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The Theatreguide.London Reviews
EDINBURGH FESTIVAL AND FRINGE 2009
The several simultaneous events that make up 'The Edinburgh Festival' - the International Festival, the Fringe, the Comedy Festival, etc. - bring literally thousands of shows and performers to the Scottish capital each August. Virtually all of these shows tour after Edinburgh, and many come to London, so the Festival is a unique preview of the coming year.
No one can see more than a small fraction of what's on offer, but our dedicated reviewers covered close to 250 shows. Once again, our thanks to Edinburgh veterans Duska Radosavljevic and Philip Fisher and the rest of our expanded review team for contributing to these pages.
Because the list is so long, we have split it into two pages. The reviews are in alphabetical order (soloists by last name), with A-L on this page and M-Z on another.
Scroll down this page for our reviews of Accidental Nostalgia - After Circles - After the Bomb - Almost 10 - And Bosnich Is Off His Line - Angle of Incidence - Art House - A-Team The Musical - Austen's Women - Auto Da Fe -
Baba Yaga Bony Legs - Baby - Balloon Boutique - Bane - Barbershopera - Barflies - Beachy Head - Beast - Becoming Marilyn - Been So Long - Beggars Belief - Be My Eyes - David Benson - Billy Budd - Aidan Bishop - Des Bishop - Bitch Got Owned - Bite-Sized Breakfast - Borges and I - Boy in Darkness - A British Subject - Bully - Burn -
Cambridge Footlights - Cardenio - Cardinal Burns - Nathan Caton - Catwalk Confidential - The Chair - Changing The Wheel - Chatroom - Chortle Student Comedy Awards - The Chronicles of Irania - Chronicles of Long Kesh - A Clockwork Orange - Colin Hoult's Carnival of Monsters - Jason Cook - Cool Cutz - Crave - The Critic - Crush - Curtains -
David Leddy's White Tea - Destination GB - Dirty Love - Doctor Whom - Domestic Goddi - Double Art History - The Doubtful Guest - Durham Revue - East 10th Street - Ernest and the Pale Moon - The Event - Everything Must Go -
Facebook Fables - The Fall of Man - Fascinating Aida - Faust - Faust in a Box - A Fistful of Snow - Five Characters In Search of Susan - Mickey Flanagan - Flanders and Swann - F.L.O.W. - Forever Young - Francis the Holy Jester - Frank - F**ked - Funny - George in the Dragon's Den - Rhod Gilbert - The Girls of Slender Means - God - Stefan Golaszewski - A Grave Situation -
Hangover - Her Yellow Wallpaper - Heyton on Homicide - Bec Hill - His Ghostly Heart - Hooked - The Hospitable - The Hotel - Hugh Hughes in 360 - Icarus 2.0 - If That's All There Is - Il Ritorno d'Ulisse - The Importance of Muffins - Improverts - In A Thousand Pieces - The Interminable Suicide of Gregory Church - Internal - Jane Austin's Guide to Pornography - Janis - Simon Jenkins - Pete Johansson - Jumpers -
Russell Kane - Katakio - Shappi Khorsandi - Killing Alan - King Arthur - King of the Gypsies -King Ubu - Kit and the Widow - Knuckleball - Lady Bug Warrior - Land Without Words - Last Night Things Happened - The Last Witch - Andrew Lawrence - Micaela Leon - Lilly Through The Dark - Little Gem - The Lost Letters of Mr. Corrigan - Love Letters on Blue Paper -
Accidental Nostalgia
Traverse
Subtitled 'An Operetta about the Pros and Cons of Amnesia' and the first
in a trilogy that has been going great guns in the USA, this is a feast
for the eyes and ears told via a darkly comic concoction of gothic
Americana. Flanked by a four-piece band and a brace of IT gurus,
neurologist Cameron Seymour launches into a lecture on amnesia and the
self-help book she has written that links into her own problem with the
condition. Seymour admits to possessing a disturbingly selective memory,
meaning that she does not know if she killed her father or not.
Concluding that the secret is locked in her Deep South past, she
abruptly ups sticks and heads for her hometown where things get murky
and dangerous. As the neurotic neurologist, Cynthia Hopkins is utterly
compelling, changing costume, modifying character or breaking into
expository song all at the drop of a hat. Amplifying her journey of
self-discovery is a huge backdrop screen across which march the images
that punctuate her life, manipulated by her local computer nerds.
Gimmicks galore propel this oddball odyssey, underpinned by Hopkins'
resonant voice and powerful songs. A nagging afterthought is that all
this hi-tech trickery and dark frippery don't quite hang together, that
this absurdist universe doesn't make as much sense as the cast would
have us believe. Still, an undeniable highlight of the Fringe. Nick
Awde
After Circles
Underbelly
At 26, Irish playwright Henry Martin might be forgiven for taking
inspiration from dark Pinteresque settings and dramatic situations
filled with hidden menace. He might even be applauded for wishing to
deal with such pressing issues as child soldiers and the treatment of
women in war. To that end, director Antonio Farrara's production of the
play has assembled a cast of capable actresses. Martin's writing also
has a good sense of poetry to match such serious themes, however, he is
yet to be coached in the fine art of managing audience expectations.
Despite an inspired approach to structuring the piece retrospectively -
which does at times seem intriguing - the overall effect is still
excessively mean and introverted, requiring hard work on the part of the
audience who are given very little by means of a hook into the story or
the characters' lives to begin with. For the most part the piece is
bleak, indulgent and unappealing and it definitely seems that Martin
could do well to also take inspiration from Pinter's sense of humour for
example. The good news is that he still has plenty of time to get there.
Duska Radosavljevic
After
the Bomb Zoo Southside
It is 1957 and two Soviet spies are repeatedly sidetracked from their
mission of hitting Western capitalism at its heart, the Glasgow bus
system, by bickering over the relative merits of the Albanian and
Ukranian KGBs. Meanwhile, the future of democracy is somehow in the
hands of a philologist sacked for having a taste for carnal knowledge of
small kitchen appliances, an alien robot can't remember whether her
cover story has her coming from Scotland or Walesland, and one actress
plays two separate sex-starved Miss Moneypenny types. Actually, four
actors play everyone, which means that we have all the ingredients of a
Penny Dreadfuls-type farce, the kind in which the quick changes, dodgy
accents and impossible-to-follow plot are part of the fun. Or we would
have, if things moved at twice the speed of this languorous Cicero
Productions staging, or had twice as many jokes. As it is, the slow
scene changes, rhythmless direction, very uneven acting and long gaps
between jokes leave you more aware of the laughter-less stretches than
of the few moments that score. Gerald Berkowitz
Almost 10 Pleasance
You may not believe for more than a few scattered moments that the
speaker in Raphaele Moussafir's solo play is nine years old - eleven
seems a closer guess - but if you forget the question of age, she is a
delightful creation, here played to sparkling perfection by Caroline
Horton. As she tells us about the highlights (riding a train without an
adult for the first time, making prank phone calls with her best friend)
and low points (everyone choosing a competing birthday party rather than
hers, coping with her au pair and adults in general) in her life, we
live them fully with her and fully understand the level of importance
she attaches to each. Some of the moments that do ring true for her
assumed age provide the purest joy - playing sexual games with her
Barbie and Ken without really knowing what she's doing, being
embarrassed by adult displays of emotion, discovering that lying to
grown-ups is sometimes the simplest option. And when she encounters
death for the first time, her remarkably complex and mature responses
seem absolutely right. Even the fact that the monologue jumps about
without transitions becomes part of the character's wholly real thought
processes. Throughout, Caroline Horton communicates a wide-eyed
intelligence and indomitable spirit that take everything in and process
it in ways that make at least as much sense as what our adult
perceptions tell us, so that we come to adore the child, whatever her
age, and leave with absolute confidence that she will grow up to be
wiser and kinder than any of us. Gerald Berkowitz
And Bosnich is Off His Line... Free Fringe
With the Fringe festival costing so much every year, increasing amounts
of people are turning to the Free Fringe as a way of seeing theatre and
comedy, often from less established acts. This collection of young
stand-ups demonstrates that any negative conceptions about the quality
of the Free Fringe are unfounded, as it is more than on a par with many
of the shows at the Fringe proper. Compered by the jovial Liam Williams,
the four student comics do exceptionally well to entertain the small
crowd. Keith Akushie has a nice line in observation and with a little
more confidence in his delivery, could really impress. So You Think
You're Funny semi-finalist and A Level student Rhys Jones is also highly
amusing and it will be interesting to see how his material progresses
post National Curriculum. Highlight of the show is Rob Carter who, armed
with guitar, offers some witty singing that deals with such subjects as
love and having a friend called Pizza Face. Rounding up the event is
remarkably genial Cambridge student Daran Johnson with some hilarious
one-liners. All the performers show real promise and the show is a very
worthwhile alternative to the increasingly commercial Fringe. Christopher
Harrisson
Angle
of Incidence Zoo
Lux Lucis Productions play with optical illusions, reflections, mirrored
surfaces and glass boxes in this oddly fragmented piece about loss of
identity and human isolation. The show opens with a character, Latimer,
trapped in a mirrored glass box, his image ricocheting into infinity on
three sides. Dialogue is muffled, the pace is slow. Concept-driven, a
little too enamoured of its main stage device, the production tries to
capture a certain diffuse, digressive mood of urban alienation but is
not always effective in doing so. Cello music creates a melancholy
heartbeat to the scene changes from the more abstract ones to tiny
vignettes of domestic life in which a couple talk about nothing and
everything while brushing their teeth or preparing for bed. The piece is
visually strong, containing some powerful theatrical images, especially
the play with surfaces, transparency, mirrors and physical echoing. But
overall it lacks a strong sense of direction and one is left perplexed
about what the company were trying to achieve. William McEvoy
Art
House Zoo
An artist fakes her death in order to boost her prices, virtually
guarantee a posthumous award, and give herself the freedom to work
undisturbed. Her sister, hitherto overshadowed, serves as her
dealer-publicist, and begins to blossom in the role, while the artist
learns that her hermit-like existence doesn't inspire as much as she had
hoped. Rachael Cooper's one-hour play sets up an interesting premise
but, perhaps because of time constraints, the characters never come
alive and so their conflict never goes beyond textbook pop psychology.
Unsurprisingly, grudges held since childhood reawaken, and
unsurprisingly the artist is as jealous of her sister's burgeoning sex
life as of her tending of the flame. Meanwhile, we are told too much,
either in soliloquies or exposition-crammed dialogue, and shown too
little, the play's several short scenes generally devoted to reporting
on events that took place offstage between them. Caroline Horton as the
frustrated artist and Emily Randall as the vengeance-achieving sister
make the most out of each moment but have difficulty connecting the
pieces into fully-developed characterisations. Gerald Berkowitz
A
Team The Musical Gilded Balloon
This nostalgia-fest borders on the pantomimic, and calling it a musical
is something of a misnomer, since songs are few and far between. But if
your heart leaps at the sound of Mr T's catchphrases, and there's a
wavy-lined flashback to the blue-eyelinered 80s every time you hear the
theme tune's opening bars, then this could be the show for you. The plot
is wafer thin. Young female hick is threatened by local yobs when she
doesn't hand over protection money. That's it. In come the A Team,
Hannibal (old), Face (vain), Murdock (potty) and BA Baracas (angry), and
justice overcomes corruption. The extremely low-fi production values are
turned into a running joke, with cars and the famous A-Team black van as
cardboard cut-outs, and a helicopter becomes some tinfoil on a stick. So
far, so tacky. But the audience loves the nostalgia, and still has a
soft spot for this motley array of ex-Nam freedom fighters. From
Hannibal's trademark cigar, to BA's odd haircut and Murdock's imaginary
pets, this ticks all the boxes. But where are the songs? A couple are
performed well and with gusto, but actors have been cast for their looks
rather than their voices. Scratch's production is not without its
laughs, but there's a fine line between laughing at it and laughing with
it. William McEvoy
Austen's
Women Assembly
What could we have in common with Jane Austen's characters, you might
ask, when those girls married at 17 and guys were considered 'old men'
at 'two and thirty' years old? Give this show a go and not only will you
get plenty of answers to the question, but might even run home to blow
the dust off one of the novels again. Rebecca Vaughan's loving homage to
Austen's words and characters includes fourteen short sketches of some
of Austen's famous ladies such as Lizzy Bennett, Marianne Dashwood and
Emma Woodhouse, but also some lesser known ones, such as Diana Parker
from Sanditon and Miss Elizabeth Watson from The Watsons. Petulant,
prudent, silly or sophisticated, these wives, daughters, young lovers
and sisters will have all of our own strengths and weaknesses, and could
still teach us a thing or two about how to get on in life. Vaughan's one
woman show has hints of Sex and the City as well as Catherine Tate in it
- showing us the way in which Austen may well have laid the foundations
of observational comedy too. Under Guy Masterson's direction, the piece
is tightly corseted but frilly, flowing and flamboyant in all the right
places. Duska Radosavljevic
Auto-Da-Fe Space on the Mile
One of a string of one-act plays Tennessee Williams wrote just before
his breakthrough Glass Menagerie, Auto-Da-Fe is a brief study in
repression and denial, a point that seems to have escaped director Ryan
Bourne and Fired Up Productions. An upright and churchgoing mother and
grown son live in New Orleans' raffish French Quarter and tut-tut over
the shockingly improper goings-on that surround them. The discovery of a
pornographic photo tests their ability to cope, as they struggle over
whether to report or destroy it. This production satisfactorily captures
that much - although Jeanne Graham as the mother can't move past
caricature, Jeff Alan-Lee nicely underplays the mama's boy who would
really prefer that the world out there stay far away. But where he
wavers and she falls completely is in letting us see that a part of him
is excited by that (presumably homosexual) photo and that she is trying
not to notice that because it would threaten the denial she has been in
about him all along. A hesitantly moving, rhythmless pacing destroys any
sense of building tension or forward movement and makes a violent ending
appear too abruptly and out of nowhere. Worth seeing for the play itself
and what you will sense could have been done with it, more than for what
has been achieved. Gerald Berkowitz
Baba Yaga Bony Legs Sweet ECA
This company should be highly commended for their skill at making
strangers trust them enough to follow them into a pitch-black room for
forty-five minutes - unfortunately that is where the praise must cease.
