sales. With the massively diminished 2021 festival basically useless as a comparator, everyone was looking comparing it against the 2019 levels. There were a lot of panicky headline about sales falling by 27%. However, with the number of shows falling by 17%, this worked out as a fall of 12%. Still a notable fall, but not too bad compared to the rumours of doom and gloom circulating in weeks 2 and 3.
To be honest, however, nobody knows what these figures actually mean. In normal years, you can read a lot into these figures: 10% growth in ticket sales against 5% growth in registrations is good; 5% growth in ticket sales against 10% growth in registrations is bad. Comparing 2019 to 2022, however, has a lot of extra variables that nobody seems to fully understand. And then there’s the question on whether growth is a good thing anyway. If expectations for sales in 2023 are pushed down and fewer people come, is that necessary bad? After all, a lot of people though the 2022 fringe was too big.
That feeds into questions about what 2023 holds for Edinburgh. I will return to this when I close the article. But that’s enough for now. Let’s get on with some reviews.
Pick of the Fringe
We start with the top tier. After two years of lenient judging on the fringe circuit, we’re not back to a fiercely contested category, and some plays that would have walked it in less contested years were squeezed out. So if you’re in this list, well done, you’ve beaten off some tough competition.
Gulliver
I only had to wait until my second day for this is happen, but for Box Tale Soup it’s been a longer wait. But it’s about time they got my highest accolade.
I expected Jonanthan Swift’s famous story to be ideal for Box Tale Soup to take on – after all, you have to take on the challenge of tiny people in Lilliput and gigantic people in Brobdingnag somehow, and puppetry is the logical way to do it. However, Noel Byrne and Antonia Christophers have had years of practice and several previous productions to hone their craft, and it pays off handsomely.
What you see on stage is a playbook of everything crafted to perfection. The obvious choice of the tiny people of Lilliput is puppets, and as any accomplished puppeteer knows, it is possible to keep the focus on a puppet but still make the puppeteer part for the action. All of the cast of three operate puppets at some point, and it always pays to apply the facial expression of the puppet you’re operating. However, Box Tale Soup are very versatile and masterfully switch between Lilliputians played by puppets and the actors playing the Lilliputians themselves. When the land of giants comes, the obvious choice is to make Gulliver the puppet himself, but not always. When a human-size Gulliver views is first giant – well, I won’t spoil that for you, but let’s just say the set of the doomed ship used at the beginning of the play has all shorts of uses through the hour.
No amount of clever puppetry, though, compensates for a misunderstood story. Here, again, Clarke and Christophers deliver handsomely. In all four of the strange lands visited (for this adaptation does include the lesser-told chapters of the flying island and the land where horses are masters), the politics are reflections of human society, commentating on just about every acts of vanity, cruelty, vindictiveness, prejudice and arrogance known to man. The Lulliputians, for instance, are at war with their neighbours over a stupid dispute on the correct way to open an egg. (We, of course, know the correct thing to fight centuries of war over is who got the details correct in a story of a magic baby and a stable.) It’s not just the shortcomings of these other lands that is brought to bear – Gulliver find the vales of the continent he came from challenged just as much. The common theme brought throughout this is all civilisations thinks they’re better than the others. Even the Houyhnhnms – the horse beings seemingly the most enlightened of all the beings he encountered – always look down on Gulliver is inferior to them.
It’s a challenge to bring four separate stories together in an hour, but the script chooses what matters perfectly. Everything about this production is flawless, from the choreography to the sound, to the pace to the puppetry, and if I was to wax lyrical about every inventive acts I would never finish this review. I am used to Box Tale soup producing high-quality shows in their unique style, but this time they have excelled themselves. I thoroughly recommend this to everyone, and you can catch them at 10.50 a.m. at Underbelly Cowgate from now to the end of the fringe.
An Audience with Stuart Bagcliffe
Triptych Theatre impressed we the Brighton Fringe with Vermin. That was one of two plays; the other one I couldn’t catch owning to timings, but I was keen to see the other one. One of the first things I noticed as the play begin was that most people in the audience – possibly everyone but me – was seeing this as a comedy, as socially awkward Stuart takes to the stage. In spite of the title, he is possibly the least prepared person for any audience. Nor does it help that the techie seems to miss most of the cues.
I wasn’t laughing though. Not because of the delivery, but because of what I just knew was coming. For a start, with this being the same writer as the dark-as-hell Vermin with its graphic descriptions of animal cruelty (not to mention playing the nutjob-in-chief himself), I knew something bad was coming. Even if I hadn’t know that, though, I probably would have guessed. It’s pretty obvious from the outset that not only is Stuart unsuited the stage and doesn’t really want to do it, there’s no way he should be forced to do this. Instead, it’s his pushy mother making him do this. For another thing, Stuart has a rare medical condition with his blood, but to be honest, that’s not his real problem. Stuart is very naive and trusting. I know from bitter experience what this leads to.
Benny Ainsworth’s writing of both plays shows just how good he is at characterisation. If Vermin writes a believable character guilty of some of the worst things, Stuart is written as the archetypal innocent. He assumes that the correct way to answer a question about density of water is to ask if it’s solid or liquid, not understanding the science teacher is an arrogant egotists who hates anyone putting a foot out of place. Stuart’s mother is a nuanced character, and whilst I can’t quite let her off the hook for keeping her child under her thumb, she still cares for her son and wants what she believes is best for him. Even when things happen that would be dismissed as far-fetched, Ainsworth finds a way to make it plausible.
There is just one thing about the story which doesn’t quite work. Much of the story surrounds his first love Daisy, who understands him the way the rest of the school doesn’t. Trying my hardest to not to do a spoiler, Stuart and Daisy both separately get mixed up in something worse that overbearing parents or arrogant teachers. I can easily see why Stuart would have fallen for it, but I found it hard to believe that level-headed Daisy would have fallen for it too. I can’t see any easy way of making this plot point more believable, but it was a shame to have this weak point amongst such good characterisation.
That’s the only criticism I have amongst two excellent plays though. This is truly is an achievement. I’ve seen groups come out of nowhere with one excellent play, but two excellent pays on the first attempt is very impressive. I highly recommend catching both – this one at 10.55 a.m at Zoo Playground, with Vermin at 1.00 p.m. at Gilded Balloon Teviot. But know what you’re letting yourself in for.
Ghislaine/Gabler
One of the big news stories at the start of the year was the trial of Ghislaine Maxwell, now proven as Jeffrey Epstein’s number one accomplice. But whilst it’s easy to guess what made Epstein do what he did, there is the puzzle over Ghislaine. Why did she do it? She certainly had far from a normal childhood – a controlling father and children competing to be his favourite (something that she finally succeeded in doing) – but how do get from that to chief conspirator for a systemic abuser?
Obvious caveat before we proceed: this is a play, not a documentary. The only person who might know what is going through Ghislaine Maxwell’s head is Ghislaine Maxwell – this is only speculation of what she might be thinking. Nevertheless, Kristin Winters’ depiction is one that has been observed in countless abusers and sex offenders: they don’t think they’ve done anything wrong. They may deny doing what they’re accused of, but even then they don’t really think the thing they were accused of doing is that bad. At this point I should give a content warning for the play. I know I’ve been getting heavy on content warnings lately – I try to avoid them when it’s obvious from the title, but this one is pretty full-on with the victim-blaming. Sometimes Winters switches to playing the victims – little about the abuse itself but a heavy focus on the exploitation of their naivety. Back as Ghislaine, she insists she was doing all these teenage girls a favour when she did all the things she denies doing but obviously did.
How does Hedda Gabler fit into this? It’s only a small part of the performance, and you could probably have run the rest of the play without this bit. Nevertheless, on the occasions this parallel is used, the gamble works. In this depiction, Ghislaine admires Hedda Gabler – but for all the wrong reasons. Hedda shows her true colours as the play goes on over how much of a controlling individual she is and that she can’t help herself, perhaps a rationalisation of her like-minded father. The one exception she insists on is that the Maxwells don’t give in. They don’t commit suicide, so it must have been murdered – but Ghislaine only reveals the level of delusion she shares with her fictional role model.
I think it’s fair to say this is going to be a Marmite play. Not everyone is going to be comfortable with the way this subject material is portrayed, essential though it is to the concept. The parallel to Hedda Gabler is a wild idea which I suspect is going to split opinion. If this isn’t the sort of thing you want to see, I don’t blame you. But see it if you can. Many plays are fast to condemn the worst things that happen in the word, but few try to understand.
Make-Up
For this review, I must declare a conflict of interest. I think a play has room for improvement, I will suggest how – and until now, that’s been the end of that. No Logo productions, however, have been keen to stressed to me that that have specifically acted on my feedback from this play what originally saw online for Brighton Fringe 2020. Under these circumstances, it is very tempting to say that the revised version is great and congratulate myself for giving such good feedback, but that temptation must be resisted at all costs. I’ll leave it up to you whether or not you believe me, but it is my honest opinion that this has changed the play for the better.
Lady Christina, drag artists extraordinaire, is leaving the stage. In the dressing room, glamorous Christina undergoes the transition back to plain old humdrum Chris. Chris expresses some mild snark over these newcomers to the drag scene who think it’s a quick ticket to Ru Paul’s Drag Race. However, the day has arrived when Chris discovers he looks like his estranged father. The one who threw him out for being gay. The weak point with the original is that plays about a gay man and his relationship to a homophobic father are ten a penny. What stood to be interesting was the fantasy world of Christina, with her imagined father who was everything his real dad is not – but that was only an aside. It would be a lot more interesting, I thought, if we heard more about Chris’s alter ego. Clearly Lady Christina means more to Chris than a drag act – but what is it about her that’s so important?
Well, I can sort-of take credit for the idea (not full credit, I gather other people said similar things), but I can’t claim credit for the solution. Andy Moseley now works Lady Christina’s backstory (as imaged by Chris) throughout the play. At some points, Lady Christina’s life is completely different from reality, sometimes different from Chris’s family, other times different from Chris. At other times, however, Chris lifts his own life into Christina’s – every comeback he could have made against the bullies at school, how she won over the cool kids. I won’t tell you the best touch into how Christina came into being, though. That’s too close to the end, too much of a spoiler, but it does a lot to explain why Chris can never leave Christina behind.
I just have one small issue. There’s a slightly confusing lighting cue at the beginning of the play. The rectangle implies that Lady Christina is in the door of her dressing room, but if I have understood the text correctly, she’s still on stage addressing her fans. If that’s the case, I’d have though a spotlight would make more sense. Other than that, good job done. I will give a health warning here and advise that it doesn’t always pay to act on feedback given by a reviewer, not even me – if the reviewer doesn’t share your vision it will only make it worse. On this occasion, however, I’m very happy with the way it’s gone, so thanks a lot to No Logo for persuading me to give this another chance.