The decision to stage the play in darkness creates, as is frequently the
case, more problems than it solves. Without the support of visual
images, the performers' underdeveloped vocal technique is totally
exposed. Rather than being immersed in Little Masha's epic journey
through the fearsome forest, the over-riding sensation is the rather
frustrating one of being shouted at in the dark. Making use of ambient
sounds that attempt to transport the audience into a specific time,
location or emotion is a sound concept but it has been poorly executed
in this case. These are a repetitive, garbled and ultimately confusing
distraction from the story, drowning out the narrative voices. Moments
of physical contact between the performers and the audience are
similarly repetitive. Occasionally, the actors move in torchlight,
another good concept that falls flat because what the torches highlight
has not been carefully thought through. Katrina Marchant
Baby
George Square
Six vibrant young voices from Cambridge University easily fill a simple
space with enough energy for each audience member to thrive off. Baby
explores the effects of pregnancy on three different couples through
live music, dance and powerful performances, introducing a talented
comedy duo in the shape of Alan (Oli Hunt) and Arlene (Miri Gellert). Of
course, in this carefully balanced score, rather than detracting from
moments of sincerity, the humour aids the ensemble, bringing rhythm and
pace to the musical. With song themes ranging from the heartbreak of a
miscarriage to the surprisingly entertaining journey of sperm, it is
difficult not to lose oneself in the characters' tales. The audience are
shown the highs and the lows of having a baby in contemporary times, yet
unfortunately, the editing means the plot seems slightly disjointed
which disrupts one's enjoyment of the story as a whole. Whilst the
accents are occasionally questionable, this is soon offset by catchy
tunes superbly sung by performers full of vitality and exuberance. This
slick and focused performance hit no bum notes with me. Georgina
Evenden
Balloon
Boutique C
Do any of us still remember the awe experienced by the first ever sight
of a dog emerging out of a sausage shaped balloon? This is not strictly
speaking a children's show - although it is about a childless couple's
desperate desire for a family - but you are almost certain to experience
again the childlike awe and wonder felt at discovering just what is
possible to do with a piece of latex. Using masks, balloons, rockabilly
music and a 1950s radio, the two actors take it in turns to play the
aged couple as they go back in time remembering their courtship,
love-making and shared loss. Directed by the Trestle and Told by an
Idiot founder John Wright - the piece has a characteristic sense of
craftsmanship and non-verbal lyricism. A particular moment of genius
which has the young couple helplessly entangled forever after their
first balloon kiss, is alone worth seeing the whole 50 minutes for. Even
though the subject matter isn't exactly light - and the actors'
performances are a lot more timid than expected - this is a piece about
the importance of having fun in life, and if you don't love it for that,
you'll love it for its balloon motorcycle. Duska Radosavljevic
Bane
Pleasance Dome
Bane is a hard-boiled detective story, with a typically broad and
colourful cast including snitches, baddies, assistant baddies, molls,
opera singers, a mad scientist and of course the lone wolf hero himself
- all played by Joe Bone. The result is simultaneously a salute to and
send-up of the genre, as the solo performer plays both sides of every
conversation or shoot-out, not to mention a raft of sound effects and
mood music. The fun of a show like this lies in the accuracy of the
parody - that is to say, in having every comic moment or absurd plot
twist vaguely remind us of some film noir precedent or at least seem
true to the genre. And of course we enjoy the inventiveness and
versatility of the actor jumping so seamlessly from role to role. This
is in some ways the solo version of the sort of quick-change,
multiple-role-playing almost-lose-control-of-the-juggling farce that has
long been a fringe staple, and just about the only criticism to make of
Bone is the seemingly perverse one that he is too much in control, not
allowing us the added fun of watching the story and performance
complications threatening to overwhelm him. Gerald
Berkowitz
Barbershopera II Pleasance
Dome
Esteve is a very confused matador. He has journeyed to a tiny Norfolk
village to claim his inheritance only to learn that it is his late
father's hairdressing salon. Quite how a matador swaps his sword for
scissors fills the rest of one of the most fun-packed musical hours at
the Fringe where ancient rivalries in sleepy Shavingham stir - as do the
Matador's loins on meeting the feisty town-crier Vicky. And somehow it
all leads to a Wild West-style climactic coiffeur 'cut-off' between
Esteve and sinister snipper Trevor Sorbet and his Miracle Mousse.
Unlikely hairdos and accents punctuate the zippy four-part harmonies
that range from barbershop (obviously) and opera via hiphop and G&S. Stand-out numbers include the
Voluptuous Vicky duet, the Mousse rap, and a beautiful hymn to
Shavingham, with even a nod to Prince in between the pink rinses. As the
motormouth matador Rob Castell combines bravura with hilarious
bafflement, matched by the sensuous charms of Lara Stubbs as the prickly
Vicky. Tom Sadler brings a dark edge of humour to Esteve's arch-rival
Trevor, while Pete Sorel-Cameron manfully holds the whole thing together
as solid chappy hairdresser Rod. Writers Castell and Sadler and director
Sarah Tipple have created a fast-paced technical tour de force that
manages to be sheer entertainment at the same time. And thanks to the
efforts of this dazzling cast, the combination has created a subtle
slice of cutting edge comedy. Nick Awde
Barflies
Traverse
There was a time when Charles Bukowski's prose was the main means of
sexual awakening of teenage boys around the world. Alcohol fuelled,
arrogant, animalistic and brimming with aphorisms, it easily translated
into many a culture's youth cult material. It is hardly surprising
therefore that Bukowski's work sits comfortably in a bar in Edinburgh,
even decades after its heyday. Grid Iron's adaptation - based on three
stories from the 1967 collection The Most Beautiful Woman in Town - is
even smoothly rendered into the Scottish vernacular. Any flashes of the
post-war American angst and disillusionment are gently and skilfully
glossed over with a kind of artistry uniquely characteristic of this
particular company. Producer Judith Doherty and Director/Adaptor Ben
Harrison have picked a site laden with ornate chandeliers and the deep
red and gilded New Town pub gorgeousness which they enhance with
atmospheric fake smoke, some most exquisite live piano music courtesy of
Silent Dave - David Paul Jones, and a magnificent display of the bar
centre-piece itself. However, their greatest feat is a glorious
theatricalisation of their chosen material - both textual and textural.
Keith Fleming is the lazy, constantly dishevelled sharp-tongued bohemian
Henry, complemented beautifully by the fiery Gail Watson who unfurls a
whole range of moving and memorable portraits of the unfortunate women
associated with him. To call their performances visceral would be rather
an understatement when these guys actually 'rip' their vital organs out
and fling them across the bar towards each other. Their sex scenes too
are totally uncompromising, both in their tenderness and crudity. And
when they are not leaping across the furniture, screwing and unscrewing,
swilling and spilling bottles of various beverages around their stage,
the two engage in some thoroughly enchanting fox-fur and bottle opener
puppetry. Grid Iron have yet again pulled off a marvelous success -
easily one of the best shows this year and quite possibly a winner
within the company's own repertoire. And they have shown that just like
the subject of their fitting tribute - they mature extraordinarily well
as they line up effortless, unpretentious, penetrating modern classics
one after another. Duska Radosavljevic
Beachy
Head Pleasance Dome
As a company, Analogue combine detailed research and an almost
documentary accuracy in reportage with inventive staging and employment
of multimedia. With Beachy Head, though, they don't seem to have gotten
the balance quite right. The reportage sometimes seems undigested or
unabsorbed into the fiction, and the media effects imposed on the
material rather than growing organically out of it. At the core of the
story, a pair of filmmakers accidentally capture the moment of someone
throwing himself off a cliff, and decide to search out his story. This
connects them to his widow and her grieving process, and to doctors and
pathologists and their professional distance. There is drama, and a
beautifully nuanced performance by Emma Jowett, in the young widow's
emotional journey, and in the moral ambiguity of the filmmakers'
position. But the pathologist interviews make their points -
essentially, that the person is no longer there after death - at
unnecessary and drama-interrupting length, and making us view some
scenes through video projections, even with the live performer onstage,
adds little. Gerald
Berkowitz
Beast
The Vaults
In the testosterone-fuelled festival that is Edinburgh, it is a joy to
discover the lyrical love story that is Beast. Bookshelf's engaging
two-hander tells the tale of a prostitute and an artist whose first paid
encounter marks the beginning of a lifelong relationship where business
turns to pleasure and more. Clips and pre-recorded passages punctuate
the scenes, reflecting the changes in the couple's life over the passage
of time and the parallel shifts in their relationship. Often they face
the audience as they speak, a device that reveals the smallest flicker
of emotion on their faces. As the poignancy of the tale grows, exploring
the truths to be found in love, so too does the intensity of their
romance. Graham Edwards' laidback, almost laconic delivery forms a
bedrock for Aine O'Sullivan, who convincingly and expressively travels
through the four emotional seasons of their love. The premise, however,
is hindered somewhat by failing to depict a realistic muse-artist
relationship, yet the simplicity of the connection between the
protagonists more than compensates, to the point that you can sit back
and let the poetry of Elena Bolster's script wash over you. Nick
Awde
Becoming Marilyn Assembly
Norma Jeane Baker was a chubby teenage bride who escaped Hicksville
thanks to being spotted in a photoshoot. With peroxide hair and a name
change to Marilyn Monroe, she graduated from studio party escort to
bit-part player in movies to mega-superstardom. But Marilyn never left
Norma Jeane behind, as this thoughtful one-woman show reveals. In the
bedroom where she was found dead of an overdose, Marilyn reviews her
past and brings to life the characters and events of the remarkable
times that moulded her. She pauses occasionally for edgy asides as Norma
Jeane demands her own perspective and opinions and Marilyn starts to
question how far she has journeyed from her old self - a subject on
which, understandably, her alter-ego begs to differ. Issy van Randwyck
neatly captures the star's legendary pout, baby voice and those
legendary curves. Handily, she also possesses a versatile voice
(memorably used in a previous incarnation of Fascinating Aida) and
delivers impeccable versions of classics such as 'I Wanna Be Loved By
You' and the (in)famous 'Happy Birthday' sung to President Kennedy.
While Bernie C Byrnes' bubbly script tells us little that is new about
Marilyn it does shed light on Norma Jeane, particularly her mother's
insanity and harsh foster-home life. Pace-wise Gareth Armstrong's
sensitive direction keeps the energy and humour going right up to the
poignant finale. Nick Awde
Been So Long Traverse
(Reviewed in London)
At its core a thoroughly
old-fashioned musical, Been So Long is made current and alive by its
fresh milieu, clever writing and attractive and energetic performers.
Set in the bar-and-club scene
of easy sex and easy betrayal, it finds two players discovering the
unexpected experience of actually falling in love, being scared
brainless, and almost blowing it. And
so we get the familiar dance of the couple attractively played by Naana
Agyei-Ampadu and Arinze Kene as two people who don't know what is
obvious to us - that they are each deeper than they realise themselves,
and that they're made for each other - made new and emotionally resonant
by a setting in black south London that we know to be littered with
failed relationships and missed opportunities. With
their romance providing the emotional core to the play, much of the fun
comes from the characters around them. Cat Simmons plays the heroine's
ever-randy friend with enough comic sexual fire to wilt any man at
thirty paces, and her song I Want a Fella is one of the evening's high
points. Meanwhile,
there's a nerdy little guy determined to avenge an imagined slight from
the hero three years ago, and Harry Hepple plays him with such
attractive bravado that you cheer him on even as you know his
character's quest is doomed. And
Omar Lyefook provides another emotional anchor to the play as the
bartender pining away for love of the heroine, who looks right through
him; he opens and closes the show with a pair of strong blues numbers. Actually, Arthur Darvill's music,
mainly blues-based with an occasional funk beat, is never especially
interesting, with the power of the songs coming from the alternately
witty and evocative lyrics by Darvill and playwright-director Walker.
And even they are merely the raw material for the inventive and engaging
performers. Gerald Berkowitz
Beggars
Belief C cubed
Will Lawton's play combines elements of typical romantic comedies,
nerdish bloke comedies and the kinds of philosophical debates that are
rites of passage in the first year at uni, and somehow ends up as a
rather sweet little drama about religious faith. While his friends are
busy working out their failed or not-quite-ready-to-begin romantic
lives, the biggest misfit among them has a dream about God and begins to
wonder whether he's as confirmed an athiest as he's always assumed. In
between games of Power Puff Girl Monopoly, he tentatively and comically
tries reading the Bible and asking his believer friends about their
faith. While the tone and the focus of the play waver, and some of the
characters are undeveloped, it is frequently lightly comical and has at
least one sequence, when each of the characters, for their own
individual and not always admirable reasons, attempt to pray to a God
they're not all sure is there, that is quite lovely and touching. The
play never quite escapes the feel of Theatre-for-Church-Groups, to be
accompanied by guidelines for aftershow discussion leaders, but there is
clearly more to it than that. Gerald Berkowitz
Be
My Eyes Radison
This piece from Fine Chisel Theatre Company is an interesting find. It's
tautly directed, the performers are very strong, and there is a
confidence and commitment throughout the entire cast, a rarity in many
productions in the Fringe. The problem is the crux of the material. The
play boasts its play on perspective, and whilst the exploration of
story-telling is skilfully done, it is difficult to engage in the plot.
The story of a missing boyfriend and the traumas and dilemmas it
projects for those who knew the man and met him indirectly doesn't have
enough depth to make you care about the characters, and sometimes the
more serious dialogue is too predictable to create the emotional arc the
play seems to want to achieve. So it is welcome when a bizarre but
intriguing nightclub sequence is played out to break the structure. The
piece unravels itself tidily by the end, commenting on how one person's
loss is another one's gain, and the sensitivity the cast show in their
work is admirable. The most impressive aspect is its comedy, which
involves an erratic, insecure woman seeking solace in her Sat. Nav.
system, and a couple at the beginning of their relationship. The
awkwardness that is played out in their dates at a restaurant and cinema
is brilliantly played by both actors, whose expressions during the
silences are as entertaining as the excruciating attempts to make
smalltalk. This is a good show, but I wanted to invest myself in it more
than I did. Benedict Shaw
David Benson Sings Noel Coward Assembly
(Reviewed at a previous
Festival)
Like it says on the label. David Benson, Fringe veteran best known for
his solo shows incorporating music into his monologues and for playing
Noel Coward in several episodes of the TV series Goodnight Sweetheart,
offers a straightforward (no pun intended) concert of some of the
Master's best- and least-known songs, from Parisian Pierrot and I Am
No Good At Love to the inevitable (and no less welcome for that) Mad
Dogs And Englishmen and I'll See You Again. This is Benson singing
Coward, not Benson as Coward - a few brief moments aside, he doesn't
try to imitate Coward's voice or singing style. But Benson has a
pleasant voice and the absolutely essential precise diction, and as an
actor-who-sings he brings out all the wit and sentiment in the wide
range of Coward's songs. By-play with his pianist Stewart Nicholls
sometimes gets a bit arch and strays into Kit and the Widow territory.
But anyone who loves the songs or needs an introduction to Coward the
songwriter will find a thoroughly satisfying and enjoyable hour. Gerald
Berkowitz
Billy
Budd C Too
Billy Budd is impressive. A twenty strong cast, top to toe in immaculate
eighteenth century naval get-up, prowl the smoke filled theatre with a
confidence and assurance that is held throughout by all. The set is
simple yet striking - a sunken area onstage creates focus and
contributes to the claustrophobic feel of the whole piece, a
claustrophobia that is maintained by Philip Swan's brave directorial
decisions. The effect? A beautiful and perfectly crafted portrayal of
the chaotic order that we can only assume existed on such naval vessels.