Svengali
It was a coincidence – but I ended up seeing three plays about sexual abuse. This one was a little different from the other two though. All three were good – but this time I wasn’t sure I’m picking up the message I was supposed to pick. But it didn’t matter; the ambiguity, intended or not, worked in its favour.
The start of this play wrong-footed me for a while. The play is openly advertised as a reimagining of a classic character for the #MeToo era, but without knowing anything about the source material I just saw Chloe-Ann Tylor on stage in a suit – I assumed her to be victim preparing to give a testimony to court. To her, tennis is everything. She considers the soft-porn quality of tennis appealing. For a moment, I wonder if this is another victim-blaming narrative being set up, and it’s only a few minutes the penny drops: Tylor isn’t playing the victim, Tylor is playing the perpetrator. But unlike the other two plays, where the perpetrators were after sex, this perpetrator – who idolising the Svengali for the source book – is a lot more interested in control. Sex, it seems, is simply the icing on the cake. And, unfortunately, our Svengali-superfan is doing pretty well in the job as a coach. With chosen young player Trilby storming the major tournaments, nothing is questioned. Controlling behaviour that would set alarm bells ringing anywhere else is accepted as a normal part of the relationship between mentor and protege.
One thing the stood out for me is that in this story, nothing this coach does is anywhere near breaking any law I know of – but it is still the most morally repugnant thing imaginable. I wasn’t entirely wrong when I thought a victim-blaming narrative was being built up. Trilby might be destined for phenomenal stardom on the tennis courts, but if that’s got anything to do with being the chosen protege, the reason’s a distant third at best. It’s pretty obvious Svengali is more interested in how pretty she is … but more still, how vulnerable she is. She was previously in an unhealthy relationship a more assertive woman might have bailed on sooner – and one suspects the thinking here is that if she can stumble into one unhealthy relationship, she can stumble into another. (I do think one problem that is being underestimated is opportunist predators choosing their targets based on who has the lowest self-esteem – if that was the intention to flag this here, it did the job.)
Now for the bit where I wondered it I’d interpreted it different to writer Eve Nicol’s intentions. After establishing Tylor is playing the perpetrator, for the next 20 minutes or so I assumed she was playing a woman married to another woman with an eye on a third woman. In fact, I think there were only a few words said by her character that unambiguously make him a man. I understand the ambiguity was not Eve Nicol’s primary intention of the casting, but she ended up liking the idea of the ambiguity, and I liked it too. Some reviewers call this a portrayal of male power, but I see this as taking gender out of it. Why does it matter? The controlling and coercive behaviour was equally plausible whether it was from a domineering man or a domineering woman. It is also equally appalling either way. If anything, what this play does is show just how much it comes down to who has the power, and what you have to do to get that power in the first place. Some reviewers have criticised the end of the play for indeterminably switching to Trilby narrating, and yes, it took me a couple of minutes to think “Wait, are we hearing Trilby’s story now … yes we are.” I personally liked that experience, though I appreciate it might not work so well if this is your 12th play and your brain is running on empty.
When I looked up the original, a final thing occurred to me. In the original book, Trilby isn’t a tennis superstar, she’s a singer superstar – but the one discipline other than sports that is notorious for controlling relationships is the arts. Mentors can have a huge amount of power over proteges, and controlling behaviour that would set every red flag flying elsewhere are all to often accepted in the arts as artistic temperament. In this sports-based retelling, Svengali’s power over Trilby wanes as she become more and more popular with the crowds and he can no longer isolate her – and in the arts, Harvey Weinstein suffered a similar fate when his power waned. If this ambiguity is a feature and not a bug, this play gives you a lot to think about however you perceive it.
Sugar
There are two things notable about Sugar. Whilst the fringe circuit has mostly moved on from the online programme pioneered over the last two years, some of the biggest successes have been remembered and brought back in person – it seems The Space’s efforts to be part of the temporary online programme have paid off in this regard. The other thing is that this is a prime example of why I think the current system of content warnings doesn’t work. Sugar contains subject material that I’m pretty sure some people really don’t want to relive, but it would not be possible to spell it out without giving away how this play goes. I am going to spell it out here because it’s not possible to review this without giving the theme, and on that note, please consider this your spoiler warning.
The tagline of Sugar is “One Girl. Five Ages. Many Morally Ambiguous Life Choices.” Between the ages of 6 and 18, Mae (written and performed by Mabel Thomas) tells the stories of her madcap adventures in a sort-of hybrid of Just William and Derry Girls. Whether it’s her scheming at 6 years old to get the coveted raffle prize of a day with the headmaster in a fast food place, her foray into entrepreneurship at ten or her underhand tactic to boost her grade point average at 16, the story is kept light-hearted with warmth and humour. Until we reach 18½. The cheapest higher education she can find is impossible to afford. And her latest get-rich-quick scheme is to get a sugar daddy. I already have a bad feeling about this.
In a different play, I might question what the point was of the first five of these six chapters. Story-wise, they have little to do with what happens at the end. But that’s not really the point here. We are not building up a story as such, we are building up a character. Why is Mae embarking on something which is so obviously dangerous and out of her depth? Because for the last twelve years of her life, she has built up a lot of misplaced confidence. It’s true that she’s got her way most of the time, but it’s a lot more down to luck than her ability to talk her way out of any trouble. It’s not so much an overestimation of her own abilities, but an underestimation of what a big bad world it is out there. Until now, she’s lived in a relatively innocent and sheltered world where the stakes are low. In the world of sugar daddies and sugar babies she’s stepping into, there are people more ruthless, more amoral and more exploitative than anything Mae can imagine. Whatever petty lying and cheating she’s done up to now, she doesn’t deserve this.
There is one piece of subtext about this play I liked, and I’m not sure how much is deliberate and how much is accidental. There is the obvious question of how there is any justice in some awful people have incomprehensibly vast amounts of wealth. But the more subtle question is the attitude to people without the money. The only reason Mae is doing this is to get enough money to pay for a community college. As the girl from the poorest family at school, the safe and morally accepted route means no money, no higher education, and perhaps a lifetime of soul-crushing minimum wage jobs. Over here, there would be at least some protests over this situation, but in the leafier parts of Wisconsin, it’s just accepted as completely normal. Neither Mae nor anyone else questions this – just the way it is, and that’s that.
So yes, I must advise you that, contrary to what the title might imply, this play is a lot less sugary than the title and first two thirds may lead you to believe. This play has a lot to say, and it’s not just trap many plays fall into that Good Things and Good and Bad Things or Bad, but other less comfortable subjects about the dangers of naivety from a sheltered youth, and how some of the worst people out there can get away with some of the worst things. Recommended, but brace yourself for the final uncomfortable chapter.
The Bush
How do you make a story about a protest movement into a play? In the case of The Bush, it’s about a local protest to save a piece of rural land with local sentimental attachment in 1970s. The trouble with these sorts of stories is that real life doesn’t lend itself that well to scripted drama. I am a great believer in writing events that keep the viewers’ attention: one event leads to another and another, this things happens every now and then to change the course of the story. Real campaigns, however, tend to consist of a set of little events largely unrelated to each other adding up to an outcome one way or the other. The other problem particular to this one is that the decisive moment that saved Kelly’s Bush was a coincidence never alluded to before (because nobody knew). In fiction that would be decried as a contrived way of ending the story. But this is what really happened. What do you do?
The way Alice Mary Cooper makes this work is making the story just about the people in the protest movement as the campaign. Of course, stories about liberated/hedonistic campaign movements behind worthy causes are done to death, but this works by being exactly the opposite of what you’d expect: a prim and proper collection of suburban housewives, as middle-class as you can be. Being the 1970s, the men have jobs and the women stay at home, but the men barely feature in the story, always referred to in the party where the movement is founded as somebody’s husband. Regardless of campaigning activity underway, it always seems to be running parallel with a drive to provide the most sublime cooking, with assorted kitchen disasters turned around with initiative and years of culinary experience. Somehow they find time to save Kelly’s Bush whilst juggling school commitments. When they form an alliance with a construction union, and one of them mildly flirts with a housewife who’s never been flirted with for ten years, she turns beetroot. What might have been a dry play that was difficult to follow is made into a story with warm humour.
Alice Mary Cooper’s preferred format is third-person storytelling. Whilst I personally would have preferred her previous work, Waves, to have been done in first person, it makes more sense here when the story is about a protest movement rather than a political character. The obvious question whenever a play is done in this format: why do it on stage at all? Why not just do it as a podcast? The answer is that Alice Mary Cooper is very good at making her storytelling visual, sometimes using naturalistic props, and sometimes repurposing them into new uses, pulling every trick in the book to keep the play visually engaging. The only downside I can see with the solo format is that I completely lost track on which housewife was this. It doesn’t matter too much as the focus of the play is on the cause rather than the individuals, but maybe there were some characters arcs I was supposed to pick up that I lost.
This play has been touring for six weeks in outdoor spaces similar to Kelly’s Bush, which I reckon would have suited it well. I was optimistic expectations for this one and Alice Mary Cooper delivered about an unlikely bunch of dissidents.
The Land of Lost Content
It happened for the second time this fringe. But the last time this happened it came from a front runner who I already expected to do well. It’s a different thing when it comes out of nowhere.
Henry and Judd are sitting at the bar table in the pub, the Flat Earth in, of the rural village they grew up in. They have been best friends since childhood, but there used to be more of them. This is not some idyllic sleepy town from a Hovis advert, however, but a deprived town with a lot of people struggling and – more relevantly – a lot of boredom. Their teenage years were spent mostly drinking and getting stoned because there wasn’t anything else to do. And, in a way, they are the lucky ones. Other teenagers the same age as them go through worse things.
The Land of Lost Content is written by Henry Madd, playing Henry, and his heavily based on his own memories of his teenage years in this town. A lot of memories involve the 292 bus which somehow seems to serve everywhere you could possible want to go; other memories are more dangerous actt of recklessness. To some extent, this is a similar format to Sandcastles which stormed the reviews over at Assembly George Square. It’s set as a memory play, with the story told in a non-linear format going back and forth in time from the Year 7 disco where Judd joined the class as the insecure new kid taken under Henry’s wing, to years as the class clown sneaking in booze to school proms, to definitive moments in their twenties that made Henry and Judd what they are today. It also make heavy use to soundscapes, used to wonderful effect here.
But there is one crucial thing that Henry Madd does much better here. Rather than just memories of teenage parties and holidays after exams, Henry and Judd and their other friends have all been through so much together. And it’s when you stick to each other through thick and thin that you can truly understand how much their friendship means to them. Even when there’s bullying from bigger boys, you can quickly see they’re in the same situation of boredom and low life prospects, merely being slightly ahead in the pecking order. Not all of the time though. There are some bad people in the town, and Henry’s closest two female friends come off particularly from the dregs in society. The saddest part of the story is that Henry can see the lives of his friends falling apart around him – but whilst his friends are there for him to pull him back from the darkest moments, try as he might, he doesn’t know how to do the same when they need him.
Writing so closely about your own life experiences is always a risky game; a play can only ever be a simplification of real life, and all sorts of things can go wrong when distilling it into an hour. You might steer clear of uncomfortable details that stop the on-stage story making sense, and even events that happened in real life can come across as not ringing true. Not here – I never doubted at any point the believability of these characters and the vulnerability that stopped them doing more when things mattered the most. If there’s one thing I would hope for a re-run, I felt a cast of two men struggled a little with the female parts, so a third female actor might help the format. Whatever format this returns in, you must see this – but bring the hankies.
Second Summer of Love
Writer/director Emmy Happisburgh plays Louise, now a respectable wife to a respected headmaster – but in her youth in the early 1990s she was part of the “Second Summer of Love”. This was when there was the craze for the illegal rave, and rather than do the sensible thing and just create a legal version with the music but without the drug, they passed absurd laws banning music with repetitive beats (which the rave DJs took as a challenge to create non-repetitive drum beats). Honestly, if they were that bothered about it, John Major, Norman Lamont and Michael Heseltine should have embraced it and performed their own set, instantly rendering the whole rave scene so toe-curling no self-respecting teenager would have anything to do with it.
Anyway, I digress. Louise was a raver, and misses her hedonistic rave days, drug-taking included. The one vice she allows herself today is to go to “ravercise”, which is like Zumba but with rave music, glow sticks, and middle-aged housewives wondering about what to cook their kids for tea. Not at all the same as the real rave, as Louise fondly remember the trip to her first. Amongst the many things we learn from the 20-minute sequence covering this is that she previous went to an all-girls’ school. One suspects going to a rave is the first bit of excitement she’s had in her life – and no, her stunning singing voice doesn’t come anywhere near. In fact, the whole progression of Louise’s life is portrayed convincingly, with her life choices after her rave days leading back to boredom explained well.
The clever thing about the story, however, is how Louise’s story unravels. Her ultra-romanticised version of the story glosses over all the bad bits. To be fair to Louise, she doesn’t know how her rave sweetheart has become even more of a disappointment than she is (a policy wonk for the Conservative Party, I believe), but there’s other things she’s chosen to ignore. The friends who suffered lasting damage from the drug taking. When you think about it, the most telling part is how she airbrushed out the damage it did to her own life. She tells herself the high point was taking a super-powered pills that kept her awake for 72 hours, mental or what? But one side-effect of that was sleeping for a week, missing an audition, and the end of her aspirations to be a singer. An exciting life that could have lasted far longer than five years of raving. It is going to take others to tell her exactly what her rave days cost her.
I’m not convinced this is that well suited to a solo play. Although Happisburgh does a good job of switching between characters, there’s only so long you can do both sides of a conversation before it gets strained, never mind a four-way conversation that dominates most of the rave sequences. I’m aware that a solo play costs a lot less than a bigger play for all sorts of obvious reasons, but the economisation comes at a price, and I think this performance would be stronger with an ensemble. I did enjoy this as a solo play and it has a lot to say, but I’d love to see how this would turn out as a scaled up production. Emmy Happisburgh hopes to upscale this to a seven-hander, I reckon four would be enough myself. Sadly, Pants on Fire are apparently not planning to do any more big-scale productions (pity, as Ovid’s Metamophosis was positivel brilliant), but I hope this gets its bigger play.
Seen outside of Edinburgh:
And finally, I allow into Pick of the Fringe plays that were in the Edinburgh Fringe programme that I saw elsewhere. This is because I don’t usually have time to watch these plays again in Edinburgh, so this is my way of giving plays I saw at Brighton Buxton etc. a fair chance against those I saw in Edinburgh. The three additions are:
No One: Seem to Brighton Fringe This Year. Only loosely following the story of The Invisible Man that this is adapted from, but stays true to the essence of the story. What stood out, however, was the superbly choreographed physical theatre that Akimbo Theatre does so well.
Vermin: I’ve already reviewed Triptych Theatre’s An Audience with Stuart Bagcliffe here, but it was precisely on the strength of their companion play (seen by me in Brighton that I saw this in the first place). You need a strong stomach for this one due to the graphic descriptions of animal cruelty, but the tale of a messed up couple who begin in love and turn on each other is disturbingly believable.
The Ballad of Mulan: Yet again one from Brighton. Out of the three plays of Michelle Yim’s on East Asian women, this one about the mythcial Chinese general is easily the strongest. Billed as the undisneyfield version of the story, it’s got a lot more in common with the tales of World War One, with the camaraderie of battle companions and the horrors of the battlefield dominating over laugh, smiles and songs.
And four plays I saw again …
We’re not quite done. The pick of the fringe is rounded off with four plays I’ve seen before but chose to see again. Apart from Make-Up, which I saw for the changes, I saw these four below just for fun. Not much to add from last reviews (linked), but as a recap:
Skank: For most of Clementine Bogg-Hargroves’s play, it’s a hybrid between a northern Fleabag and a female Peep Show, with Kate’s antics in her boring office job punctuated by her quest for men – failing in the case of Sexy Gary through lack of dignity, or succeeding when it really raising questions over her taste in men. Until something happens towards the end that jolts the story back to a serious reality. If there’s one thing I picked up second time round, it’s how much some kind word matter when they’re needed.
Green Knight: Saw this at Buxton Fringe in 2019, and it’s as good as I remembered. She’s one a many performers who comes from an academic background, but whilst many from this route struggle to bring their knowledge to the stage in a way that works, but Debbie Cannon does it perfectly. She uses her love and knowledge of medieval literature to create a re-telling of the tale of Sir Gawain, as witnessed by Lady Bertilak. No events in the story are changed, but it is cleverly written so that her story is very different to the one that Sir Gawain saw.
Jekyll and Hyde: A One-Woman Show: Finally, one I saw in Buxton last year from Sweet Productions, that earned Heather Rose-Andrews my award from best performance, mostly for her transformation scene. I did struggle to follow bits of it the first time around, but having seen it the second time it confirmed what I suspected: it helps to know the original. This one was only supposed to run for one week but ended up running most of the fringe. Well done.
Honourable mention:
Now we come to the second tier. This is the home of a few performances I loved outside of the theatre category, but also for a lot of theatre performances that impressed me one way or another. Some had one particular thing notable about it, some had good overall standards, and a few would have made it into Pick of the Fringe had I not been forced to be incredibly picky. We have:
Ghost Therapy
You are invited so drop in on a series of encounters with a variety of ghostly characters. From looking at the title, you might be think that you’re having a therapy session using ghosts – but you’d be wrong. The therapy session is FOR ghosts, and we find this out in the first minutes when an unusually white clad Dr. Soul apologises for the dodgy lights – her technician only died last week.
Much of the play works as a series of character comedy skits of various ghosts. The fictional universe seems to encompass all fictional ghosts. One client desperately wants to be liked by the family who lives in her house, and has been taking inspiration from Caspar the Friendly Ghost. In fact, she’s Caspar’s number on fan and has the T-shirt to prove it – sadly, she is also even more annoying than Caspar ever was. The Ghost of Christmas Past is also a client – he’s having trouble with his wife because he just can’t help bringing up the past. The grim reaper also has a stroppy goth daughter who has no real interest in following her father’s footsteps, instead doing a funny routine of helping herself to all the ghost cookies she obviously has no room to eat.
There is some room for improvement. Dr. Soul herself has her own issues – her fear of chickens and her controlling relationship with her aforementioned recently-deceased assistant. However, these don’t really get developed until the end of the story. The pace seems to fall a little flat between the visit of clients, so perhaps this could be used as an opportunity to build up her controlling behaviour and/or chikenophobia. However, Trenetta Jones is excellent as Dr. Soul and really makes the character her own.
What is interesting about this is that this went into the Edinburgh Fringe too late to make it into the paper programme. That can be the kiss of death for getting an audience. Writer Jaz Skringle, however, seems to have got a decent audience anyway with some good social media marketing. An enjoyable 40 minutes, and whilst there are some things that could be better that is good standard for a fringe debut. And for a debut from an 18-year-old, it’s an excellent start.
Morecambe
Morecambe is about the comedian and not the town, although we do learn that Eric Bartholomew did adopt his home town as his stage name. Out of the two of Morecambe and Wise, the former is probably the better of the two to make a solo play about, mainly because of the build-up to the premature final curtain. Like many beloved entertainers, he literally worked himself to death, with the sensible option to call it day overruled by the pleasure of giving millions what they want. The story most of us know is the rise and rise and rise with their famous television shows. As with most success stories, however, what you seldom hear is what happened before then. The story from the beginning covers the numerous failures before the big time including, somehow counter-intuitively, their first TV appearance. (Note: never trust a TV executive who insists on writing the gags for you.)
Judging by the age of the audience, I think I can safely say this play has a particular appeal to the Morecambe and Wise generation. A lot of the play includes the most famous jokes of Eric and Ernie, both on stage to their audiences and within the story. My knowledge of their routines is largely limited to the Andre Previn skit, but it looks like this was a sufficiently faithful reproduction to earn the approval of the fans. Speaking of Andre Previn, the appearance of the stars is a good marker of the peak of their fame – as the play observes, appearing on their show was the sign the nation consider you a good egg.
We didn’t always get Eric Morecambe as a person though. His brushes with mortality were done well, especially the applause following his first stage appearance after his first heart attack. However, we didn’t always pick up how he felt in his earlier career. Saying “I got depression” after the first TV flop is all very well, but writing this into what he says would be stronger. What I think is missing more, however, is Ernie Wise. He is represented by a puppet throughout the play, but with his partnership with Ernest Wiseman making up at least 80% of the story, it get a bit clumsy for Ernie to say all of his lines. But, more to the point, Ernie isn’t just his co-star, he’s also his closest friend who supports him throughout the ups and downs. I could see the camaraderie between the two being very movie if done right – also, on a practical note, this adds a lot of flexibility to allow two-sided conversations with other characters (Tom McGrath’s Laurel and Hardy and Brain Mitchell’s Big Daddy versus Giant Haystacks are good examples of how to do this.)