Although the quality of acting is greatly varied throughout the cast,
the effect of the ensemble as a whole is an imposing and powerful one
and several performances stand out among the ranks. Most notable is that
of Julius Colwyn Foulkes whose portrayal of the ship's Captain is
subtle, commanding and, most of all, poignant. It is unfortunate that at
times the play loses the clarity and focus that drives it so strongly at
other points. However the production as a whole acts as a sensitive
discussion of the morality of war and the repression of homosexuality in
the military, themes that are as relevant to us today, as they were to
Herman Melville at the time. Samuel Caseley
Aidan
Bishop:
No Sissy Stuff Gilded
Balloon
Women, they say, like men who make them laugh. They also like a bad boy.
Aidan Bishop gamely attempts to bridge the two but ironically, as he
confesses, having originally set out to give us 'No Sissy Stuff' his
show is in fact morphing into a (highly entertaining) Sissy Fest. The
Ireland-based New Yorker is healthily red-blooded in his wide-ranging
analysis of men, women and how they get it together - and yet he seems
unable to prevent his sensitive side from jumping out where he least
expects it. Bishop grew up streetwise in tough Queen's but in Dublin the
muggers stay away from him because they think he's gay. Conversely, his
summary of women's romanticism creates a warm glow of lurve until he
feels compelled to convert everything into the male equivalent where
porn and green apples feature prominently. Meanwhile the subject of
things never to say to girls strikes a chord with both sexes for
entirely different reasons as it becomes a wild litany of serious
no-no's. Making neat use of a lo-tech flipchart where other comics might
use a voiceover, Bishop jumps quickly from subject to subject. Juggling
comedy in this way can be a bit hit and miss (and the Catholic ramble
probably belongs to another show) but he clearly likes to live
dangerously onstage. He visibly warms up as the show progresses and
connects on a personal with the entire audience - admittedly it might
take Bishop a while to warm up the guys, but he has the girls right from
the start. Nick Awde
Des
Bishop Assembly
Although he is big in his adopted country, comedian Des Bishop still
seems more American than Irish, not just in what he admits is a
marginally less repressed emotional life, but in his ability to observe
behaviour and mores 'on this side of the Atlantic' with some
objectivity. Repressed emotions are the theme of his show, as he
explains that Irish Americans don't express themselves openly lest they
appear too self-absorbed, while the native Irish tend to feel things and
then apologise for the presumption and the English just think it is all
in bad taste. Bishop's stories about growing up among less inhibited
Italian-Americans in New York, about discovering how to stop a brawl in
an Irish pub, or about revelling in the emotional openness of a visit to
Australia all illustrate these national patterns of inhibition. Other
topics include jogging, post-coital conversations and masturbation. He's
in favour of all three, unsurprisingly, and the audience's strong
response to his arguments for their uninhibited embrace may well be
generated as much by their enthusiastic agreement as by the comic
quality of the material. Gerald Berkowitz
Bitch Got Owned! Laughing
Horse @ Espionage
Sajeela Kershi is not your usual comedian, but she certainly is a
natural. She has Bollywood, Josef Fritzl and real life stories about the
BNP and the Taliban all in one set - and you'll still be happy to eat
cut up fruit out of her hand. You'll even forgive her for drying up
occasionally as all the incidental digressions, sharpness of wit and ad
libbing in her Joanna Lumley cut-glass vowels will be more than worth
it. And that's before I've even mentioned her own take on Loreal...
She'll flirt with you and remember it and come back to remind you at
just the right moment, without ever making you feel uncomfortable. And
you might also just find yourself an innocent passer by, watching her
show from afar, and getting drawn in without realising it. Because - and
this is the best bit! - her show is absolutely free and taking place in
a busy but delicately chosen bar: the oriental-looking Kasbar at
Espionage. Be quick to discover Edinburgh's best kept secret as she
won't stay that way for too long.Duska Radosavljevic
Bite-Sized
Breakfast in Bedlam Bedlam
White Room Theatre offers a rotating programme of ten-minute plays in
its morning slot, including what it calls its Best Bites from previous
seasons, the selection I saw. While the five short plays on my menu were
all of a high order, they were unsurprisingly uneven in effectiveness.
The weakest, Paul Randall's Mind The Flak, is a character sketch of an
impatient London tube passenger that, like the frustrated character,
ultimately goes nowhere. David Bulmer's Suspicious Minds, about cops
ineptly handling a grieving widow, is a funny review sketch stretched
just a bit too long. More successful as short but complete plays are
Jonathan Gavin's Sleepless Nights, a nice variant on the rom-com formula
of the couple who at first dislike each other on sight, and Adam Gelin's
Tangled Net, a comic tale played out entirely in e-mail messages and
given an extra layer of absurdity by being done in Victorian dress. But
the playlet most fully developed and satisfying despite its brevity is
Philip Linsdell's sweet and comic Quiet Table For Four, in which a
nervous couple on a blind date are accompanied by actors playing their
confidence-destroying inner voices. Gerald Berkowitz
Borges and I Zoo
This dreamy, unusual celebration of writer Jorge Luis Borges, who died
in 1986, is a little gem that uses the frequently startling motifs
typical of the Argentinean's writings to illustrate the story of his
life and aspirations. Created by Idle Motion, this poetic and visual
feast neatly criss-crosses between a book group and the world in which
Borges grew up. As the members of the book group discuss fiction,
network, bicker and even fall in love, parallel stories develop when one
of their number applies for a job at the Bodleian Library as another
starts to lose her sight. Interleaved are scenes from Borges' childhood
in Europe, his problematic schooldays, the slow process of going blind.
Irony of ironies, as he himself acknowledges, is that he finally loses
his sight just as he is appointed director of the National Library.
Linking to that, in a deeply powerful scene based on one of his best
known short stories, Borges describes existing in a ghostly library made
of identical hexagonal rooms that stretch away into infinity. The
economy of Borges' words contrasts with the piece's lush images. Subtle
costume changes, balletic rearrangements of chairs and the hundreds of
books piled around form a world of limitless imagination where old tomes
become crumbling roads, airplanes, even the tigers of Borges' childhood
imagination. A true ensemble piece, Borges and I is a magical piece that
deserves to be developed further to tour to a wider audiences. Nick
Awde
Boy in Darkness Zoo
Dark, haunting and uniquely inventive, Curious Directive's adaptation of
Mervyn Peake's story is nothing short of phenomenal. This play is
everything you came to the Fringe for: visually striking and
astonishingly creative theatre, brilliantly acted across the board -
special mentions going to Bertrand Lesca as the Hyena, and Lydia Rynne's
bright-eyed, inquisitive Goat. The whole production burns with
collaborative energy. Kim Pearce's skilful and artful direction not only
brings out the best in each performer, but also creates a remarkable
atmosphere of tension, wonderment and fear throughout. The ensemble -
spread out and moving not just across the stage, but into the vacant
seats and behind the audience - bring about a very unsettling experience
and an aura of constant menace envelops not just the young Boy at its
centre, but each audience member as well. The nightmarish quality of
this production never lets the audience out of its grasp until the
closing moments. Everything about Boy in Darkness shines with quality
and imagination: the two ordinary armchairs turned into hidden passages
and chimneys, the several clever comic touches (watch out for
Sellotape), the incredible make-up, the eerie, distorted music. This is
extraordinary theatre. James Hamilton
A
British Subject Gilded
Balloon
A few years ago Daily Mirror writer Don Mackay reported on the plight of
Mirza Tahir Hussain, a British citizen who had spent almost two decades
in a Pakistan death row on trumped-up charges. Mackay and his wife,
actress Nichola McAuliffe, became active in the ultimately successful
campaign to free Tahir, and now McAuliffe has written this play about
it, in which she also appears, as herself. As a docudrama, a lightly
fictionalised version of the facts, the play has a special immediacy and
emotional power, but it also suffers in purely structural ways. Had
McAuliffe been free to write the play as pure fiction, she would
probably have involved herself and McKay much earlier in Tahir's story,
rather than making them latecomers to the campaign, and she would not
have had to rely on the deus ex machina of Prince Charles getting
involved at the last moment and, against all political advice, doing a
bit of behind-the-scenes arm-twisting with the Pakistani President.
Other problems arise from the little fictionalising that she does -
surely Mackay couldn't have been as shocked as she makes him that the
downmarket tabloid Mirror wouldn't publish the 37-page article he wrote
about Tahir, and while the former prisoner may indeed be the saintly
Gandhi figure she paints, it plays as a bit of a dramatic cliche. Still,
there is a built-in power to the story, and to the strong performances
by McAuliffe, Tim Cotcher, Kulvinder Ghir and Shiv Grewal. Gerald
Berkowitz
Bully
Gilded Balloon (Reviewed
at a previous Festival)
The title of Richard Fry's monologue is misleading, since the character
he plays is not a bully, but rather a man who spends his life in fear
that he might become a bully, only to discover that he has become a
victim instead. He tells of a childhood with a violent and abusive
father, and the conviction that textbook psychology requires history to
repeat itself, not realising that it was equally possible that he might
replicate his mother's role when he grew up, came out and found what
seemed to be the man of his dreams. That dark twist, and its tragic
results, come fairly late in the hour, much of which is devoted to the
lighter memories of childhood happiness stolen from the shadow of the
father and some of the more comic aspects of a young man's introduction
to the gay scene. The whole is written in unobtrusive and frequently
witty rhymed couplets, and indeed the whole tone of the hour is
understated and unsensational, Fry's performance consisting of little
more than sitting in a chair and telling the story, when more in the way
of acting it out or investing it with emotion could have enriched it. Gerald Berkowitz
Burn
Underbelly
Andy McQuade's variation on a theme from Sartre's No Exit moves the
damned trio to a kind of desert island, makes them strangers to each
other, and changes the details of their earthly crimes, but otherwise
makes the same point that hell is being in the presence of others who
will eternally remind you of your damnation. One of the women, as in
Sartre, is a lesbian, who drove her lover to suicide, while the second
killed her child because it made her feel too old. The man is now an
international banker who single-handedly destroyed the world economy
with his fund manipulations. That particular bit of updating has the
paradoxical and unintended effect of trivialising things by making this
just another credit crisis play, while McQuade's vision of hell as a
constantly repeated cycle of discovering one's damnation afresh (rather
than being stuck with the awareness forever) actually seems a charitable
gift to the damned. Nika Khitrova, Lucinda Westcar and the author fight
the bad acoustics of their playing space, along with their own
inclinations to speak either too quietly or too loudly, in an ongoing
struggle to be heard and understood. Gerald
Berkowitz
Cambridge
Footlights Pleasance
The implicit annual competition of revues between Cambridge and Oxford
(with Durham frequently topping both) has been won by Cambridge this
year. Though rarely fall-down-laughing hilarious, their sketches are all
marked by a delightfully skewed sense of the absurd, so that some twist
or throwaway bit will catch you by surprise. The punchline of a
beachcomber sketch may be a letdown, but before then the idea of a
beachcomber able to find only sand and water is funny. A lifeboat sketch
somehow morphs into group therapy, a sketch about not-very-bright drug
dealers suddenly starts footnoting Othello, and typical wedding party
chatter somehow develops into the conviction that the bride is a witch.
Surrealism is all, and it happily carries the hour over the occasional
low spot or more conventional gag. Gerald
Berkowitz
Cardenio C Cubed
It is the Holy Grail for theatricals and academics alike: Shakespeare's
lost play, The Tragicomicall Historie of Cardenio. It was omitted from
the First Folio of 1623, for unknown reasons. Dr. Bernard Richards'
reconstruction of the script is eminently watchable and, for the most
part, charmingly performed. This is particularly true of the deft and
nuanced performances given by Benjamin Blyth (Henriquez) and Katie
Alcock (Violante). The decision to present the players as a travelling
band, replete with wagon, is an intelligent one. Playing in a small
space, to an audience on three sides, produces an intimacy that, on
occasion, the cast plays to beautifully. However, the vocal power and
clarity of movement required for this arrangement are not always
achieved, causing certain moments to become obscured. TACT are taking up
a gauntlet with this production and, for the most part, doing so
successfully. The recreation of this script is an academically admirable
exercise, but it is through the class and verve of this company that
Cardenio finds new theatrical life. Katrina Marchant
Cardinal
Burns Pleasance
Seb Cardinal and Dustin Demri-Burns, formerly two-thirds of the comedy
group Fat Tongue, offer a collection of sketches notable not only for
their funniness but for the ability of the two writer-performers to
extend their comic material to unusual length. With only a half-dozen
pieces in the hour, each develops and sustains its premise beyond the
point at which most other comedians would have started to flag or lose
focus, and the delight in watching them skilfully keep the imaginative
ball in the air so long becomes part of the fun. A couple of the
sketches, like the guys considerably less cool than they think they are,
or the actor desperately trying to follow his director's instructions,
are clever variants on familiar comic premises, while the idea of a shop
with only one product - here, potatoes - is invigorated by being played
entirely in French and Franglais. Meanwhile others, like the singing
minicab drivers and especially the chat show guest who is an ordinary
store clerk, open unexpected new comic territory and find a lot to
explore and develop there.Gerald Berkowitz
Nathan Caton
Pleasance
Dear family of Nathan Caton, you have very many reasons to be proud of
your boy. Not only is he clearly a highly intelligent, talented,
sensitive and witty young man, but he has painted a beautiful loving
portrait of you all in this show which only appears to suffer from the
lack of your approval. Please don't think that his study of architecture
has gone to waste when he has constructed such a beautiful home in his
heart for you all and created such a warm and happy place for his
audience, even if for just an hour of their time. The soft interior
however is well supported by a sturdy and cool exterior - the kind of
bearing that spells out 'don't mess with me'. Yet he will not use a
single swear word before he has properly excused himself on account of
his grandma. OK, he does have a bit of a go at his little brother, but
that too is because he cares. And what more could you ask for when he
gives the last word of the show to his dad! And it's a punchline at
that. Quite perfect really. Duska Radosavljevic
Catwalk
Confidential
Assembly
Robyn Peterson is not the first former model to be re-packaging her life
story into a theatrical monologue. A career in the fashion industry is
after all a fine source of rags-to-riches stories as well as juicy tales
of cunning, envy, gossip, destruction and self-destruction. It's all
cattiness galore in Catwalk Confidential, and there'll also be some
pictures to jog your memory with or simply marvel at if need be.
Peterson delivers her story with panache, keeping it light, though not
too bubbly, and certainly betraying no unprofessional sentiment at all.