So there lies the paradox. Morecambe won’t disappoint the faithful, and for a small group is Soham it’s impressive. But this one-hander is, I think, crying out to be made into a two-hander. A decent play could be a fantastic play. Does Viva Arts have a suitable Ernie Wise look-a-like amongst their number. If so, I say go for it.
The In-Laws
Tim Ogborne plays a may who starts off his day in the office. He starts with multiple failed attempts to log into his computer. A lesser performer would have taken as easier route and said “Come on, take the bloody password,” but his this performance Ogborne keeps in perfect synchronisation to a soundtrack, reacting both to fruitless and fruitless attempt to type a login, and the look of frustration syncs every time we hear the inevitable login failed sounds. The good news is that he finally makes it in, but the bad news is that his girlfriend phones him up to remind him that tonight she’s introducing him to her parents.
In performer Tim Ogborne’s own words “This one-man show breathes new life into the form of mime, blending tightly rehearsed choreography with a meticulously created soundscape.” I wouldn’t normally quote a blurb verbatim, but I couldn’t have done it better myself. It’s becoming increasingly common to craft action round soundscape, but it’s obvious from the outset he does this much better than most of his peers. The battle with the login prompt is just the beginning, with the rest of the action from the day in the office to an awkward meeting with the overbearing parents to the death-defying chase and showdown with future father-in-law.
The only flaw I have to pick out is the transition I’ve just mentioned. One moment we’ve got a relatable awkward meet-the-parents moment, the next moment future father-in-law is trying to kill him, reason unclear. As far as I can tell, our hero went to the bathroom and discovered a secret passage and saw something he wasn’t supposed to see. Since the fringe, I got the impression this was supposed to be a reference to a film, but whatever the reference was, I missed it. However, it doesn’t matter too much. This story isn’t supposed to be taken too seriously, and it’s a lot of fun to watch with a lot of skill needed to put this together. At 30 minutes this is on the short side for fringe performances, but it’s the ideal length for this. Recommended as you’ll see nothing like this.
Fabulett 1933
This one-man musical is set on the closing night of the Fabulett Nightclub, Berlin. Between the two World Wars, Berlin enjoyed a spell as the hedonistic capital of Europe. Needless to say, the new government in Berlin is not at all keen on This Sort Of Thing and has ordered the closure of all dens that “promote immorality”. For Fabulett’s, there’s no wriggle room, for the emcee Felix is dressed in an outfit that makes The Rocky Horror Show look like Andy Pandy. Which, I must stress, is perfectly fine if you like that sort of thing, but try telling that to the Nazis.
The host (Michael Trauffer) is presiding over the defiant closure at 10 p.m. Felix’s own story is of a youth demobbed after the Germany’s defeat; faced with the choice of returning to his authoritarian father or more tolerant Berlin, he opts for the latter. When he loses his more understanding mother – his relationship with her one of the most touching bits of the play – Fabulett’s becomes his only life. As well as the brief period of hedonism in Berlin, the other thing portrayed knowledgeably was the rise of convention defying science from people such as Magnus Hirschfeld, one of the first researchers of transgenderism. We know his work is going to suffer a similar fate to Fabulett’s.
Where I think this play could have said more is on the rise of the Nazis. In this production, the Nazis are portrayed as something that people should have seen coming and suddenly they were there. I wonder if that’s all the story though. One thing that I Am a Camera portrayed so well (something that wasn’t in either the stage or film versions of the musical) was that the Nazis didn’t gain a foothold with Jew-hatred just because of what some demagogues on podiums were says – it was when ordinary people going about their lives started saying the same thing. Did a similar thing happen for gay people? Did people who used to ignore them suddenly see them as the root of all immorality? Because that’s too good a chapter of the story to miss if it was.
There were some poignant moments in the story – the contrast between his mother who wants him home from Christmas to enjoy his favourite cinnamon cookies is as touching as his father cutting all ties with his son is jarring. One small thing I’d say on a technical note is I’d dispense with the headset mic. I’ve seen those little buggers in action often enough to know they’re notoriously unreliable. When your songs are prone to being disrupted this much, they easiest solution is to just not bother and rebalance the piano to work with acoustic vocals – and in a small space like this one it shouldn’t be too hard. On the whole, however, this was an enjoyable and informative performance.
There is one thing I would change about this. For the second time, I’m going to suggest that a solo play would work better as a two-hander. It’s not crying out for this quite as strongly as Morecambe, but the lengthy conversations she has with a voice representing the visiting nutcase makes the play go static. My hunch is that we need to see him on stage to really see him for the unstable man he is. After he “departs” (if you know what I mean), I’m sure the plot at the end could be tweaked to give him a role one way or another. Kait Wainer says she tweaked her movement in light of my review, so maybe she did make it less static. There again, coming over from North America is an expensive business if you double the cast size – maybe further performances closer to home can be different.
Take It Away, Cheryl!
Cheryl welcomes you to her kissing booth. If you are the audience member who’s sitting on a dime, you can place it into the coin slot to activate the booth. But before you get too excited, Cheryl’s kissing booth does not actually offer kisses any more. She inherited the business from her family and now her service is to listen to the problems of men. And she’s pretty good at this. And – just like some men who hire prostitutes only to discover they’d rather sit and talk rather than have sex – this service is proving very popular.
Actually, this is only half the story. The other theme (which I didn’t mention in live coverage because it was too much of a spoiler) is that she is surrounding by other fairground stalls talking to souls of the dead – and when a customer who turns out to be insane tops himself, he still won’t go away. Even with the new unexpected theme coming in, however, the central theme holds:Cheryl spends so much time listening to any trying to solve other people’s problems, she doesn’t take enough time for herself. The one thing she is desperate to do today is lay flowers on the grave of the love of her life who shot himself – one might suspect the reason she’s so invested in solving other people’s problems is to compensate for the man she couldn’t save.
There is one thing I would change about this. For the second time, I’m going to suggest that a solo play would work better as a two-hander. It’s not crying out for this quite as strongly as Morecambe, but the lengthy conversations she has with a voice representing the visiting nutcase makes the play go static. My hunch is that we need to see him on stage to really see him for the unstable man he is. After he “departs” (if you know what I mean), I’m sure the plot at the end could be tweaked to give him a role one way or another. Kait Wainer says she tweaked her movement in light of my review, so maybe she did make it less static. There again, coming over from North America is an expensive business if you double the cast size – maybe further performances closer to home can be different.
I’ve refrained from giving away the unexpected direction in the plot and I won’t tell you now, except to say that this may increasingly take over the plot as we reach the climax, but it does not lose sight of the central theme: can Cheryl ever choose herself for a change? Worth a visit.
Utter Mess!
One of the reasons I picked this is that Stonecrabs is one of the most determined theatre companies to ask me for reviews, and with one of their productions somewhere I can see it I wanted to check this out. Stonecrabs is quite a large theatre company that do productions over sort of different genres, and this clowning piece is a joint production with Busu Theatre, a Japanese company primary specialising in folklore.
A pair a clowns: an older Japanese man and a younger European woman, start off getting the audience to do a warm-up. Any preconceptions this might be a jolly hour of custard pies and cars with wheels that might fall off are dispelled at the end of scene one, when the exciting message they’ve looked forward to seeing says “You’ve been drafted!” Yip-ee-yiy-ay! They are clowns after all. Then comes the “interval”, where the clowning stops and the older clown is informed that the board has decided to lay him off.
I do need to give a major caveat to this review: I am not that familiar with either clowning or Japanese folklore, so there may well be something I didn’t pick up that other people would. From the point of view of someone used to more conventional theatre though, it did feel a bit like this had “concept overload”. There were a lot of abstract concepts thrown in with subjects chopping and changing. The main theme, I picked up, was the two clowns being locked up the Musuem of Lost Things, and they cannot leave until they find what they have lost – not a physical object, but what they have lost in themselves. But I didn’t get what the younger clown constantly taking selfies for Instagram was about. Now, to be fair, I read about the meaning of this in the press release later, and it made more sense. But you can’t count on everybody going back to the press release when they’re stuck.
There are some strong points to the performance. The pair of clowns are both strong performers, and they certainly know their stuff with the loop pedal. I really liked the scene of the laid off clown seeing the annoying psychiatrist who keeps switching to the messenger from the boardroom telling him he’s lost in touch and other messages to talk him down. I guess that, ultimately, this is Stonecrabs’ call. If their target audience is people more used to clowning and/or Japanese folklore, and they’re confident they will pick this up, fair enough, carry on as you are. If, however, this is supposed to be accessible to everybody no matter how little they know of this format, that’s a much bigger challenge, and I don’t have any bright ideas here as this is way outside my field. But good luck either way.
Beg for Me
This one grabbed my interest because it’s about a man radicalised enough to take part in the infamous January 6th insurrection. We don’t have his name, but his Twitter handle is @R3alAm3rican99. A visitor comes to his cell, which he presumes to be Police. But as far as @R3alAm3rican99 is concerned, he’s done nothing wrong. The storming of the House and Senate was a peaceful protest, and the only attempts made to kill anybody were provoked by the Police, who are all in league with the secret cabal of the liberal elite hell-bent on sending Mexican immigrants to rape your white daughters.
One frequent mistake made with depictions of the other side is to set up your enemies as straw men to take down, and normally that’s what I’d been questioning here. After all, Trump fans might claim anyone who disagrees with them are NPC cuck snowflakes scared of mean words, but Hillary fans are equally swift to paint their critics as alt-right Nazis who watch Jim Davidson on repeat. However, in the aftermath on the US election I was following the social media activity of people who insisted the election was rigged for my amusement research, and, honestly, the level of batshittery depicted in this play is perfectly believable (and that’s still mild compared to QAnon levels of batshitness).
What this play is really about is how he got to this point in the first place. I remember the shock in I Am A Camera (the stage play that led to Cabaret) where Fraulien Schnieder is still a kindly caring landlady, but she believes all the things the nice men in suits say about the Jews. This man never used to spout the racist and misogynistic bile he now spouts, and however much he may decry the old version of him as a mindless sheeple, it’s clear he was once just an ordinary guy.