She only occasionally indulges in sending particular lines in the
direction of teasing innuendos and then rescuing them back to innocence
before they get there. Interestingly too, she knows where to cut her
story short in order to rescue it from any suggestion of a faded career,
or the triumph of time and age over her dream. So, unlike some of the
other similar stories I have heard there is no condemnation of her
industry's inherent sleaziness or a celebration of wisdom and a new
lease of life in the aftermath of a modelling career. No, Peterson ends
on celebrating her Vogue cover, at all costs. Duska Radosavljevic
The
Chair Zoo
Set in the 1940s, this choreographed piece explores one character's
relationships with his partner and mother through powerful, explosive
bouts of physicality. Nasae Evanson gives a fully committed central
performance as a prisoner, athletic and agile, with excellent support
from the other female dancers. The problems, though, are manifold. The
music, for a start, is often repetitive and grating, while the
choreography can feel blurred and overly jerky. Sometimes it tries to
illustrate a narrative, but it's hard to work out what is going on.
Themes of sexual conflict and abuses of authority by a female prison
guard do emerge but there's a troubling lack of coherence. Stubs of
ideas, such as the man and woman communicating through tapping on a
desk, could have been taken much further, but when the choreography does
not have a distinctive performance vocabulary, things start to unravel.
That said, Kimberly Clarke, Annie-Lunnette Deakin-Foster and Raquel
Gaviria support Evanson with intensity, and despite all the flaws, the
show ends up leaving a strong impression. William McEvoy
Changing
the Wheel - Bert Brecht and Me Spotlites at the
Merchants' Hall
Peter Thompson's solo show attempts five things - a lecture on the life
of Bertolt Brecht, a reading of about three dozen Brecht poems, an
exploration of how Thompson's own life relates to Brecht's, a voicing of
Thompson's own political beliefs, and an integration of all these parts
into a unified performance. The last is not at all successful, as the
various parts remain separate without illuminating or resonating against
each other. Thompson's life proves to have nothing in common with
Brecht's, and that strand is quickly dropped, while he is unable to make
his politics seem any more worthy of our attention than those of the
person in the next seat. Brecht's life story might be of interest,
though those who choose to see this show would be likely to know much of
it already. Which leaves the poems. Brecht's poetry is not his strongest
suit, and only a very few of those Thompson reads, like the one in his
title, seem to be of real merit. Thompson's presentation is amiable and
low key, much like a particularly entertaining university lecturer, and
he thoughtfully lets us know when he is being Brecht by picking up a
cigar. Gerald Berkowitz
Chatroom
The Zoo
With the rise of social
networking sites a whole new arena has opened up for anonymous and
malicious cyber- bullying. Chatroom follows the online conversations of
a group of middle class teenagers, exploring their motivations for
seeking contact online and offering touching insight into issues of
depression, suicide and the urge to manipulate and damage others. Exeter
University Theatre Company's production presents these interactions as a
series of conversations with the characters seated on stools,
foregrounding the text and allowing for interesting character
development through reactions and facial expressions. This form,
however, conveys little about the disjointed nature of internet
communication or how the language used online affects the identities
constructed by users. Although the space is used well, changes between
scenes sometimes lack the unity of movement needed to make them
effective and slick. The delivery of text is excellent, with some subtle
and layered performances, but more could be done to explore the vocal/
physical presence of teenagers as opposed to the slightly older
university age of the performers. Overall, Chatroom is a
thought-provoking and surprisingly humorous drama that highlights some
important issues, hinting at what is lacking in online communication
whilst unpicking the complexities of how and why some teenagers engage
with it. Alex Brown
Chortle
Student
Comedy Award Final
Pleasance Dome
Edinburgh is awash with stand-up comedy during August, and most festival
goers will have sat uncomfortably through some kind of dire attempt at
humour in a near empty room. Thankfully, the talent on display at the
final of the Chortle Student Comedy awards was a world away from this
familiar scene, with a packed house at the Pleasance Dome presented with
some genuinely funny material by the 12 finalists. Many of them would
have comfortably stood their ground alongside professional comics, and a
few in particular are clearly names to watch in the coming years. The
panel of judges, made up of agents and critics, chose 21yr old Joe
Lycett, an English student from Manchester University, as their winner.
Instantly likeable, with a keen eye for witty observations, his
intelligent humour had the audience in stitches. Runner-up Ian Stirling,
an Edinburgh local, possesses the kind of gleeful charm that makes
stories hilarious in the telling. Tom Rosenthal's inventive and quirky
comedy is definitely worth checking out, and Nicola Bolsover's extended
love song to Sean Bean was a delight. Sam Gore's biting sarcasm will no
doubt prove popular on the comedy circuit, and Mat Ewins and Max Dickens
both have the potential to be very funny comics indeed. MC Elis James
kept the energy up throughout the near three hour show, and a dark
surreal short story from last year's winner Jack Heal was packed full of
clever and giggle-inducing word play. The audience appreciated
intelligent humour and were patient and supportive of acts who seemed
less at home on stage or whose material fell short of the generally high
standard on the night. There was a refreshing lack of the reductive
jibes and small minded quips that are the bread and butter of inferior
comics. Alex Brown
The
Chronicles of Irania Pleasance
On the surface this seems a deliciously kooky hour celebrating
traditional hospitality and the myths of Iran, a nation still proud of
its ancient (and distinctly non-Islamic) origins. You certainly get a
traditional welcome as Maryam Hamidi's cheery Iranian housewife
alter-ego offers cup of tea around the audiences and politely inquiries
if anyone's a state spy. From the outset however, her cute Aladdin's
cave of cushions, kilims and storytelling props throws up a harsh mirror
on not only Iranian society but also our own in an unexpected two-way
process. Hamidi's infectiously cheery delivery is aided by model moons,
suns and finger puppets as she tells tales of the world's creation, the
first man and woman, chronicles of Iran's ancient kings and viziers.
Woven into all this in are contemporary accounts by Iranian women such
as an acid attack by a husband and watching a son die, hanged for being
gay. The message emerges that such a combined onslaught on the status of
woman drags down all of society - ironic to say the least, given the
idealisation of women in the stirring myths Hamidi relates. The mix of
saccharine traditional storytelling and hard-nosed current affairs may
seem odd bedfellows but Hamidi makes it work via her character's charm.
The script and direction need a great deal more focus to make things
less devised while the accent needs fixing for clarity. Nevertheless
this remains a thought-provoking yet entertaining piece that should be
seen across the country and beyond in any form. Nick Awde
Chronicles of Long Kesh Assembly Hall
It will be hard to find a better ensemble performance than that of the
six Irish actors who together take us to what was more perhaps commonly
known as the Maze Prison (on this side of the Irish Sea at least) with
its notorious H Blocks. The story starts in 1971, when the Westminster
Government introduced what was known as Internment, holding primarily
IRA prisoners for indefinite periods without charge. The actors play
prisoners from both sides of the political divide with equal commitment
and also Prison Officers stuck in the middle. Indeed in a chilling
scene, one of them is told all about the daily routine of his family,
prior to some minor blackmail. In the end though, the worst enormities
are perpetrated on the prisoners, men who are loyal to their respective
causes and so quickly returning to prison after their release.
Chronicles of Long Kesh builds through the relatively relaxed early
years (all things are relative) to the Dirty Protests when prisoners
refused to wear uniforms and decorated cells with their own excrement.
This led to hunger strikes and the play's most moving moments, as first
Bobby Sands and then nine of his compatriots starved themselves to death
for the IRA cause. Chronicles of Long Kesh works impressionistically,
using short scenes and can be very effective, as the actors play
numerous roles to inhabit the prison with believable characters. This
could be irredeemably grim but is leavened with a capella hits of the
70s and some excellent gallows humour. Playwright Martin Lynch directs
with Lisa May and if there is a criticism, the material could have been
cut a little to sharpen the overall impact. However, this should not
detract from a powerful script and fine performances from every member
of this excellent cast. Philip Fisher
A
Clockwork Orange
C
Chelsea Walker's ambitious and imaginative production of Anthony
Burgess's dystopian classic is visually fantastic, with excitingly
choreographed ultra-violence and engaging flourishes of physical
theatre. The first half suffers from a lack of the macabre menace that
underpins the tale. Too much in a rush to proceed to 'real horror show'
set pieces, it sacrifices narrative exposition and character
development. Placing actors amongst the audience is effective at times,
unconsidered at others. This confuses our position between experiencing
the cleverly conceived, institutionalised and immoral futurescape with
Alex, or judging him for his part in it. Inexplicable stylistic
decisions such as the use of a window-frame or the appearance of a
Kubrick-styled alter-Alex have little narrative function, and tend to
undermine the production as a whole. Good performances from Jacob Taee
and James Corrigan - as Alex and Pete/The Doctor - stand out, but
suggest nevertheless that the cast would have benefited from more
rehearsal time spent on the text. Poor projection makes it a struggle to
keep up. This is a little too blunt for an effective re-examination of
the controversial content of a well-known piece. Oliver Kassman
Colin
Hoult's Carnival of Monsters Pleasance
If we admit it, everyone can be a bit of a monster... sometimes. But
there are those who walk amongst us who possess something seriously
sinister inside that seethes away, gnawing at their sanity. It could be
the neatly turned-out gentleman beside you on the bus, the respected
teacher, the well-meaning activist - all of whom, be warned, feature in
this Carnival of Monsters. For openers, a cloaked carnival henchman,
hunched Igor-like and with an appropriate fear of fire, emerges with a
frightening plea to become friends before the ringmaster bids us welcome
to the dark visions that await. Loping from character to character, we
meet the man who after 20 years of Greenpeace has decided that the
answer to life's ills is to exterminate all baboons, a faded star of the
stage bullies us into listening to tales of her golden years, while
there is a cringe-making tour de force in the shape of the karate
instructor from hell. A lasting image is that of the hoodie penguin who
plays on the disbelieving audience with astonishing cheek. The true
horror or course is that these are dreadfully normal people, brought to
life by Colin Hoult's slick, edgy writing and the acting talents of Zoe
Gardner, Stephen Evans and Dan Snelgrove. Every few years Edinburgh
produces the buddings of comic genius - League of Gentlemen, Dutch Elm
Conservatoire (mostly poached for The Office), Flight of the Conchords -
and here surely is the latest. Hoult is a mere step away from creating a
hideous, hilarious universe in which to perch his characters - and for
that he needs a TV series of his own. Nick Awde
Jason Cook: Fear
Stand
Jason Cook's show has got everything one would want in a stand up: wit,
originality, attitude, Geordie accent, excellent material and a
fantastic audience rapport. To top it all he also has that vital
ingredient for a performer which so many of his colleagues shy away from
- vulnerability. He puts himself on the line every step of the way as he
works through a list of commonly held fears and phobias, not neglecting
of course to share his own deepest secrets and irrational anxieties. And
he hasn't had it easy living next door to a dentist's surgery as a boy,
or spiraling into alcoholism in his early twenties as a result of a
stint in a Middle Eastern prison. He never fails to recount these
memories with characteristic light-heartedness and self-irony despite
any residue of trauma. What's more, he'll throw in a film of his attempt
at overcoming his fear of heights by doing a 600 feet freefall jump in
Auckland. And in case that doesn't make you laugh, film footage of his
left foot will. There is an ultimate punchline to the show, but you'll
have to wait for it, or better still - go and enjoy it personally. Duska
Radosavljevic
Cool
Cutz C
A quartet of hairdressers gossip, bicker and discover darker sides to
themselves as they cut, highlight, primp and perm. Dreams of haute
coiffure stardom beckon in this energetic comedy but the reality of
snipping for a living is to be an agony aunt for the customers' tiresome
gossip. Maggie (Wendy Tenbeth) is the kindly but tetchy boss whose
sexless marriage is a constant reminder of her unrealised ambitions. Her
staff are no less complex: Monica (Laura Lowndes) exasperates the whole
salon with her lurid sexual exploits, Verity (Natalie Reed) bores them
with reports of her kid and seemingly absent husband, while dark horse
Susie (Jody Williamson) struggles to keep everyone on good terms.
Whenever the tension rises, the girls break into gloriously Old Skool
songs (and yes, the hairbrushes serve as mics) and there's a thumpingly
good 'Mickey' routine. Original numbers include a heated rap between two
customers: a pensioner and a teenager oblivious to the fact that they're
both getting blue rinses. Gags abound of haircutting and smalltown life
and, under Dawn Richmond-Gordon's careful directorial eye, the cast work
hard and keep things well paced. Scripted by Lowndes, Williamson and
Stephanie Doyle, with more work on the characters this should easily
expand to a successful full-length show. Nick Awde
Crave C Soco
Sarah Kane's plays present directors and performers with unique and
potentially very productive challenges. It was therefore an exciting
prospect to see how as reputable an institution as Royal Holloway
Theatre would approach Crave, Kane's beautiful, tragic outpouring of
human desperation and isolation. The set looks great. A dim cafe - with
four tables in front of a red and black chequered counter - situates the
tortured characters firmly within the wretched everyday. Sadly, the set
is the most creative thing about this production. Once we have got used
to the difficult confessional mode of the writing and the confusingly
de-individuated characters, static delivery and unimaginative use of
space make for an increasingly monotonous second half. While EJ Martin
and Steve Wickenden give engaging performances, they seem to be in a
separate play, entirely usurping the other two actors with their finely
drawn characterisation. Unvaried, tormented delivery, particularly from
the waiter, becomes increasingly difficult to listen to. This is a shame
as the character has the most beautiful monologue of the whole play, yet
the performance manages to render it utterly meaningless. The
relationships between the characters, or lack thereof, are haphazardly
dealt with, resulting in an awkward half naturalism that sits
uncomfortably with the lyrical style of the writing. This production
seems to consist of a string of observations about the text which,
although perhaps interesting in themselves, are not developed enough to
justify the creative decisions they have informed. Eleanor Williams
The
Critic C
Sheridan's 18th-century satire takes the mickey out of theatre buffs,
theatre critics and theatre practitioners, some of whom you might well
encounter, in their modern equivalents, in your wanders about Edinburgh
this month. The scenes of luvies effusively praising each other's work
and taste, only to express their real opinions in asides, might well be
set in the Pleasance Courtyard, and the rehearsal of a particularly
awful play, with enthusiastic commentary by the author, may be the
funniest play-within-a-play since Pyramus and Thisbe. The actors from
the University of Lincoln should be encouraged to play even more broadly
and over-the-top than they did at an early performance, since excess and
high camp are big parts of the fun, and once they've loosened up a bit
this will be a thoroughly delightful antidote to any temptations you may
feel to take the Fringe too seriously. Gerald
Berkowitz
Crush Underbelly
Paul Charlton has written a two-hander, made up of alternating
monologues, that pieces together the portrait of a marriage in deep
trouble. Sam and Anna are 29 and past the first blush of passion, though
there is no question that they love each other. But their sex life is
almost nonexistent, and Sam's energy is distracted by his new job, a
slowly growing gambling problem and a cyber-flirtation with a younger
woman. Hating herself for thinking in these terms, Anna decides to lose
weight, to re-attract him, but he perversely leaves sweets and pastries
lying about. And then he makes a very big bet on the day she makes a
very big discovery. The challenge for a writer of monologues is to
create a sense of the relationship even when the two never relate, and
Charlton is certainly successful there, dropping little clues in one
speech that may only resonate later in another (as when she casually
mentions a second mortgage that has boosted their bank account). As Sam,
Neil Grainger starts slowly, seeming a perfectly ordinary guy and only
gradually exposing his anxieties and danger areas, while Claire Dargo's
Anna peaks earlier, giving us the character in a rush and then letting
us anticipate the effects of his actions on her. It's not a major work,
but there is a real writer here, and two sensitive performers. Gerald
Berkowitz
Curtains Church Hill Theatre
Curtains is the final collaboration between Broadway stalwarts John
Kander and Fred Ebb, produced after Ebb's death, with Kander and book
writer Rupert Holmes filling in some additional lyrics. Curiously, its
British premiere is not in London's West End, but on the Edinburgh
fringe, by students from Archbishop Stepinac High School in White Plains
New York. And let us begin by admitting that the kids are far from
professional, though they are also far closer to it than I remember my
American high school theatricals approaching. The main attraction is the
show itself, a spoof murder mystery set backstage during the out-of-town
tryout of a Broadway musical, and the central joke is that the detective
is a closet theatre buff who keeps interrupting his investigation to
offer suggestions for restaging problem numbers. The songs are a bit of
a disappointment for those hoping for echoes of the hard-edged music and
lyrics of Cabaret and Chicago, as many of them are pastiches for the
musical-within-the-musical and therefore have to be self-parodies. There
is a nice acerbic song about critics and a mock dirge for an unloved
murder victim in the spirit of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Poor Jud Is
Dead ('The skies are blue. Her lips are too.') In fact, you're likely to
be reminded of other shows as much as of K&E's own - Show People is
openly a salute to Irving Berlin, the mockingly sexy Thataway recalls A
Little Brains, A Little Talent from Damn Yankees, and only the cynical
It's A Business has a bit of the Chicago flavour. The show is not
especially strong, and would depend on star performances the schoolkids
obviously can't provide, though Julian Amato as the cop and Jillian
Sayegh as the brassy producer give some hint of the personality and
energy their roles want. Gerald Berkowitz
David
Leddy's
White Tea
Assembly
A rather ordinary melodrama of family secrets uncovered and troubled
relationships somehow resolved is given a freshness and even beauty
through a production that literally clothes it in freshness, purity and
exotic otherness. The audience of perhaps 20 is ushered into a small
all-white room and dressed in white kimonos, to sit against the walls
mere inches from the story being enacted by one Western and one Japanese
actress. The European was the adopted daughter of a famous Japanese
woman from whom she has long been estranged, but the mother is dying and
an intermediary has been sent to bring the daughter to Tokyo. They're
too late, but the two younger women bond and together uncover facts
about the mother that allow the daughter some emotional closure. The
story itself is close to banal, and full of red herrings and loose ends,
and evocations ranging from Hiroshima to Yoko Ono seem arbitrarily
imposed on it. But the pure blankness of the setting, along with the
grace and respect given to the depiction of Japanese customs, holds
interest and emotional involvement, as do the impeccable performances of
Gabriel Quigley and especially Alisa Anderson. Gerald
Berkowitz
Destination GB
Pleasance
I'm of two minds about this show. On the one hand, it is a 'must
see' satire of racism and cultural stereotyping, created by a company
with an original voice and excellent comic timing. On the other hand,
their own treatment of the subject is a bit unsure of itself, and
therefore appears dangerously close to the bone. It's not so much the
conclusive - and a bit too seriously angry - rant about immigrants that
gives cause for concern. It is rather their underlying anxiety to match
every reference to England with a reference to Scotland and their
Benetton approach to additional casting that betrays a lack of
confidence in the show's inherent innocence. That said, Lost Banditos
create an hour of uninterrupted fun, exhilarating role-play and the kind
of joy found only at a children's playground. As a result, their show
about a group of Night Shift Dover workers on a secret mission to
Azerbaijan - is rough at the edges and occasionally a bit too cramped on
the stage. Still, your journey will be worth every penny and every
minute, and it might just take you places you never even knew existed. Duska
Radosavljevic
Dirty
Love C
Looking like a duet between a 1970s porn-star-wannabe and a die-hard
nerd, Guy Combes and Dan Lees predictably have a musical repertoire
featuring subjects such as masturbation, porn, beans, bad knickers and
pretending to be lesbians. While they also have a regular comedy show in
town, Dirty Love is an Edinburgh version of their London-based comedy
club featuring different line ups of every night. Despite their
decidedly sleazy or just plain awkward demeanour, Lees and Combes manage
to achieve a surprisingly effective rapport with willing audience
members. The success of the evening will also depend on their chosen
guest acts, and on this occasion they had a perfect counterpart in goofy
but cool Eric Vampire and silly but handsome Dave Florez. As Combes and
Lees progressively descended into the self-made hell of sexual
frustration, no amount of enthusiastic audience banter could really save
their act. But their guests did - which might well have been the point
of Dirty Love, for all I know. Duska Radosavljevic
Doctor
Whom - My Search for Samuel Johnson Assembly
Many Fringe shows are works in progress, and a reviewer must consider
both the shape they're in now and their potential as they are developed
further. I ran into David Benson just before the Festival, and he
admitted that he had not yet written his Samuel Johnson show, due to
open in Week Three. Well, he still hasn't. Benson has a lot of respect
and enthusiasm for the eighteenth-century writer, lexicographer and wit,
and he has amassed a lot of research and memorised a lot of Johnson's
aphorisms and longer quotations. But he hasn't quite made a show out of
them. He meanders through his material trying to communicate his delight
in it, but the effect is something like the friend who spends an evening
playing you bits from his favorite musicians, trying to get you to share
his conviction of how great they are. What Benson needs is a hook, some
angle that will provide a structure for the show and a core idea to hang
the anecdotes and quotations on. Certainly there's a lot of great
material here, and Benson is an attractive and personable performer.
What there isn't, yet, is a show. Gerald Berkowitz
Domestic
Goddi 2: How to Cope Pleasance
Rosie Wilkinson and Helen O'Brien must have a lot of time on their
hands. Their show - fittingly entitled How to Cope - is a catalogue of
numerous but often under-developed sketch comedy ideas ranging from
cheerleading songs, inarticulate school-girls' spats, female-slant
parodies of Top Gear and Radio 4 programmes, Spanish ads and various
leisure-time activities including am dram Shakespeare, Irish folk
singing and Wii fit. The problem is that I have probably just given most
of the show's best bits away by merely listing some of the Domestic
Goddi numbers. When they do get down to it and begin to scratch the
surface of some of their more interesting characterisations, they often
run the risk of inadvertent ambiguity - such as the hotline-girl/nanny
of indistinct 'European' origin, or the slang-talking school dinner
ladies who could be mistaken for farmers. Wilkinson and O'Brien could
clearly do well to apply some home economics to their repertoire and
spend more quality time baking their characters and layering their
routines, than just churning them out one after another.Duska
Radosavljevic
Double
Art
History
Udderbelly Hullabaloo
If hype were the guiding principle, this would be one of the best shows
in Edinburgh. As director of the Tate Galleries, Will Gompertz clearly
has friends in high places. This show does what it says on the packet
but not too much more. Mr G is an eccentric in big glasses, who clearly
enjoys the chance to wow an audience. His chosen subject in Modern Art,
1870 to the present day, covering 25 or so genres in 45 minutes showing
his 'class' no more than 60 representative images to make points.
Audience participation is the norm, from the initial request for each
pupil to draw a penis in any style they wish to a final quiz to test
memory of the illustrated lecture. Will Gompertz runs quickly through
his topic but in doing so reveals deep knowledge and the ability to
impart this in plain English, not a trait normally associated with
experts talking about the visual arts. This show might well return, as
it has sold so well and if so, do catch it. You will have some
light-hearted fun, learn something about art and a great deal about the
man in charge of the Tate. Philip Fisher
The
Doubtful Guest Traverse
Edward Gorey's thin book contains fourteen drawings, each accompanied by
a couplet, succinctly telling the story of some thing (It looks a bit
like an auk in tennis shoes) that invades a stately home, does some
occasional minor vandalism, but mainly just Won't Go Away. The couplets
are witty, and the drawings are the sort that make you want to look in
all the corners for small comic details. It is, in short, a beautiful
piece of black comic minimalism. Hoipolloi, by turning it into a 90
minute stage version, do just about everything wrong to violate the
spirit of the book and spoil all the fun. (To be fair, the one thing
they get right is costuming and posing the actors to resemble the family
members in the drawings, though surely you'd expect them then to have a
stage set that resembled the drawings as well). Every scene is
introduced at ponderous and generally unfunny length, played at
ponderous and generally unfunny length and then followed up at ponderous
and generally unfunny length - and then Gorey's couplet is projected on
a screen, instantly putting what we've just seen to shame. Meanwhile,
although the concept of a cartoon Something terrorising cartoon people
makes some sense, real actors pretending to be afraid of a Something
represented variously by a drawing, a stuffed toy or one of the other
actors just doesn't work. It is possible to put Gorey onstage
successfully, but what we have here, I fear, is a textbook example of
adapters who Just Don't Get It. Gerald
Berkowitz
Durham
Revue Underbelly
I've always had a great deal of affection for the Durham Revue. Almost
alone outside Oxbridge, they've continued to fly the flag for student
sketch shows, once a backbone of the fringe. And in recent years they've
consistently outshone both Oxford and Cambridge in writing sketches that
were not just potentially comic concepts but were actually funny. But
this is a down year for them, I fear. Too many of their pieces are the
ideas for comic sketches but not the sketches themselves. Wouldn't it be
funny if obituary writers killed people for the material? Well, no, as
it turns out. How about parodies of The Secret Garden or Crimewatch? Not
unless you find something actually funny to do with them. Mac users
bullying a PC user? There's just no joke there. And so it goes. Some
bits, like the Argos blackout, have absolutely nothing. Others may have
a bit of surreal humour in passing or around the edges - a policewoman
who walks around making siren noises - but not enough to save the
otherwise lifeless sketch. Let's just hope they're back in form next
year. Gerald
Berkowitz
East
10th
Street Traverse
Performance artist, professional wanderer, friend and fellow eccentric
to Quentin Crisp, Edgar Oliver found a small room for rent in New York's
East Village thirty years ago, and has lived there ever since, despite -
or, indeed, because of - the primitive facilities and deeply odd
neighbours. He tells his story in a very mannered and sonorous voice,
enunciating and elongating every syllable, with broad gestures and
from-below lighting that suggest a slightly demented and more than
slightly camp scoutmaster telling ghost stories around a campfire. There
are ghosts in his story, amiable sorts who like to lie around on the
floor of his landlord's office. But mainly there are the neighbours -
the 90-something woman who commandeers the communal bathroom, the
alcoholic postman whose life purpose lies in harassing her, the
homicidal midget caballist, and Oliver's own sister, who paints the
walls of her room under the artistic direction of the I Ching. His tale
touches in passing on the giant rats of Paris, cats named after Roman
emperors, and his own propensity for walking for hours through the most
deserted streets of whatever city he's in. (His producer told me in the
Traverse bar that Oliver almost didn't make his first show because he
was meandering around Edinburgh.) Your enjoyment of the hour will depend
entirely on your taste for eccentricity but, as directed by Randall
Sharp, Oliver does tell his story engagingly, and may well lure you into
his skewed and undeniably colourful world. Gerald
Berkowitz
Ernest and the Pale Moon
Pleasance
Oliver Lansley's new play with Les Enfants Terribles is a highly
atmospheric piece of gothic storytelling. Channelling Edgar Allan Poe
and Henry James of the Turn of the Screw period, the company produces a
compelling and macabre account of obsession, immurement and murder.
Directed by Emma Earle, the show has a beautiful, simple set composed of
an assymetrical metal frame, figuring a world out of joint. This warped
image translates into the story of three characters in a building whose
desires turn deadly. Accompanied by accordion music, the sounds of a
metronome and cello, the piece is strong on atmosphere, gloomy,
beautifully lit and rich in texture. The performers create sound effects
onstage, much like companies such as You Need Me and Filter Theatre,
demystifying stage illusion at the same time as weaving a narrative
spell over the audience. There's a sense of deep traumas contained in
some of its images. With some stunning coups de theatre and clever
shifts in perspective, text and theatricality intersect in the work of a
company very adept at showing how physicalized storytelling is at the
heart of some of the best theatre around. William McEvoy
The
Event
Assembly
John Clancy's monologue play is, for at least three-quarters of its
length, a brilliant piece of self-reflexive metatheatre. Taking and
holding the stage with quiet authority, David Calvitto explains that the
titular event is what we are experiencing right now, with strangers
sitting in the dark watching a man in the light speaking words written
by another man for him to memorise and rehearse. The monologue continues
in that key, describing itself as it happens, and even allowing for
deviations from the script which are, we are assured, all scripted.
Beyond the cleverness, though, the event is effortlessly expanded into
metaphor, the audience passivity reflecting a larger inclination to let
others think and speak for us, the anonymity of both speaker and
listeners hinting at urban isolation and lack of social bonds. It is
there, roughly at the point Calvitto sits down, that Clancy's writing
weakens its hold and the metaphor almost collapses. Rather than
continuing to comment on and through the event, the speaker mounts a
soapbox and lectures the audience directly on the failures of modern
society, becoming merely a mouthpiece for the author. Perhaps sensing
this lapse, playwright and actor struggle to re-establish the original
mode, though never fully succeeding. David Calvito's performance
throughout is a tour-de-force of control and complexity, sustaining the
speaker's reality while simultaneously commenting on it from outside.