The message this play seems to be giving is that it didn’t happen overnight. He didn’t open a reddit thread and suddenly sign up as a full-blown Trump-worshipping Nazi. In fact, he was already disappearing down that rabbit hole long before he read any of this. Prior to that, he was subjecting his girlfriend to degrading sexual acts (and blaming her for being the disgusting whore who’d degrade herself that way). However, there is a missing link in the back story here. He went into that relationship as a shy man asking for permission to kiss her – but there doesn’t seem to be any explanation for how he got from that point to a shitty controlling partner. And okay, there’s only so much you can explain in an hour, but I did feel too much of the play was taken up by the visitor admonishing the accused for the way he treats women. Look, this is the Edinburgh Fringe, not Parler. I’ve 100% confident no-one saw this play and thought “You know, @R3alAm3rican99” has a point. I’m pretty sure we can take it for granted that everyone thought “What a fucking nutjob.”
To be fair, there is a good reason why the mysterious visitor is so insistent on giving our man a dressing down, which ties into the journey from normal guy to alt-right fanatic. I won’t spoil the play by saying what the reason is, but it’s a good one. Rhys Anderson’s portrayal as the radicalised fanatic is excellent. The one thing I would seek to add to this is more about the beginning of the journey. What I think this play underestimates is what a lot of people underestimate – how perfectly understandable and legitimate grievances are ruthlessly exploited by extremists and twisted with half-truths and distortion. Rosa Maria Alexander is 80% of the way there – I hope we can completely this with the final and most uncomfortable 20%.
Antigone, the musical
The first thing I will say about Hard Luck musicals is that I respect them for doing the musical the hard but more rewarding way. Most fringe musicals understandably economise by sequencing/recording the backing music in advance. For those that choose to play the music live, they generally struggle – it is rare to see a live band in a fringe musical that gets all the tuning and balance right. Hard Luck musical, however, has a live nine-piece orchestra on stage playing to a pretty impressive standard, and – apart from some early tech problems with the stage mics – a good standard from the singing too.
For the first two third of this play, Antigone the musical does what it says on the tin. It tells the story of the fateful events that led to the heroine’s imprisonment by King Creon quite accurately, and also accessibly. Some musicals don’t bother with the motivations of the main characters, but there’s never once any doubt over what is motivating either Antigone to risk her life of Creon to insist on a death sentence over a matter as petty as giving someone a burial. And they could easily have stuck with this approach and gone right up to fateful moment when Creon has a change of heart too late.
And the comes the twist: apology for the spoiler, but in this version, Antigone doesn’t die. Haemon and Ismene incite a last-minute uprising and come to the rescue in the nick of time. That certainly is a different take on what we’re used to, but in terms of cheesiness it’s right up there with the version of The Titanic where the ship dodges the iceberg. That jars a bit with the down-to-earth faithful staging done to this point. I feel this could do with making a decision one way or the other: either a faithful adaptation or a cheesy adaptation, but I’m pretty sure the intention was the latter.
To be fair, a cheesy retelling probably needs some good movement direction to work to its full effect, with the orchestra taking up so much space, there wasn’t really much room in the space that was left. That’s not a problem unique to this musical – it’s always a bugger for any production with a cast of more than five to find a place which both gives you the space we need on stage and is affordable. If this is has a life beyond Edinburgh Fringe – and looks like it’s gone down well enough to achieve this – I hope this gets further performance on a stage that does this justice. And cheese away for all it’s worth.
Salamander
Salamander seems to have enjoyed a very successful week-long run at the fringe, partly through to its local connections, and partly from the sudden pertinence of the subject following Edinburgh Council’s decision to ban strip clubs. My own interest in this play was helped along by an online play I saw last year called Cash Point Meet. They play had its flaws, but it did make a convincing case that clamping down on sex work – however good the intentions might be – ends up doing more harm than good. I remember the time when Edinburgh made itself one of the most liberal cities, with so-called “licensed sauna”, and if you’re enough of a fringe old-timer you will remember the days when you walked past the building off Merchant Street with “SAUNA” written in grubby orange lettering, which was so obviously not where you go for a sauna.
This is set in the 1980s. Polite society is starting to realise that you can’t wash your hands of the sex industry, and the murder of a prostitute has prompted the Police to create a prostitute liaison officer. Much of the play was written around speaking to real people involved in the events. Four of the six characters are working prostitutes: an assorted bunch of characters who have got into the business for various reasons. It soon becomes clear that, as far as they’re concerned, the closest thing they’ve got to the Police is each other. They each other which clients to steer clear of and look out for each other the best they can. Which means that Police Officer Pat’s job is to win over their trust. It’s far from an easy task, with a long history of looking the other way to contend with – and just when she’s making progress, other less tolerant people in authority do the something to set the whole thing back to square one.
The surprise character with the strongest story arc, however, is Joan. She appears at the first meaning as a representative for the Church and the Women’s Institute. “This is a terrible idea”, I’m already thinking. “The last we need is somebody trying to sell the virtues of less sex and more God.” But wait – Joan is not like that at all. We find out from her prayers that, far from a cringe-worthy evangelical mission, she genuinely wants to make life better for some of the most shunned woman in society, bit like Jesus did. However, she’s going it alone – the support from the church people who agreed to this is at best lukewarm, and most of her friends are horrified that she’s have anything to do with such people. That’s only half of it though. Some of the worst finger-waggers in public are regular clients in practice, and when someone close to Joan turns out to be one of them, things get nasty for everyone. Becky Niven’s performance as Joan is excellent and adds another dimension to the story.
One thing the play doesn’t say much about is the question over whether banning sex licences really does any favours – and with the current reasons appearing to be a new idealism of disapproving of women degrading themselves rather than the old-school puritanism of wanting nothing to do with those sort of people, that would have been very interesting. However, when a play script is so heavily based on speaking to real sex workers and listening to what they have to say, I am wary about trying to steer the message to support a point the play writers want to make. And, to be fair, this issue has cropped up very recently, and probably too late to work into any play. Regardless, this a good play that takes on an issue that some people have strong opinions on one way or the other, and handles it without sensation and just says it how it is.
Famous Puppet Death Scenes
This is really in the comedy camp rather than theatre, but I couldn’t let a second fringe go by without seeing for myself exactly what this weirdly-titled performance is about. Had I known that writer and master puppeteer Louisa Ashton of Sparkle and Dark was one of the three puppeteers in this, I would have cleared my diary in the first week. I’d previously mused this would either be funny or pretentious. Well, I wasn’t quite right – it’s not either/or, the performance is funny AND pretentious. But it’s ironically pretentious rather than unironically pretentious, and that’s a defining feature of this show.
Famous Puppet Death Scenes works by sustaining a number of in-jokes. Yes, we know this is a comedy really, but it’s presented as something deathly serious. The action takes place in an around a puppet marquee which is both colourful yet strangely macabre. And then we a treated to the most heartbreaking, sombre and respectful re-enactments of famous death scenes reacted by puppets. Or maybe it’s death scenes of puppets so famous they’re being re-enacted by more puppets. In reality, however, these stories are all completely fictitious, created for the purposes of showing the unfortunate puppets about to meet their makers (and I don’t mean the people who built them). One story that seems to have an awful lot of death scenes is “This Feverish Heart” by Nordo Frot, where copies of the same stout figure are continually splatted by a giant fist that comes out of nowhere, just because. There’s also the element of the surprise on when the unfortunate puppet is going to die, not to mention the unexpected on who dies and exactly when, and then there’s the recurring methods of death that become increasingly commonplace as the performance goes on. Finally, there’s the instructions for the audience, but instead of “Laugh”, “Laugh Hysterically” and “Applause” like they do for bad sitcoms, you’re more likely to be asked to say “Oh”, or clap – but do it somberly and respectfully.
One of my favourite death scenes was at the beginning was the children’s puppet show with two doors Ja and Nein, where selection of the wrong door (okay, either door) results in death full of blood, guts and bones from the monster that lies behind. The Old Trouts are a very versatile puppetry company, and use about every technique going. Frequently the puppet theatre raises and outside curtain and the puppeteers appear for some larger-scale puppeticide. For an operation involving three macabre-looking puppeteers, it is one of the most complex and sophisticated puppetry operations I’m seen pulled off at a fringe.
If there’s one weakness I’d pin on this performance, it gets predictable. It helps a lot to vary how the puppetry is being done, and switch between the surprise deaths and the obvious deaths (e.g. the star of The Ferverish Heart, who is probably getting sick of this by now), it inevitably hinges on variations of the same joke. Perhaps one area that might have been made to work better is managing the audience participation – or maybe I just came on a quiet day. But it doesn’t really matter because The Old Trouts have pulled off what everybody on the Fringe wants to do – a wild and bizarre original concept that is unique to them and audiences pick up and loves. A gamble like this could easily have backfired, so well done for pulling this off.
Seen outside of Edinburgh
And added to those ten are another five which were performing at Edinburgh Fringe that I saw earlier in the year. As a reminder, the hurdles at Edinburgh are higher, and a play that scooped pick of the fringe at another festival might have to settle for honourable mention here, but that’s just s reminder of how high the standard is. We have:
Room, based on a Room of One’s Own: This impressed me for something completely original. They are plenty of stage adaptations of stories, but this I think is the first time I’ve seen a stage adaptation of an essay. Virginia Woolf’s speech about the lot of women authors was quite on point for its day, so it ws interesting to see this speech brought back to life and part re-enactment, part dramatisation.
Sex, Lies and Improvisation: The other thing I saw at Brighton Fringe was an improvisation show. I’ve seen a lot of improvised comedy and got to know the formula for how to make this work, but this is a rare example of improvised theatre. Whilst the premise chosen on the cuff got a few laughs to begin with, the story of a relationship pulled about by political idealism wasn’t far off the standard of scripted plays.
Nyctophilia: Another performance I saw at Buxton that impressed me, and one of the most innovative. Performed in total darkness throughout almost the entire play, the series of folklore tales shows what you can do when focus switches to sound, the faintest of vision, and the few moments when light is available.
The Glummer Twins: Finally saw this at Buxton Fringe after years over everybody taking about them. A charming double act with warm humour somewhat in the vein or Morecambe and Wise, with a performance that straddles theatre, comedy, music and poetry. With the fringe circuit often viewed as a young performer’s game, it’s great to see an older pair become such firm favourites.
Also showing:
And to complete my coverage, the rest of the reviews. Just a reminder that just because a review didn’t make it to honourable mention doesn’t mean I hated it – such as the competitiveness of Edinburgh Fringe that even that category is a high hurdle. (As always, if you notice a play I haven’t listed and want to know what I really thought, I accept payment in beer.) Rounding up my plays are:
Death of a Disco Dancer
Four friends, newly-graduated from university, get together for one last party. This final party, it quickly emerges, involves, dancing, playing loud music, drinking a lot and taking all manner of drugs. It’s a wonder they don’t attract any noise complaints for the neighbours, but perhaps they have good taste with their bangin’ choons no-one minds. The drinking and drug-taking is taking its toll though. At least one of this cozy foursome never has the death of his father far away on his minds, and there’s only so far anyone can keep this up.