Gerald Berkowitz
Everything
Must Go Augustine's
Kristin Fredrickson created this solo show as a love letter to her
father, but as inventive as it frequently is, it does not succeed in
making him come alive. Despite a performance mode that ranges from
narrative through dance and gymnastics to lip sync, and stage effects
including films, puppetry and larger-than-life cut-outs, and despite the
fact that her father was a soldier, PE teacher and part-time
transvestite, Fredrickson's story never transcends the specific and
never convinces us that this man should be of as much interest to us as
he quite properly is to her. Her fictional premise, of trying to find
some key to her father while clearing out his house, is almost
immediately forgotten, and nothing is put in its place to give shape or
meaning to what never amounts to much more than a collection of someone
else's home movies. The show originally borrowed much of its limited
emotional power by having the man himself appear onstage in the final
seconds, and now, with dubious taste, ends with the announcement that he
died in June. For all her artistry, Fredrickson has not made art out of
her personal story. Gerald Berkowitz
Facebook
Fables GBT
Apparently based on personal experience, this ultra-relevant and very
watchable show combines elements of character comedy, revenge tragedy
and some slick dance routines to deliver a seamless cautionary tale of
just where our Facebook obsessions may lead. Andreya Lynham, Amber Noble
and Samantha Lyden are the brains and bodies behind the piece which took
just over a year to develop and which intertwines the fates of three
women around one man. William Desburgh's spurned girlfriend Isabelle
hatches a plan to discover who her rival might be by secretly setting up
her ex-boyfriend's Facebook profile. This nets her a former
school-friend Keeley - a feisty wannabe model, and a delusional
acquaintance Fiona he flirted with during a telemarketing call. And
since 'hell hath no fury like a woman scorned', Isabelle spares no one
in avenging her broken heart... Nine deftly observed characters are
woven into this story of mistaken identities, and that's without the
invisible lover-boy Desburgh and a certain Mr Seely. Even though the
narrative loose ends are all tied up a bit too neatly to be believable,
this is the kind of comedy show that will go down extremely smoothly and
leave you ever so slightly concerned. Highly recommended. Duska
Radosavljevic
The
Fall of Man Pleasance
The co-authorship of The Fall of Man is somewhat unusual, with John
Milton on whose Paradise Lost the play draws, taking second billing to
Red Shift's Jonathan Holloway. To be fair, the 45 minute long plot is
all Holloway. It tells an old, old story of co-director Graeme Rose's
Peter, a happy businessman and father of Constance and Toby and his not
very undying love for the Slovenian au pair. Stephanie Day plays
Veronica, every husband's dream but also inevitably a nightmare in
waiting. The unusual twist is that as the affair flames and then
expires, the protagonists quote highly appropriate, generally diabolical
(in the Satanic sense) extracts from Milton's classic. By doing so, they
render what might otherwise have seemed gratuitously graphic depictions
from the storm-lit bedside something rather more artistic and on
occasions beautiful. With two good performances and intensity that never
diminishes, The Fall of Man is among the better Fringe offerings.
Philip Fisher
Fascinating Aida Pleasance
This may be their third or fourth Absolutely Final Farewell Tour, but
who are we to complain? The mistresses of comic song are back. If you
know their work, you'll be delighted; if you don't, you have the
opportunity to become a fan. Dillie Keane, Adele Anderson and, in the
current incarnation, Liza Pulman channel the spirits of Gilbert and
Sullivan, Flanders and Swann, Noel Coward, and Tom Lehrer into a wholly
new collection (Sorry, fans, no sequin song) of witty and frequently
telling lyrics. Regulars might sense a slightly stronger political bent
than usual this time around, with a couple of songs on the monetary
crisis, a calypso set in post-warming Scotland, and a running gag of
Bulgarian folk songs skewering public figures. But other topics include
middle-aged dogging, the unexpected hazards awaiting Girl Guides, and a
hymn to the Church of Tesco. Longtime fans know that Dillie (the
pianist) was there from the start, Adele (the tall one) joined soon
after - and, with Dillie, writes all the songs - and that there have
been a string of Third Ones over the years. Most took on the persona of
being befuddled to find themselves in this company, but bouncy Liza
Pulman joins enthusiastically in the fun, keeping the energy level high
whenever her colleagues (who admit to being in the general vicinity of
50ish) feign flagging stamina. Gerald
Berkowitz
Faust
Lowland Hall, Royal Highland Centre, Ingliston
It is easy to see how the programming of Purcarete's Faust within this
year's Edinburgh International Festival fits in with Jonathan Mills'
chosen theme of the Enlightenment. To tell the story of the man trading
his soul for greater knowledge, the Romanian director chooses Goethe's
text - the version of the myth which in itself constitutes a radical
departure from its predecessors and stands as a major masterpiece of the
epoch. Unlike many before him, Goethe's Faust is redeemed by the power
of human love at the end of his quest, offering hope and reassurance
that it is never too late to take risks - or at least that is what fifty
nine year old Silviu Purcarete seems to suggest. In tandem with his
long-term collaborator - designer Helmut Stuermer, Purcarete places his
aging Faust within a barren, clinical and unstable landscape of academic
knowledge, a massive school room whose walls will be pulled down to
usher us into an exhilarating world beyond. Courtesy of Ofelia Poppii's
sinister, sprightly and shape-shifting Mephisto - this Walpurgisnacht
will be an affair to remember. Witches dangling off the top of a
fork-lift truck are flying over spectacular processions, while others
are dancing and cavorting before an awe-stricken audience. A person
standing next to me remarked that this was far better than any of the
raves he used to attend at this same site - a former aircraft huger, now
used as a conference centre. Originally staged in Sibiu in one of many
disused factories of the communist era, this two hander with a
hundred-plus member chorus is unlikely to have much of a tour anywhere
else. Its brief visit to Edinburgh was therefore a unique opportunity
for some of the more traditional Western European audiences to have
their attitudes towards theatre making shaken up and potentially
enlightened. Duska Radosavljevic
Faust in the Box
Underbelly
Bridge Markland is a Berlin-based dance-theatre-performance-artist
specialising in transgender performance. In this particular show she
lends her androgenous looks to a series of characters in Faust as well
as manipulating a number of hand puppets while standing in a cardboard
box. Her particular twist on what would otherwise be an elementary
puppetry show is that she interlaces the voice-over of the English
translation of Goethe's verse with a collage of famous pop music tunes.
To make matters worse she lipsyncs to it all through the entire show.
Looking like a bad parody of puppetry made by a teenage Rocky Horror
Show fanatic, the show is mildly amusing for the first ten minutes but
then descends into an interminable stint of what could only be seen as
self-gratification. The cut up tunes and radio voices evolve into an
unmitigated audio nightmare in which you might find yourself fantasising
about packing Markland's box up and sending it back to Berlin. Duska
Radosavljevic
A
Fistful of Snow
C Soco
This is what I come to the Fringe for - a play that may be imperfect in
itself but that is clearly the work of a real writer - or in this case,
two. Indeed, the cooperative authorship may be one of the play's
handicaps, since it suffers, not from lack of invention, but from a
surfeit of material and some trouble in focussing its many thematic and
theatrical ideas. At its core is a sympathetic portrait of the one-hit
wonder, here a writer whose first book was a fluke hit and who knows in
his soul he will never be able to repeat it, though he must devote
immense amounts of energy to sustaining the denial of that awareness.
Authors Danny Alder and Chris Hislop set this not-uncomic internal drama
in a comic exterior, as the guy takes a job at an Arctic outpost to
recharge his creative batteries and slowly goes crazy from the
isolation, arguing with a stuffed moose head ('I'm a reindeer, damn
it.'), placating a doorbell-ringing polar bear and submitting his book
ideas to a critical budgie. While the guy-going-crazy comedy sometimes
threatens to displace the blocked-writer-in-denial drama, both are
inventively imagined, well written, engaging and thought-provoking, so
that one feels almost ungrateful in complaining that there is too much
of a muchness here. Directed by Hislop and performed by Alder (with
recorded guest voices for the animals), it's more fun than a barrel of
polar bears.Gerald Berkowitz
Five Characters in Search of Susan Underbelly
Here is a character comedy showcase with a difference. Although not
particularly ground-breaking for its concept - whereby a show that
doesn't go on is being populated by random passers-by - Susan Harrison's
collection of passers-by is indeed a real treat. The first to grab the
limelight is of course the Underbelly usherette Shakira who takes us
through accounts of her failed X Factor auditions and her disturbed
family life. Other intruders upon the stage include a 16 year old
latecomer JBS - an MC from Tunbrdige Wells and premature university
student in maths and science, and a neurotic pill-popping theatre critic
with a secret and a foul mouth - Lynne Scrupples. Slightly more fanciful
portrayals are given to a wayward mermaid in a wheelchair and an
Australian teddy bear therapist on the run from the police. Nifty and
nimble Susan Harrison introduces us to her alter egos with remarkable
ease, brilliant comic timing and a sense of authenticity - creating
suspense and raising the exciting question of just what she will be
capable of in a few years time? Duska Radosavljevic
Micky
Flanagan: Spiel Pleasance
You can easily see Micky Flanagan becoming the voice of the nation - or
at least a newly-middle-aged section of it. The fortysomething comic is
a late starter who has only recently settled down with baby and
mortgage. By virtue of being (technically) middle-aged, he has a lengthy
life experience to help him pass comment on the effects of the
transition which many younger comics simply don't have. And that's lucky
for us since this is one of the funniest spots of the festival, even for
those not blessed to be under 50 and over 39. Flanagan puts his life
into perspective by setting out to compare how he changed from a
seventies punk teenager to a noughties vest-wearing suburbanite. It's
the cue for a steady stream of funny and wickedly accurate observations
on posh South London of today and the East End of yesteryear: building a
hierarchy of neighbours worth talking to, flashing a commercial caller
at the front door, how his dad disappeared each weekend as all dads once
did, booking sex into the family's weekly diary, walking around the
house to the strains of Radio 4 and the skills of doing sweet f***-all.
On paper it all seems pretty ordinary stuff, but when seen from
Flanagan's socially warped viewpoint even the lowly bath tap has
unlimited comic potential. His laid-back laconic Cockney tones are
infectious and lull you into rambling stories before the punchlines
spring out of the blue and catch you unawares. Flanagan effortlessly
tops my laughometer for this festival but of course that might just be a
sign of my advancing age. Nick Awde
Flanders and Swann Pleasance
(Reviewed at a previous Festival)
This salute to the duo who pioneered genteel song-and-patter comedy in
the 1950s is a delight that does not rely on nostalgia or even knowledge
of the originals for the fun, though I must admit I was surprised that
everyone in the audience, young and old, could join in the chorus of the
Hippopotamus Song ('Mud, mud, glorious mud...') without prompting.
Perhaps it's one of those things, like the Goon Show voices and the Dead
Parrot sketch that have entered the British DNA. Duncan Walsh Atkins,
quietly droll at the piano, and Tim Fitzhigham, boisterously welcoming
at the microphone and singing in an attractive baritone, take us through
a dozen F&S classics, from the aforementioned Hippo through Have
Some Madeira M'Dear, Transports of Delight and I'm a Gnu. Tim's
intersong chatter is new but fully in the F&S mode, taking on the
blimpish persona of a Kensington Tory deigning to work alongside his
south-London accompanist, and the moment in which he plays a french horn
concerto by blowing into one end of a music stand is truly remarkable.
All together now, 'I'm a gnu, a gnother gnu....' Gerald Berkowitz
F.L.O.W. Bedlam
Performance artist Neel de Jong evidently gives a different half-hour
show each time, depending on her mood and inspiration. I saw her in a
bedraggled puffball dress, slowly rotating and swaying drunkenly for
several minutes before inching forward on the stage and dropping the
single shoe she was carrying. At one point she lifted her dress, at
another she removed her sunglasses and leered at us, suggesting a
deranged woman suffering under the delusion that she was graceful and
seductive. Eventually she spoke, platitudes like 'Don't do what they ask
you to do' and 'Only when I like it.' But another reviewer saw her dance
more conventionally to the onstage pianist who was silent at my
performance, while a third reports her dressed in a suit coming down to
accost audience members individually. I suspect that, consciously or
not, there is a strong element of aggression toward the audience in her
art - she looked at us and said 'Look at all the boring faces. Not
mine.' Strictly for those who collect bizarre performers with no clear
evidence of talent, and if you care, it's 'Fabulous lucky outrageous
world'. Gerald Berkowitz
Forever
Young Augustine's
Using poetry, songs and
personal writings from the First World War, the Yvonne Arnaud Youth
Theatre have achieved what they set out to. Adam Forde has edited these
historical sources into a script that acts as a testimonial for those
who lived and died during the Great War. The idea itself is not
particularly original since both source materials and staging strongly
evoke the 1963 stage musical Oh! What a Lovely War. Despite this, the
show ably reanimates the voices of history. The performances are all
beautifully delivered; subtle, sincere and precise. The cast's clear
talent for both song and storytelling is enviable, especially given
their age. They are mesmerised by the history they are enacting, shocked
by such an enormous loss of life, determined to do it justice. They do.
As an audience member we are being granted a privilege that is normally
reserved for the most successful teachers - we are seeing the powerful
moment when learning grips a young mind. We are being allowed to watch
the results. Only a dyed-in-the-wool cynic would not be moved by that!
Katrina Marchant
Francis
the Holy Jester Pleasance
Veteran Dario Fo associate Mario Pirovano delivers Fo's
characteristically folksy monologues about Francis of Assisi with a
verve and informality that closely resemble Fo's own performance style.
There is one animal story, but the emphasis is on Francis's democratic
and pacifist impulses. His 1222 'harangue' to the war-loving citizens of
Bologne ironically praises them for their skill and efficiency at
killing both their foes and themselves. Describing the miracle of the
water into wine, Francis plays Mary, Jesus, the Cana caterer and a
passing drunk, effortlessly domesticating the tale, while a high-ranking
Cardinal is described as knowing the Pope so well he can call him
Innocent, without the number, and even the account of Francis's death is
lightened as the saint auditions singers for the mourning choir. This is
the first performance of the monologues in English, in a fluid and
colloquial translation by Pirovano himself, that even manages a few
jokes and puns, as when a tipsy Cana guest tells Jesus 'You are de
wine.' Pirovano performs with enthusiasm and high energy, accompanying
every line with movements, facial expressions or gestures that sometimes
approach the manic style of Robin Williams but that, like his stories,
are rendered friendly and unthreatening by his obvious pleasure in
sharing with us. Gerald Berkowitz
Frank
Spaces
Frank brings something of a fresh take on the murky tale of how Frank
Sinatra sold his soul to the Mafia, revitalised his career and
guaranteed him an eternal place in the pantheon of world superstars. The
string of historical vignettes created here to chart his highs and lows
is a handy device that throws up an unholy array of the characters who
populated the crooner's turbulent life. It's the early fifties and
Sinatra (Sean Cook) is washed up, dumped by his record company with not
a movie role in sight. In desperation he becomes bagman for the mafia,
taking millions in cash to hoodlum Lucky Luciano (Robin Kirwan), on the
run in Cuba, or using Marilyn Monroe to 'fix things' with sexual-fuelled
President Kennedy. Faust overlays Sinatra's own story and so his Mafia
godfather becomes the Mephistoclean Mr Fixit Momo (Neil Jennings) and
the deal is done for the singer's soul. And there's a lot to be sorted:
Sinatra argues with second wife Ava Gardner (Laura Murray) over the role
he wants in the movie From Here to Eternity (he got it and won an
Oscar), he fights indifference to get back into the concert and
recording business, while forced to appear before official
investigations into organised crime. The cast works hard, although David
Keller's direction and AR Cox and Simon Rae's script could be tighter.
And just as I am honour-bound to mention the epithet Ol' Blues Eyes at
least once in this review, I must also mention The Voice. Although Cook
captures Sinatra's fifties era swagger, his admittedly pleasingly rich
baritone captures neither the star's mood nor phrasing that is not
helped by an eclectic selection of songs. Nick Awde
F**ked Assembly
Penelope Skinner has written a sad little portrait of a
young woman whose life did not turn out anywhere near what she might
have hoped, and underlines the irony by telling the story in reverse
order. (I should say at the start that I have almost never seen this
device work, and I don't think Skinner's story would have been hurt, and
might have been helped, by being told in normal chronology.) We
encounter the 20-something played by Becci Gemmell as an unsuccessful
pole dancer reduced to trading sex for drugs and then move backwards a
year or two with each jump to see how she got to that point, ending as
the teenager planning her obligatory loss of virginity on the way to
university. What is clear at each stage is that the character defines
herself entirely in relation to her man of the moment or the one she's
carrying a torch for, and that her expectations are so low - she takes
it as a particular honour that her first boyfriend uses a condom, and
accepts another's casual abuse as no more than her due - that there is
no motivation for the men to treat her any better than they do. These
elements, more than the ironic backwards movement, are the core of the
story, and it is to Gemmell's credit that she makes them clear and
touching even while the author's attention seems to be elsewhere.
Gerald Berkowitz
Funny
Assembly
Make 'em laugh, make 'em cry, make 'em talk. In the war against
terrorism, a number of suspects are reported to be resisting our
interrogators. Their weapon? Meditation to blank out psychological and
violent techniques. The Ministry of Defence's solution? To send in the
comedians. Purportedly based on fact, this fast-paced drama looks at a
bizarre episode in the theatre of war. Accordingly, a British Army
interrogator tries out comic routines in preparation for questioning a
major suspect who has just been captured in the Middle East. Such is his
dedication that he runs through the A to Z of comedy from corny music
hall ('kids blow up so quickly these days') to the Borscht Belt to in
yer face stand-up. He knows the material is corny but his mentor, a
civilian comedy writer, is at hand to help. The problem is that the
mentor knows nothing of the interrogator's motives and this sparks a
deadly chain of confusion as their partnership provokes the suspicions
of another soldier on the interrogation team. Interpreted by this
focused cast along with Katherine Morley's tight direction, Tim Nunn has
written a highly ambitious play that hits most of its objectives and,
with a bit of extra care, wouldn't look out of place on any major
theatre stage. What needs fixing however is the yawning gap in logic
where we are asked to believe that anyone can slip into the military
intelligence machine unscreened - this totally shots in the foot any
credibility in the play's climactic conclusion. Nick Awde
George
in
the Dragon's Den
Zoo Southside
In this inventive and ambitious satire, Las Productions takes the legend
of St George and the Dragon and uses a traditional mummer play to
transpose it into our modern today where the monster-slayer ventures
into the lair of TV's venture-capitalist reality show Dragons' Den.
Within the den lurks a many-headed monster whose fiery breath punctuates
never-ending financial motormouth musings. The update is a thoroughly
contemporary: St George appears in the guise of an immigrant Polish
workman whose lowly status cannot hide his lofty morality. Inevitably he
encounters the Princess and, at first suspicious of her intentions, the
unlikely knight finally falls for her charms and is cajoled into
becoming a contestant in the Den. There he slowly ropes in the fat cat
dragon to his doom via the commercial allure of an eternal food
production device. Told entirely in verse with entertaining rhymes
aplenty, Louise Seyffert and Bart Vanlaere swap costumes and accents in
a show that is in the direct tradition of British agitprop and Theatre
Workshop - the sort that was once the bread and butter of past festivals
but has become lost in our Mammon-obsessed present. So only one
criticism: more songs please. Nick Awde
Rhod
Gilbert
and the Cat that Looked Like Nicholas Lyndhurst
Pleasance
The far from snappy title, Rhod Gilbert and the Cat that Looked Like
Nicholas Lyndhurst takes a long time to explain. It doesn't really
matter, but to give Wales' top comedian credit, he gets there in a
satisfying final flourish. Rhod Gilbert is now a TV star but still
obviously relishes his time on the Fringe, lager as always in hand as he
chats but more often rails against the constant vicissitudes of his
life. Gilbert ignores the many highlights of the last year, exemplified
by his presence at Pleasance 1 in front of 400 delighted fans every
night (and fiery argument with the Prince of Wales at the Royal variety
show). His aggressive style works far better in a bigger space and there
is no doubt that the stand-up has hit the big time and deserves it. His
topics seem diverse but determinedly inconsequential. Battles with
inanimate objects and those who sell them are always favourites. This
year, he had the misfortune to need a new washing machine and Hoover,
much to the amusement of the audience. His friends also persuaded the
Welshman to try Anger Management and hypnosis but thank goodness, they
fuelled his comedy rather than killing it. And the Cat? If anyone cares,
this was a childhood memory chosen to frustrate a gent in Canterbury.
Rhod Gilbert and the Cat that Looked Like Nicholas Lyndhurst is by far
the best show that the popular comedian has ever delivered in Edinburgh.
If you can't get in, put the promised DVD on your Christmas list.
Philip Fisher
The
Girls of Slender Means Assembly
Muriel Spark's novel and Judith Adams' stage adaptation follow the
inhabitants of a London hotel for women over a few months in 1945. The
young women are a predictable cross-section - the glamourous one, the
deep one, the older one, the overweight drudge, and so on. Generating a
plot is the appearance of a Byronic anarchist-poet, who sleeps with the
glamour girl but is most drawn to the poetry-reciting deep one. Much of
the play version is told in flashbacks from a what-happened-later
perspective, and some who didn't know the novel coming in have had
trouble following things. But the shifts in time and place are clearly
central to the production's vision, and the slight disorientation is
actually underlined through designer Merle Hensel's projections and
sliding translucent panels, which not only move us fluidly from one time
and place to another, but hint at the paper-thin walls separating the
residents and our own voyeuristic position as observers. Jamie Lee is
appropriately dashing as the hero and Melody Grove coolly enigmatic as
the poetry lover, while Teresa Churcher smoothly carries much of the
narrative burden as the drudge. Gerald Berkowitz
God:
A
Comedy by Woody Allen
Pleasance Dome
As the subtitle makes clear, the strongest presence throughout this
production is Woody Allen himself. The one act comedy concerns the
struggle of ancient Greek writer Hepatitis and actor Diabetes to find a
suitable ending for their play. The ensemble - almost all of whom sport
Allen's trademark thick-rimmed glasses, and deliver their lines in
usually consistent New York accents - deal with the madcap intricacies
of the piece very well, keeping on top of the constantly flipping
locations and time periods as the play-within-the-play hurtles onwards
toward an undecided end. Dan Pick's direction makes brilliantly
versatile use of a simple set, and the rapid pace keeps the audience on
its toes. Much use is made of planting actors in the audience, and
having them unexpectedly join the action on stage. While on one level
very effective, on another this highlights the main problem with the
production. Those actors who emerge from the audience speak with the
same accents as the onstage cast, removing any feeling one may have had
that we are a part of that same audience. Metatheatrical references to
this all taking place in 'some theatre on broadway' are rendered
meaningless by our firm knowledge that this is not at all the case. The
production seems to assume that we are the same audience Allen may have
opened to on Broadway in 1975. Whilst this keeps very true to Allen's
brand of humour, a few updated and production-specific references would
have been welcome. The entire cast are essentially impersonating Allen
to varying degrees, and though this serves to remind us just how good he
is, by keeping the production so very 'Woody', Runaground miss
opportunities to localise the comedy and really engage with the
audience. That said, strong performances all round and confident,
effective direction ensure that while Woody Allen's voice and influence
may be pervasive, he certainly isn't the only star of the show. Joseph
Ronan
Stefan
Golaszewski is a Widower Traverse
In 2008 Stefan Golaszewski wrote and performed a monologue about a girl
he may have known years ago and the life they might have led. This year
he projects himself into the future, imagining a fictional Stefan in
2056 thinking about the wife he lost after forty years together. As the
widower grieves and relishes the warm memories, hints creep in -
activities not shared, dislike of her friends, resentment of an old
boyfriend - that things were never as rosy as he likes to believe, or
wants us to believe. Sustaining that double vision is the core of
Golaszewski's monologue and, though it occasionally wavers, the portrait
of a cold and bitter man that ultimately emerges is chilling, as when he
actually gets satisfaction from her terminal illness because it means
she is completely dependent on him. Surrounding this central picture are
other pleasures, as the speaker makes casual topical references to what
is to us the future, demonstrating that the author has imagined an
entire world around his characters, and as he creates verbal images of
striking beauty or power - recalling the bride's entrance at their
wedding, he says 'Like birds surprised by a gun, everyone stood.' As a
performer Golaszewski does full justice to his writing, maintaining the
cheery, confident image of the public man while guiding us behind the
facade to glimpses of the ugliness beneath. Gerald
Berkowitz
A
Grave Situation Pleasance
This is Young Pleasance's 25th anniversary show. Five grave digging
brothers from Huddersfield find themselves shipped off to Dunkirk where
they spend a week drinking and flirting in a local brothel until they
miss their ship home. The sizable but shabby Pleasance 2 space is
transformed into a 1940s England, perfect down to the last blue-rimmed
tea cup and complete with immaculate costumes. There are some wonderful
World War II stereotypes on display - a ruddy-faced, curly moustachioed
colonel and a group of cocky RAF boys in blue. On the downside, there is
not much original about the story and the musical numbers are too few
and far between. Despite this, the energetic cast work incredibly well
as an ensemble, led by the talented five brothers, and creating some
wonderful visual images, in particular a human spitfire from which the
brothers skydive to safety. You can end up enjoying the predictability
of a play like this, ignoring the plot holes and delighting in the
ending. Anna Coghlan
Hangover Zoo
David Elliot's play is given a visceral performance by two strong
actors. It is about moral consciences, the excesses of alcohol, and the
damage it can do. Yet the script gets overly didactic as the piece
progresses, and too obviously signposts its final revelation. Daniel
Flynn (David Elliot) wakes to find himself with an almighty hangover.
His dingy post-session bedroom is created onstage, pictures cut from
girly mags on the wall, and a bed centrestage. He is soon greeted by an
aggressive, bullying friend called Hangover (Stuart Nicoll) who
interrogates him about the previous night's drinking. The play is set in
Edinburgh and local references abound, but this character seems to be
from another world. The text is sometimes crude, and because the
characters are not as strongly developed as they could be, unpleasant
references to female genitalia and other things do not feel integrated.
The show is rather too one-note in its tone, and its culmination can be
spotted a mile off. That said, Elliot and Nicoll give sometimes intense
performance but the script's clumsy monologues and crude plotting leave
them with a hard task. William McEvoy
Her
Yellow
Wallpaper Sweet
ECA
A first person account of patriarchal dominance and the common
19th-Century diagnosis of hysteria, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short
story (published in 1892) is excellent material from which to devise
theatre. Confined to a room in a rented house, the protagonist becomes
increasingly obsessed by the pattern and colour of the room's yellow
wallpaper. A sense of claustrophobia, from the room itself and from the
society outside the door, is captured well by the five cast members. But
ensemble movement sections are sometimes laboured and are at their
weakest when they attempt to represent directly what is being said. The
sometimes sentimental music evokes the sadness and isolation of the
woman but not her inner turmoil. Key issues from the book - that writing
is a release denied to her, that her husband is (ironically) a physician
- are skirted over and too much attention is paid to the mannered and
vapid nature of society ladies of the period. The central importance of
her terrible fascination with the wallpaper itself is not fully captured
in a production with interesting moments and some good ideas that
doesn't quite deliver the full impact or nuanced message of its source
material. Alex Brown
Heyton
on Homicide Spaces at Royal College of Physicians
The wife of a scientifically-minded Victorian criminologist is
fascinated by spiritualism, and when their neighbours seem to become
prey to a poltergeist, solving the mystery becomes a competition between
husband and wife, science and mysticism. Things heat up with one murder,
one report of an earlier murder, and a couple of attempted assaults, and
there's an exotic South American plant involved, and the curse of a
murdered witch doctor, and a medium who somehow knows more than she
should, and some hallucinogenic seeds that may be driving one or more of
the characters mad. All the elements are there for a satisfying Sherlock
Holmes-ish mystery melodrama, or even for an ironic parody of the genre,
but in either case it would really have to be a lot more fun than it is
in this fairly stodgy play by J. M. Golder, which can't quite decide
whether it is serious or parody, and also makes the mistake of wrapping
everything up neatly, when a little ambiguity about the solution would
have been more satisfying. Although all involved have professional
experience, neither play, direction nor performances are able to rise
above the sweet earnestness of community theatre. Gerald Berkowitz
Bec Hill: If You Can Read This, My
Cape Fell Off
GBT
What do you get when you cross an IT professional and a librarian? Well,
at least this is how the Australian comedian Bec Hill tries to explain
the origins of her show about superheros, and her inherent geekiness.