The first thing I will say about this is how good the sound and lighting plot it. In fact, this applies to lots of fringe shows now, from entry-level to the highest budget. The technological capabilities to have sound and lighting plots this sophisticated have existed for at least ten years now, but expertise has been slow to catch up. I have frequently cursed when I see simple technical problems that could have easily been averted with a little technical know-how. In the last couple of years, however, I’ve seen companies get a lot more ambitious, with people who know what they’re doing, know what can and can’t be achieved, and produce impressive results with what they have. Ultraviolet Theatre have produced one of the best technical plots I’ve seen, covering music, sounds, gorgeous lighting, and – the important thing that’s easy to forget – a production that knows how to work with this.
However, the exquisite staging conceals some weaknesses with the plot. I get that these four friends are presumably close through their shared love of hedonism and debauchery, but apart from that I never really understood why they behaved as they did. In particular, why one of them suddenly turn on the others half-way through and rail against the shallowness of their parties? Okay, he’s got a steady job so maybe he’s seeing things differently, but why change tune so suddenly when he’s been just as drink and drug-addled as the others up to this point? The root problem, I suspect, is that the characterisation isn’t coming across the way it should do. This company may have very good reasons why each of the four behaves like they do, when they do – but if the audience doesn’t pick this up, it counts for nothing and just confuses people.
The even more root issue? Devised theatre is hard. Individual character arcs created by individual cast members sometimes get confusing and/or contradictory when combined into the same play. It is this sort of situations where it helps to have a dramaturg, but that is a minefield in its own right, for sometimes a good dramaturg has to ditch the favourite story arc created by one of the actors for the play to make sense. All I can suggest is to try to disregard everything you know about the play and its characters and try to imagine what an audience who knows nothing about this story will pick up – and I realise this is easier said than done. But if, as I suspect, there is more to this story than is coming across, there is a lot of potential still to be unlocked. And with the technical plot that is top of its game, there’s a lot to be made of this.
Sandcastles:
I was keen for an opportunity to see Brite Theater as they were behind Emily Carding’s hugely popular Richard III. I never got to see this myself, and I wish I had because 1) I’ve heard a lot of good things about it from people who I know and trust, and 2) it features stickers saying “dead” applied to certain unlucky members of the audience. This one features a different writer and different actors, but, it would appear, shares the same high production values as their previous plays. Like Ghislaine/Gabler, I think it’s fair to treat this one as a marmite play, with a concept that people will like or won’t. Unfortunately, on this occasion I’m on the other side.
Hannah tells Beth she’s moving to New York. Even though they are lifelong friends – even since the moment they met in the sandcastle park as children – Hannah never told Beth she was thinking of leaving. Throughout their friendship, Hannah has always been the risk-taker and Beth has been the cautious one arm-twisted into wild scheme, and even though Hannah frequently oversteps the line by stealing Beth’s boyfriends and other things, they stay friends. Hannah is finding her feet in New York, keeping little contact with Beth, but dies in a terrorist attack … That’s it. Normally I would hold something back, and in many plays I could not possibly write about (or remember) the whole story, but what I have told is you literally the entire plot. When the first six minutes consists entirely of Hannah and Beth arguing over the unplanned decision to move and nothing else, the play swiftly fails the “Get on with it” test. The rest of the play unfolds at a similar slow pace.
That’s a pity, because everything else about the play is done to a high standard. At every point you feel like these two on stage really are the best of friends. The script too is naturalistic and serves the pair well. I was particularly impressed with the music for this – there has been an upturn across the fringes for supporting plays with fitting music to set the mood, and this was one of the best. But sadly none of this can distract me from the painfully slow pace of the story. Much as I have to say this, when the truck attack finally gets talked about – the moment when I ought to be hoping against hope the inevitable never comes – I was wait itching for something, anything, to move the plot along.
This follows a similar format to Land of Lost Content, but I think the difference here is that whilst these two are best friends because the script says they they are, it lacks an explanation for why their friendship has stuck – unlike Henry Madd’s story where life experience goes beyond parties and holidays and you see how much they’ve been through together. I know other people like Sandcastles. If you want an in-depth intimate portrait of a friendship, and long digressions into memories that need not have any bearing to the story are a plus for you, this could be your thing. Indeed, this play as attracted glowing reviews elsewhere for precisely this reason. But me? I don’t get it. Sorry.
Colossal:
With comedy the dominant category at Edinburgh Fringe but theatre coming a strong second, Edinburgh is a good place for established comedians to branch out into theatre. This is what Patrick McPherson did, with Colossal being his second performance in the theatre category. At face value, this is a story about dating. Dan is excited to be going on a new date, and in the hour he has to get ready, he talks about his last long-term relationship. At first, the excitement of a new relationship, first accidental meeting, nail-biting wait for reply to first text, first kiss, first meeting with parents. And then it goes to the arguments and the infidelity that led to it falling apart. However (apology, spoiler alert, but impossible to review without this), this is not all that it seems. Dan’s version of the story is his own version. Reality, he later admits, wasn’t quite the same.
This was the fourth play at this fringe I’d seen on a subject ranging from sexual predators to unhealthy relationships. What this one is desperately missing, however, is subtext. Not all plays about unhealthy relationships need so much subtext, but when the central premise is an unreliable narrator, it’s vital. How do we know Dan started off head-over-heels in love and over-optimistically judged the situation? Because Dan tells us at the end of the play. How do we know Dan was glossing over his faults in the failing relationship? The same. Worst, of all, the play is supposed to give a message at the end about looking at your learned behaviour – but there are no examples anywhere in the story of what the learned behaviour is or how Dan came to learn it. Just a direct quote from his ex telling him to address his learned behaviour, whatever it was. “Show, don’t tell” has never been more important here.
To be fair, subtext is difficult to write, especially if you’ve come from comedy where subtext has little importance (certain kinds of character comedy excepted). It is not clear whether subtext wasn’t written into the script or whether it was so subtle it wasn’t picked up, but either way, the only thing I picked up that sort-of indicated something wasn’t right has a flickering light. I suppose the argument where the two accuse each other of gaslighting might have been meant as a sign of an unhealthy relationship, but with no context to the arguments it was impossible to tell whether they were simply words in anger or something more – and if the latter, no indication of who was gaslighting who. Personally, the best opportunity I see for subtext is a passing reference at the beginning of Dan giving a favourable spin on his previous relationship. That could easily set alarm bells ringing when the same things happen again – but once more, the only reason we know Dan glossed over his last relationship is because he told us directly.
I am probably in the minority here – it’s got a string of good reviews from its run and the show I was in was close to sold out. The main reason this is getting praise for its production values, and those were excellent. McPherson is perfectly choreographed to an intricate lighting and soundscape, and had the plot been stronger I might have been shouting praises from the roof tops. There’s one other possible reason for its popularity though: popularity with people who already agree that with the message about learned behaviour, and don’t care if nothing is done to expand on it, only that their view is stated back to them. I hope I am wrong about that, because in the long run, playing to the gallery is a mistake. So much discourse is dominated by soundbites without substance, and plays give the opportunity to expand on this and show how things such as learned behaviour can work out. It’s a shame that a play with so much going for it missed this opportunity.
Sleepover!
Cambridge University Musical Theatre got my attention last year with a showcase for one of the catchiest tunes out there – this time my interest was grabbed by the concept. 17-year-old Jenny is organising a Sleepover for her three besties, before they all go their separate ways. It’s taken ages for Jenny to get her mother to agree to something like this. However, there is a hidden agenda to this. What Jenny really wants out of this is a talk about everything she wants to know about sex but is afraid to ask. And in order to get round asking, she’s created a board game called “Sleepover” which involves answering questions on cards, all of which are obviously the aforementioned things about sex she wants to know. (Spoiler: her friends see through this ruse straight away.)
I really liked the idea of this, but where I felt this musical fell short was characterisation. That’s not unique to this show; On Your Bike produced by the same society last year was also let down a little by moments where key plot-driving decisions weren’t that believable. Okay, we are discussing musicals here, and it’s fair to remember that nobody spontaneously breaks out into song, but the songs are always more effective if you can believe the characters singing this means it and feels it. Here it feels more like the songs and issues were chosen first, with the characters developed around this. Any of these three 17-year-olds could be crushingly shy, confident and brash or anything else, but it has to be consistent. I find it difficult to believe that someone shy enough to create that board game wouldn’t be rumbled in the first five seconds – I also find it difficult that by the next song Jenny’s already shed her inhibitions to partake in “Get your titties out”.
The production values are good, and songs are managed well, and the set of a sleepover does a lot to add the the story. I would focus on the ending. At least two of the teenagers have uncomfortable secrets they’ve been holding back on, and those are the strongest opportunities for creating rounded believable characters. The big question, as always, is: why now? What has happened to persuade these characters to open up when they do? You might have a perfectly good answer in your head, but we need to know this, and conveying the information without spelling it out the challenge that needs to be addressed in the middle. And if that means you sometimes can’t include a song you wanted to include, or can’t talk about an issue you wanted to bring up, so be it.
At the end of the day, it comes down to what CUMTS wants Sleepover to be. It’s down in the comedy section rather than theatre or musical theatre; and the primary purposes of comedy is fun, which this achieves. But I think Jenny, Nina, Anita and Ruth deserve more than this, and I hope we can get to truly know them one day.
Not quite theatre:
And finally in a review, some things that I haven’t included in the league table because I didn’t count them as theatre and couldn’t make fair comparisons to the other entries. A reminder, this is based on what I think can be counted as theatre, not the section of the programme it was in. However, just because I didn’t count it as theatre doesn’t mean I can’t rate it highly. Here’s what I have:
Finlay and Joe’s perpetual hype machine
Although I didn’t count this as theatre, this sketch duo still had a fair overlap with theatre. Their on-stage personas are a couple of losers who hear phrases such as “Oh, you’re still at the bar, good for you! I’ve just been promoted.” and “Still at you’re mum’s? That’s nice. I brought a house.” and ” Are you still single? So am I. However, I’m more attractive than you.” However, all that is about to change. They have a new machine that automates sketches. Just spin the wheel and away you go.
Finlay and Joe are a family-friendly sketch group, and it was only about half-way through I realised I was enjoying myself without hearing a rude work or anything risque once. (In fact, I’ve actually dragged down the done myself with the rude/Anglo-Saxon word at the start of this update.) It is fair to say that whilst the sketches are family-friendly, the humour is more likely to be picked up by grown-ups than children. Nevertheless, is was good fun, such as what happens when the engagement ring is the One Ring from The Lord of Rings, and how confusing it is to explain sentient engines to Mick Lynch as he visits the Island of Sodor. In the strongest sketches, the fun part is the moment you realise where this is going.
However, Finlay and Joe have taken a leaf of out Beasts‘ book, and the sketches eventually become part of a story – by creating a super-intelligent AI contraption, it becomes sentient and hell-bent on taking over the world. This, I think, could have been built up a little better – there was an argument over who gets the straight character and funny character in the sketches, but surely this need to be mixed in with increasingly sinister hints building up to the “I’m sorry, Dave, I can’t let you do that” moment.
Fortunately, everything is resolved in the end, culminating in a super-sketch that encompasses at the other sketches. This includes giving a ten-pound note to someone earlier in the show and assuming you’ll get it back later, which I can only describe as brave. As I said, I’m not the best person to rate fringe sketch shows as I don’t have that many to compare it to, but this looks like a good start for a duo who are relative newbies to the comedy circuit on the fringe.
Jess Robinson: Legacy
It is 2032 and the world is about to end. The last of the earth’s population has been evacuated on to rockets, except for super genius 20-year-old Jess Robinson, who was definitely born in 2012 and couldn’t possibly be lying about her age, or indeed her ability/reliability to be entrusted with anything important. She is taking a message from the supreme commander Olivia Coleman (yes, the Olivia Coleman, because she’s a national treasure who always gets the best parts). Anyway, the last task that needs completing is uploading a memory stick containing all of the world’s arts and culture. Apologies for the spoiler, but Jess does indeed fail to live up to her reputation of ultra-reliable agent and spilling wine on her laptop and everything is deleted. What a lucky coincidence! Jess is good at impressions! She can fill the gap that way. Some more refined connoisseurs might say we’re taking an awful of a implausible plot points to set this up but IT’S COMEDY DAMN IT WE’LL BE CONTRIVED IF WE WANT TO.
The problem with entrusting this task to Jess Robinson is that, well, she’s not actually that well read on culture. When she should have been watching high-brow nature documentaries she was gorging out on trash TV. And so, for example, when tasked with reconstructing clever nature documentaries narrated by David Attenborough, she does the David Attenborough voiceover for Love Island. That’s the same thing, isn’t it? Surely no-one will notice. In a sign of the times, we in a future where Liz Truss bombed as PM and Theresa May is back in charge. Yes, we’re already at the point where people are going “She was all right, really, I suppose,” God help us. Anyway, you get the idea. Other highlights including moments of the voice of her mother giving advice for anything but the moment in hand, and speed-impressions that Jess Robinson breaks into when stressed.
I can’t give a verdict on all of these impressions because I don’t keep up with popular culture and don’t recognise all of them (he says pretentiously), but those I recognised were nailed pretty well. I’d say that Jess Robinson’s strength is impressions first and character comedy second, but that fine because this is the kind of comedy where the lead character’s decisions aren’t supposed to make sense or have any deep motivation. Nevertheless, some of the funniest comedy I’ve seen worked from believable characters behaving in a plausible way in the most ridiculous of situations, so perhaps there’s room to explore than in a future show. The production values are top-notch though. As well as the energetic performance and the impressions, she’s go a great singing voice and a slick backdrop in sync with her performance. This show is meant to fun and nothing more, and so should be judged on those terms, but if you’re after a fun night to round off a day of fringing, I can recommend this.
How I Learned What I Learned
First, a note about why I picked this one for review. I normally have a policy of not giving anybody preferential treatment because they’re part of an underrepresented group. I certainly don’t choose to review a play just because it’s advertised as female-led, nor do I review the female-led plays I choose to see more favourably. There is a very good reason for this: they don’t need preferential treatment: I monitor my picks of the fringe every year and there’s always been an even split between the two. As such, I am firmly of the position that it’s better to be absolutely clear that no-one gets a leg-up. I don’t want anybody saying “She’s only got a good review because she’s a woman”. Everybody on Pick of the Fringe has earned their place.
However, racial diversity is another matter. As I’ve already mentioned (scroll to 24th August in Live coverage), I do think there’s is a problem with lack of participation from artists who aren’t white. One of these days, I might look more into why this is and what can be done; in the meantime I’m happy to let the people affect have their say. Equally, however, I worry – based on my own observations as a neurodivergent artist – that theatre has a pretty poor respect of agency. For at least some minorities, the voices theatres choose to platform suspiciously resemble the views that the leaderships assumes the respective minorities hold, whilst ignoring all criticism from those who dissent. This was a review request and I probably would have picked it anyway, but there was one thing that particular stood out here: there’s no question of agency here. There’s no doubt that August Wilson’s autobiographical play of his life – written when he was one of America’s most respected literary playwrights – is his voice and no-one else’s. For the record, I had no idea what was going to be in this play was, nor what his politics are. I was entirely doing this on the basis on hearing what he has to say.
The circumstances surrounding How I learned What I Learned are unusual. It was supposed to be performed by Wilson himself, but by the time he wrote it he was too ill to do it, and so he opened it up to other actors to perform, in this version by Lester Purry of Saints and Poet’s Theater. Racism does feature in this 90-minutes monologue quite prominently (indeed it start with the dark joke that for over 100 years after his family came to America, there was never any trouble finding a job), but not as much as you might think. A lot of time, it’s simply life going on. Wilson recounts a whole host of eccentrics and friends and lovers he knew, including this first love in the nativity play and a shocking murder that taught him the lesson that you can say the wrong thing, but it’s worse for you to say the wrong things at the wrong time. This is a fully rounded portrait of life in a black neighbourhood in 1960s Pittsburgh.
And yet where racism does feature, that’s not what you might expect either. One rather telling phrase Wilson recounts is hearing the phrase “When you go to jail …” Not if. When. I can think of three possible interpretations of that phrase, but none of them were good. However, he talks very little about the big things such as who the cops arrest and who refuses to hire who, and instead talks about the little things. One thing you learn from Wilson’s story of his life as a young man is that he always stands his ground, even when the stakes seem low. He quits his job mowing lawns rather than help his boss appease the racist woman who won’t have a black man doing the job. Why not just mow another lawn like the boss suggests? He finishes off the play with the time when the bank cashier spend a suspiciously long time doing security checks on him, but that’s not what he objects to – it’s the lie that they didn’t have an envelope to put the money in. Why the focus on something so petty? The reason, Wilson argues, is precisely BECAUSE it’s petty. It’s not much, but it’s still a small-minded power-trip, and is completely deliberate. Tolerate that, he argues, and it won’t end there.
And the verdict? This is a difficult one – I make a point of reviewing on how well crafted the story is rather than approval of any message within the play. I personally think the key message of standing up to pettiness is a good one and it is well argued – indeed, this is a pattern I’ve been noticing lately over all forms of prejudice of low-level but completely deliberate acts to get one over someone, both now and historically, and yes, it’s a problem that I think a lot of people underestimate. But it’s an unhealthy practice to write favourable review based on how much it validates the reviewer’s views. So, I would never tell anybody that it your duty to agree with what a play says. But if another performance of this play comes along, I would encourage you to hear what August Wilson had to say. When people talk about racism the discussion is usually on the big issues. This is a compelling case for standing up to the little things.
This particular mess wasn’t Edinburgh Fringe’s fault. But there’s a lot of other messes that the Fringe Society need to clean up.
COMMENT: The fundamental mistake made by the Festival Fringe Society was trying to please everybody. They must realise this is no longer possible, decide who they want to please, and be open about it.
Well, we made it. Edinburgh Fringe was set for a bumpy ride, and the first few days were particularly turbulent, with complaints about support for reviewers, the relocation of Fringe Central, the lack of an app, and all sorts of other things being aired in the first week. There were even worries that the Big Four might break away and work entirely off their own ticketing site with other venues invited to join. Then the festival got underway properly and attention turned to what was actually being performed. In a way, it had parallels to the 2012 Olympics: lots of complaining in the run-up, but taking a back seat to the festival people love. Then came the Jerry Sadowitz saga and Assembly and Pleasance started fighting each other, undermining any prospect of a co-ordinated breakaway. Meanwhile, the performers at the free fringe venues have started clashing with the Big Four again – it seems the Festival Fringe Society was caught in the crossfire.
At the time of writing, it looks like the worst is over. Ticket sales are probably going to be okay. It’s not clear what sort of size we’re looking at next year, as it’s possible that numbers this year were inflated by postponed plans from the last two years, but we’re unlikely to be facing meltdown. There might also be a reduction as expectations of what post-Covid fringes would be like have been tempered with reality, but a modest reduction might be a good thing if it brings demand on accommodation down to something sane. The worst mistakes made this year can be rectified for next year. The app can be brought back, or, at the worst, the website can be improved to do the job. We can have the discussion of how best to support reviewers. Finances should be in a better state to roll back some of the less popular economisations. At this stage, I’m quite relaxed about 2023.
However, there is a root problem that isn’t going away any time soon, which is that Edinburgh Fringe has hopelessly outgrown the city that hosts it. Demand outstrips supply for both accommodation and performances spaces, and piles up expenses for performers; and although Edinburgh Fringe has tried to source some cheap accommodation, this is only a drop in the ocean. The bottom line is that unless you have a trust fund, already live in Edinburgh, or are able to run in one of the cheapest tech-free venues (or preferably a hybrid of all three), you are taking on a huge financial outlay without anything guaranteed in return. Anyone who thinks that your reward is directly proportional to how good your play was is naive – so much comes down to luck and factors outside your control. The Festival Fringe Society, remember, isn’t that big an organisation and can’t do that much about it. Even the Big Four supervenues can’t do that much about the sky-high rents that landlords charge for their spaces.
What the Festival Fringe Society can do, however, is decide who the fringe is for. The idealistic answer is “everybody who wants to go”, and I don’t think we should change that (indeed, if they dropped the open access I would probably stop going). However, we can still decide who Edinburgh Fringe is optimised for. Does the Festival Fringe Society concentrate its efforts of helping the minnows thrive in an environment where they compete with some big commercially successful players? Or should the society concentrate on a festival which the brightest and best compete for the prestige, and work on a sink or swim basis for everyone else? Both are valid aspirations, but they are very different aspirations that will please some and alienate others. However, alienating some performers is an improvement on alienating everybody, as happened this year.
It turns out I wasn’t connected to all the Brighton Fringe rumour mills. I’d known for some time Caravanserai wasn’t coming back, probably because Brighton Fringe couldn’t run a venue without letting costs go out of control. Now it’s gone public that Spiegeltent and Sweet aren’t being part of Brighton Fringe either. They are still running at the same time in May and June, but they are not registering with Brighton Fringe. (I admit, I did hear rumours of Spiegeltent doing this, but I’ve heard things like this touted so many times I didn’t pay much attention. I’d assumed that with Caravanserai being the focus of so many grievances, the main source of aggro was now resolved. But apparently not.)
One thing I haven’t yet covered is the return of Bite Size. To recap, what started off as the smallest of small-scale productions in 2006 grew to become one of the biggest-selling returning events at the Pleasance. In the years leading up to 2018, they ran to near sell-outs in Queen Dome, and in 2019 finally moved to a bigger space. Then came that event. In 2022, when Edinburgh Fringe was mostly back to normal, Bite Size was not amongst the returnees. It seems this was one of the many groups that had fallen apart in the down period of 2020-2021. There was one cause for hope though: the founder Nick Brice did a talk on the Bite Size story, billed as a fundraiser for a possible return. And now, Bite Size are back, after a gap of three years eleven months.
The Mr. Fox story itself is told in Loizou’s own style which is easy to recognise. The narrator he plays, however, is also a shady character. Confronts by a journalist or blogger or something over a scandal he’s implicated in, it quickly becomes clear he has a disdainful attitude towards poor people. Also women, although to start with, it’s possible his contempt to with one particular woman who got in his way; by the end, however, it’s enough to make even Andrew Tate say “Whoah, steady on, that’s a bit much.” At the end of the Mr. Fox tale, with his plot exposed, and plotting to murder your sister generally looked on dimly by aristocratic gentlemen, Mr. Fox gets his comeuppance. But, just a second – did our narrator just say Mr. Fox is the victim?
App: (Original coverage: 5th August, 10.00 a.m.) And then came the decision that, in hindsight, Edinburgh Fringe came to regret very quickly. Amongst the many economisations made this year, the Festival Fringe Society chose not to bother with an app. Unfortunately, they learned the hard way just how many acts see this at the most important service from the Festival Fringe Society. Why? Because the “Nearby and Now” feature – where the app lists performances starting in the next few minutes at venues near you – an important way of getting an audience. Now, the Festival Fringe Society said there was going to be a feature on the website that would do the same thing. But it was never publicised and, to be honest, I couldn’t get it work. And I test apps in my day job, so how is anyone else supposed to know how to use it?
Offensive comedy: (Original coverage: 13th August, 5.00 p.m. and 17th August) Just when it looks like the controversy at the start of the fringe had died down, a brand new one appeared. Jerry Sadowitz was supposed to be performing for two nights, but after complaints of the first performance, the second one was cancelled. The Pleasance weren’t clear on exactly what he said that warranted booting, but after some choice quotes about Rishi Sunak’s skin colour came to light, we had a pretty good idea. Sadowitz’s defence is that there’s a lot of “exaggerated irony and nonsense”. I’ve never really subscribed to the argument of he didn’t really mean it”, but it is fair to note that he considers himself to not be the same as the Jim Davidson / Cubby Brown / Bernard Manning crowd – and his fans seem to as well.
Half-price ticket hut: (Original coverage: 12th August, 3.30 p.m.) If there’s one controversy that I felt was unearned, it was the departure of the half-price ticket hut as we know it. In before times, this was a separate ticket office for shows that reduced the price of an allocation of tickets on the day. It was deliberately kept inconvenient enough to stop people buying full-price tickets from holding out for half-price offers, but easy enough for people looking for something to see to take up. This year, with the physical structure for the half-price ticket hut falling to bit, the half-price hut and normal box office have, in effect, been merged.
No amount of clever puppetry, though, compensates for a misunderstood story. Here, again, Clarke and Christophers deliver handsomely. In all four of the strange lands visited (for this adaptation does include the lesser-told chapters of the flying island and the land where horses are masters), the politics are reflections of human society, commentating on just about every acts of vanity, cruelty, vindictiveness, prejudice and arrogance known to man. The Lulliputians, for instance, are at war with their neighbours over a stupid dispute on the correct way to open an egg. (We, of course, know the correct thing to fight centuries of war over is who got the details correct in a story of a magic baby and a stable.) It’s not just the shortcomings of these other lands that is brought to bear – Gulliver find the vales of the continent he came from challenged just as much. The common theme brought throughout this is all civilisations thinks they’re better than the others. Even the Houyhnhnms – the horse beings seemingly the most enlightened of all the beings he encountered – always look down on Gulliver is inferior to them.
Obvious caveat before we proceed: this is a play, not a documentary. The only person who might know what is going through Ghislaine Maxwell’s head is Ghislaine Maxwell – this is only speculation of what she might be thinking. Nevertheless, Kristin Winters’ depiction is one that has been observed in countless abusers and sex offenders: they don’t think they’ve done anything wrong. They may deny doing what they’re accused of, but even then they don’t really think the thing they were accused of doing is that bad. At this point I should give a content warning for the play. I know I’ve been getting heavy on content warnings lately – I try to avoid them when it’s obvious from the title, but this one is pretty full-on with the victim-blaming. Sometimes Winters switches to playing the victims – little about the abuse itself but a heavy focus on the exploitation of their naivety. Back as Ghislaine, she insists she was doing all these teenage girls a favour when she did all the things she denies doing but obviously did.
The way Alice Mary Cooper makes this work is making the story just about the people in the protest movement as the campaign. Of course, stories about liberated/hedonistic campaign movements behind worthy causes are done to death, but this works by being exactly the opposite of what you’d expect: a prim and proper collection of suburban housewives, as middle-class as you can be. Being the 1970s, the men have jobs and the women stay at home, but the men barely feature in the story, always referred to in the party where the movement is founded as somebody’s husband. Regardless of campaigning activity underway, it always seems to be running parallel with a drive to provide the most sublime cooking, with assorted kitchen disasters turned around with initiative and years of culinary experience. Somehow they find time to save Kelly’s Bush whilst juggling school commitments. When they form an alliance with a construction union, and one of them mildly flirts with a housewife who’s never been flirted with for ten years, she turns beetroot. What might have been a dry play that was difficult to follow is made into a story with warm humour.
But there is one crucial thing that Henry Madd does much better here. Rather than just memories of teenage parties and holidays after exams, Henry and Judd and their other friends have all been through so much together. And it’s when you stick to each other through thick and thin that you can truly understand how much their friendship means to them. Even when there’s bullying from bigger boys, you can quickly see they’re in the same situation of boredom and low life prospects, merely being slightly ahead in the pecking order. Not all of the time though. There are some bad people in the town, and Henry’s closest two female friends come off particularly from the dregs in society. The saddest part of the story is that Henry can see the lives of his friends falling apart around him – but whilst his friends are there for him to pull him back from the darkest moments, try as he might, he doesn’t know how to do the same when they need him.
Much of the play works as a series of character comedy skits of various ghosts. The fictional universe seems to encompass all fictional ghosts. One client desperately wants to be liked by the family who lives in her house, and has been taking inspiration from Caspar the Friendly Ghost. In fact, she’s Caspar’s number on fan and has the T-shirt to prove it – sadly, she is also even more annoying than Caspar ever was. The Ghost of Christmas Past is also a client – he’s having trouble with his wife because he just can’t help bringing up the past. The grim reaper also has a stroppy goth daughter who has no real interest in following her father’s footsteps, instead doing a funny routine of helping herself to all the ghost cookies she obviously has no room to eat.
The host (Michael Trauffer) is presiding over the defiant closure at 10 p.m. Felix’s own story is of a youth demobbed after the Germany’s defeat; faced with the choice of returning to his authoritarian father or more tolerant Berlin, he opts for the latter. When he loses his more understanding mother – his relationship with her one of the most touching bits of the play – Fabulett’s becomes his only life. As well as the brief period of hedonism in Berlin, the other thing portrayed knowledgeably was the rise of convention defying science from people such as Magnus Hirschfeld, one of the first researchers of transgenderism. We know his work is going to suffer a similar fate to Fabulett’s.
Actually, this is only half the story. The other theme (which I didn’t mention in live coverage because it was too much of a spoiler) is that she is surrounding by other fairground stalls talking to souls of the dead – and when a customer who turns out to be insane tops himself, he still won’t go away. Even with the new unexpected theme coming in, however, the central theme holds:Cheryl spends so much time listening to any trying to solve other people’s problems, she doesn’t take enough time for herself. The one thing she is desperate to do today is lay flowers on the grave of the love of her life who shot himself – one might suspect the reason she’s so invested in solving other people’s problems is to compensate for the man she couldn’t save.
This is set in the 1980s. Polite society is starting to realise that you can’t wash your hands of the sex industry, and the murder of a prostitute has prompted the Police to create a prostitute liaison officer. Much of the play was written around speaking to real people involved in the events. Four of the six characters are working prostitutes: an assorted bunch of characters who have got into the business for various reasons. It soon becomes clear that, as far as they’re concerned, the closest thing they’ve got to the Police is each other. They each other which clients to steer clear of and look out for each other the best they can. Which means that Police Officer Pat’s job is to win over their trust. It’s far from an easy task, with a long history of looking the other way to contend with – and just when she’s making progress, other less tolerant people in authority do the something to set the whole thing back to square one.
Famous Puppet Death Scenes works by sustaining a number of in-jokes. Yes, we know this is a comedy really, but it’s presented as something deathly serious. The action takes place in an around a puppet marquee which is both colourful yet strangely macabre. And then we a treated to the most heartbreaking, sombre and respectful re-enactments of famous death scenes reacted by puppets. Or maybe it’s death scenes of puppets so famous they’re being re-enacted by more puppets. In reality, however, these stories are all completely fictitious, created for the purposes of showing the unfortunate puppets about to meet their makers (and I don’t mean the people who built them). One story that seems to have an awful lot of death scenes is “This Feverish Heart” by Nordo Frot, where copies of the same stout figure are continually splatted by a giant fist that comes out of nowhere, just because. There’s also the element of the surprise on when the unfortunate puppet is going to die, not to mention the unexpected on who dies and exactly when, and then there’s the recurring methods of death that become increasingly commonplace as the performance goes on. Finally, there’s the instructions for the audience, but instead of “Laugh”, “Laugh Hysterically” and “Applause” like they do for bad sitcoms, you’re more likely to be asked to say “Oh”, or clap – but do it somberly and respectfully.
Chris Neville-Smith's blog on theatre 