But, you also get lots of charm and warmth, harmless fun and - cheese on
toast. Aware of her cuteness, she beams a big dimpled smile all the way
through her routine consisting of regular banter as well as video
footage and her very own comic-style paper puppetry. Unsurprisingly,
there is a clear journey through the show taking us through the four
chapters of what makes a superhero, including superpowers, costume,
sidekicks and transport. There is even some interesting internet
research resulting in an inconspicuous bit of trivia for the enthusiasts
and some truly hilarious sidekick audition tapes for the rest of us. And
even though I'm not too fond of the slightly soppy - and slightly sloppy
- 'moral to the story' ending of the show, multi-talented Bec Hill
certainly has a glorious future ahead of her - on stage and off. Duska
Radosavljevic
His Ghostly Heart
Pleasance
Ben Schiffer's thirty-minute play, performed entirely in the dark, lets
us eavesdrop on a young couple making love and then engaging in
post-coital chat, the only odd note being her insistence that the lights
be kept off. We will soon discover that this is not what is happening at
all, but to explain further would be to spoil the play's effect. Suffice
to say that we will learn the true nature of the scene and its
implications for their lives to come, forcing us to reconsider and
reinterpret all that we've heard so far. Schiffer's conclusion, voiced
by the girl, is somewhat dubious - that the boy is wrong and in some way
cowardly to think of things as happy then or to try to make them happy
in retrospect, rather than to accept failure and its consequences as she
does. Audiences are likely to exit with more sympathy for his position,
both theoretical and emotional, than for her cynicism, though none of
that can be blamed on performers James Rose and Marina Niel, who
convincingly create a reality and then deconstruct it and create another
with their voices alone. Gerald
Berkowitz
Hooked
George Square
Every once in a blue moon there pops up an innovative musical that grabs
you by the (metaphorical) balls. And, for all its imperfections, Hooked
is one of those - and I'll get round to that in a sec. But first the
action: demure Angel (Laura Bailey) is a Romanian singer newly arrived
in Britain to work in a London nightclub. The hitch, as hard-nut club
manager Parnell (Terence Burns) breezily informs her, is that it is a
lapdancing club. Trapped, Angel has no choice but to accept the guidance
her co-dancers sassy Odette (Manal El-Feitury) and sultry Monique (Lucy
Smethurst). Forbidden romance rears its head when she discovers a
soulmate in troubled client Ben (Jason Langley) whose visits to the club
are at odds with his respectable wife Emma (Jessica Sherman),
pressurising him for the baby she so desperately craves. Sex workers,
mid-life crisis, biological clocks, it will only end in tragedy... or
will it? The strength of characterisation and spot-on dialogue creates a
credible contemporary world of dreams and disappointments. The songs
neatly reflect this: the rocky lap dancer opener 'You Can Have It All',
Angel's slow-burner ballad 'You Come Alive', Emma's torch song 'We're
Gonna Find Another Way' and the exquisite 11th-hour trio 'Don't Let Me
Down' where Emma and Angel face up to the confused triangle Ben has
wrought. With gritty plot and glitzy songs from the team of Nick Hale,
Matthew James and Max Kinnings, and impeccably timed direction by Anna
Ostergren, Hooked works because it tackles serious issues without losing
the intimate quirks of these very human protagonists. And for precisely
the same reasons it almost fails, since its scope is so ambitious that
it is hard to know whether you are watching a musical or straightahead
drama. So tighten up that script, smooth over the styles and
arrangements of the numbers and give each of these realistic characters
a story (and song) of their own. That should convert this into the
theatrical phenomenon that other productions can only dream of. Oh, and
kill to keep the ensemble - one of the best cast and hard-working I've
seen in a long time. Nick Awde
Horse Underbelly
Following the success of Throat in 2002 and a string of projects on the
circus and physical theatre scene, Flick Ferdinando and John-Paul
Zaccarini are back with a new show. The roles are reversed with
Ferdinando performing and Zaccarini directing, and they appear to swap
physical lyricism for slapstick too. This is a shame because
Ferdinando's concept of a single woman's hippophilia potentially has a
lot of mileage, which she repeatedly undermines with unnecessary
flippancy. Good humour and frivolity are all well and good, but sexual
innuendo is often taken to extremes for no obvious reason here and, as a
result, the eventual sublimation of our heroine's love and loneliness
comes across as irrelevant and anti-climactic. There are some
interesting visual moments in the show involving hay bales, a gym horse
and a trapeze-saddle - many of them short-lived and too quickly
discarded. Similarly, Fernando's costumes - combining a satin corset
with jodhpurs and stilettos, or a sequined dress emerging from a
drinking trough - are inspired to the point of being a cross between
haute couture and art installation. Overall though, the show trots along
rather than ever being capable of a gallop, and occasionally even loses
the rider by the wayside. Duska Radosavljevic
The
Hospitable Venue 45
Queen Mary Theatre Company stage a dark, dramatic piece exploring the
consequences of war for young people left to fend for themselves without
parents, friends and lovers. Unfortunately the young actors, who
approach the production with enthusiasm and emotion, are sold short by
Rosalyn Smith's script and direction. The futuristic, post-civil war
setting is intriguing, but the script is bland, lacking the passion that
the actors try so earnestly to inject. There are redeeming features -
quietly nostalgic monologues and vignettes define the contrast between
pre- and post-war life, referring tenderly to memories of families,
holidays and the scent of a mother's perfume. When not speaking, the
cast adopt strikingly captivating poses on a row of chairs upstage, more
communicative than moments of direct address which tend to bombard the
audience with expletives. The play's dramatic peak, where an estranged
boyfriend and girlfriend's reunion ends in tragedy, evokes a more
uncomfortable than emotional reaction. Smith's defensive direction has
isolated the audience and the only tears in the room come from the eyes
of the actors, and seem inappropriately melodramatic. Lighting and sound
create an eerie, apocalyptic atmosphere, complementing the acting, which
is intense and generally of a high quality. With a script more sensitive
to the relationship between actor and audience, these young performers
would no doubt have created something far more memorable. Ellen
Willis
The
Hotel Assembly
No detail has been spared to make The Hotel a total experience as the
guests are invited proudly by the (mostly) courteous uniformed staff to
avail themselves of its many facilities. Created by Mark Watson and The
Invisible Dot, the hotel's slogan is ÒClassic, Modern, ComfortÓ and
takes up an entire New Town building, festooned with corporate logos,
tourism board brochures, fully-staffed restaurant, well equipped
work-out room and even a masseuse. The meditation guru and the
white-walled Kafkaesque admin room appear odd touches at first but you
rapidly realise that the whole set-up is odd as you delve further. Could
that inebriated individual wandering around in a dressing-gown have
anything to do with it? Certainly the guest in the nook under the stairs
is a startling discovery (ÒPlease don't feed him, sir,Ó pleads a
hovering bellboy), as is the top guest room, minus occupant but
disturbingly cluttered with the detritus of what is a clearly wasted and
now obsessive life. Picking your way through these private belongings is
strangely voyeuristic. It is an impressive total experience where the
seemingly disparate parts are neatly brought together at the very end. I
do, however, have reservations over the ability of some of the
performers to interact with the audience's unscripted but anticipated
questions and attempts at conversation. Nevertheless, this was more than
offset by a wonderfully manic improvised response by the two nervous job
interviewees in the boardroom after an audience member (I figured he
wasn't a plant) suggested a Kylie-Jason sing-off. Nick Awde
Hugh
Hughes in 360 Pleasance
Shon Dale-Jones' alter ego as Hugh Hughes was a total delight when he
appeared out of the Welsh mists two years ago, and just as much fun in
his second show last year. A total naif, Hugh liked to put on shows but
wasn't quite sure what shows were, so he repeatedly violated some
conventions while being trapped by others of his own imagining,
explained things that didn't need explaining while leaving others
unexplained, and in general created a delightfully skewed alternative
theatrical universe wholly appropriate to the imaginative tales he was
telling. But Hugh seems to have grown up and mastered his chosen art
form, and so, while he is still as charming, friendly and slightly mad
as ever, his new show has become more conventional in form and thus,
well, more ordinary. His monologue is about friendship - about how, in a
dark moment, he returned to a childhood friend to recreate the warmth
and security he remembered from their schooldays, how that almost didn't
work, and how it ultimately did. It is a charming monologue, sprinkled
through with Hugh's askew humour, and perhaps only those who remember
the absolute theatrical magic of the earlier shows will be a bit
disappointed. Gerald Berkowitz
Icarus
2.0 Pleasance
This group-created play from the Camden People's Theatre attempts to
graft the Icarus myth onto a more realistic and melodramatic story of
grief and parental abduction. Some people found the ambitious vision and
theatrical imagery exciting, but by midway through the Edinburgh run the
production and performances had lost too much precision and coherence to
work. We are introduced to a mad scientist who has cloned a boy designed
to develop wings, and is in the process of training him to be ready to
use them once they appear. It would be wrong to add too much more, but
suffice to say that we eventually learn that everything in that previous
sentence is incorrect. But the mystification is maintained far too long
and, unless they skipped a page of the script near the end, far too much
is left unexplained for the conclusion to be satisfying. Meanwhile, if
the two performers, Sebastien Lawson and Jamie Wood, had developed
characterisations and a chemistry between them at the start of the run,
it had all disappeared by the time I saw the show. Neither made me
really understand or believe in his character, especially as the plot
twists developed, and a series of tightly choreographed sequences of
training and medical measurements had lost all their snap. The show may
once have had charm, and if director Matt Ball cracks the whip it may
regain it, but everyone involved let the level drop too far for me to
give them the benefit of the doubt. Gerald Berkowitz
If
That's All There Is Traverse
A couple planning to marry hit a wall of last-minute panic. He consults
a bored heard-it-all-before shrink and prepares multi-volume power point
presentations on his fiancee's good and bad points. She daydreams the
day away at work, oblivious to anything around her, or wanders the
streets imagining apocalyptic scenarios that might forestall the event.
He takes lessons in feeling and expressing emotion while she buries her
face in a chopped onion to try to release the tears. They carefully plan
out a moment of spontaneous passion that inevitably fails, and can't
even make it through a rehearsal of their first dance without panicking.
All this is shown with impressive theatrical inventiveness and high
spirits by the three writer-performers of Inspector Sands, Lucinka
Eisler, Giulia Innocenti and Ben Lewis. And yet one can't escape a sense
of overkill, of immense creative energy devoted to insights and
theatrical effects that don't require, or warrant, all that work.
Because if you take away the razzmatazz this is just standard rom-com
sitcom stuff, and might just as well star Jennifer Aniston. Gerald
Berkowitz
Il
Ritorno d'Ulisse King's Theatre
The combined appeal of Monteverdi's late masterpiece and the South
African Handspring Puppet company of the War Horse fame was bound to
draw in a diverse audience for this sell out run. William Kentridge, the
director, animator and set designer of the piece certainly offers a
truly synaesthetic experience in return. A warmly lit seven piece string
orchestra - featuring viola da gamba, a harp as well as the bass, guitar
and some period instruments - are positioned centre stage so to envelop
the unfolding action. Meanwhile, the singers dressed in elegant but
simple evening wear help to manipulate the puppets to whom they lend
their voices. All of this is frequently accompanied by animation and
film footage mixing internal bodyscapes with urban settings and mythical
landscapes in such a way where ultra-sound scans sometimes serve as a
background to some shadow puppetry too. Although the puppets' eyes
sparkle seductively in the glare of the footlights, the piece seems to
be a far more restrained achievement than the Handspring's London show.
This might be partly because Kentridge's concept revolves around a
hospital bed-bound Ulisse, whose return is ostensibly from an operating
theatre. Although the singers create some magnificent performances to
breathe life into their characters - Romina Basso's birdlike rendition
of tormented Penelope is particularly memorable - there is very little
action here until the decisive contest of the final act. This keeps the
overall experience closer to a beguiling concert with frills, than an
operatic extravaganza we might have expected. Duska Radosavljevic
The
Importance of Muffins
Spaces at Royal College of Surgeons
Just like the irreverently silly title, The Importance of Muffins is a
witty and entertaining show, guaranteed to put a smile on your face.
Without descending into preachiness, the play critiques the safe,
cosseted and dull existence of many contemporary Westerners. It observes
the absurdly cautious and self-disciplined lifestyle of a young
businessman as he works in the executive lounge of a Transcomfort
International Express Hotel (complete with requisite basket of
complimentary mini muffins). After a rather average opening, the show
really takes off with an exciting revelation half way through and the
arrival of Freddie Bowen to provide a slick, animated and very amusing
performance as the celestial 'Manager'. Although Roberta Bellekom's
performance as 'The Girl' fails to capture convincingly the caprice of
her troubled character, Conor Clarke's portrayal of 'The Man' makes him
an engaging and sympathetic character. Jenny Andrew's script, despite
treading some well-worn themes, is original, intelligent and highly
humorous. It takes a droll and impressively blunt U-turn when it looks
to be heading for a rather trite happy ending. A funny and enjoyable
show which occasionally lacks polish but is well worth watching. Lana
Harper
The
Improverts Bedlam
I didn't laugh once during this whole hour-long performance. The five
Edinburgh University performers guide the audience through a series of
twelve games. Each of these confronts us with boring situations, awkward
interactions - which constantly fail to evolve into anything even mildly
funny - and unimaginative story lines. Even the inevitable heckling is
badly dealt with. Instead of feeding off the shouting that punctuates
the show, and thereby showing their audience that they deserve their
place on the stage, the Improverts seem to go to an impressive amount of
trouble to pretend not to notice any of it. Luckily, the audience is
saved from total boredom by the odd one-liner - mainly coming from
Martin Heavens - that makes you smile just enough to remind you that you
still knew how to. As with Christmas, it is inevitable that the
Improverts' show will be back, and as with Christmas, I can only hope it
will be better next year. Simon Englert
In A Thousand Pieces Pleasance
(Reviewed at a previous Festival)
The subject is the trafficking, exploitation and abuse of women in the
sex trade. The company is The Paper Birds, committed to a fluid style
that incorporates dance, music and mime with the spoken word. The
result is a frequently evocative, sometimes harrowing and sometimes
ineffective picture of those unfortunates drawn to Britain by hopes of
opportunity and a new life, only to be brutalised and forced into
prostitution. The show opens on a light note, as the three performers
- Elle Moreton, Jemma McDonnell and Kylie Walsh - read from file cards
the words of young women planning trips to Britain, about what they
imagine it to be like and what they hope to do there, and then mime
and dance the wonder of arrival. But then, as recordings give us the
words of the women picked up by the traffickers and repeatedly raped
and beaten into submission, the actresses reflect the story in mime
and dance. At its best, this mode, while not graphic, does capture the
horror of the experience. But at least some of the time it is either
too literal to add much to the recorded accounts or, conversely, too
distanced from what is being described to resonate with it. Some of
the strongest moments have little to do with the company's performance
style - a film showing Brits trying to draw a map of Europe,
demonstrating how unaware of the world outside they are, and the
simple adding up of the number of rapes the typical victim endures in
a year. Gerald Berkowitz
The
Interminable Suicide of Gregory Church
Traverse
On a virtually bare stage, without the elaborate sets that accompanied
his most recent experiments in storytelling, Daniel Kitson weaves a tale
so textured and so fully imagined that many in the audience (and half
the reviewers so far) will be convinced was a true story. He tells of
finding more than twenty years' worth of a dead man's correspondence and
of reading it all, recreating a sense of the man and his life. The hook
is that the first few letters in the pile were suicide notes, but the
suicide was delayed enough (and the postal service efficient enough)
that he actually got replies to some before he got around to killing
himself, and so felt the need to reply to the replies, and then to react
to the response he got to those letters, forgetting about the suicide as
he renewed or began relationships and a richer social life than he had
known before. As Kitson reads from selected letters, dating them
precisely and cross referencing them to others in the collection, we
trace a constant friendship with one writer, an ongoing argument with
another, a relationship with a third that changes with the years - and
have to keep reminding ourselves that this is all fiction, so fully does
Kitson imagine the man and his world. As a performer, Kitson is more
relaxed and engaging than he has been in recent shows, creating an
informality and rapport with the audience that contribute to the
complete believability of his tale. Gerald
Berkowitz
Internal
Traverse
I knew it wasn't a real date but still I found myself declining the
pungent curry lunch in the hour before presenting myself at speed-dating
masterpiece Internal. I also made sure I had enough deodorantÉ oh, wait
a minute, that should be the actor's responsibilityÉ hang on, I am the
actor. And so I am. And these are the rules: five audience members meet
five (attractive) performers and dive immediately into a speed-dating
and group therapy session. One guest is going to get a psychological
surprise. That much I can reveal, the rest is up to you. The show's
outcome depends on how you respond to your date partner and how much you
can (or want to) give away about yourself in half an hour. I suppose the
worst people to invite are critics (and stalkers) since you need to have
to have a relaxed, open mind to step into Ontroerend Goed's daring total
experience. It's a compact encounter at 25 minutes but how many shows
can you name that guarantee one-to-one attention throughout? And
remember to include the time spent in the street afterwards, chatting
with your other co-audience members and comparing experiences - the
vital, unscheduled second part of a remarkable show that blurs reality
and fantasy and breaks down all four walls of theatre. Nick Awde
Jane Austen's Guide to Pornography Zoo
Southside
Billed as Australia's longest running gay theatre company, Out Cast
theatre is by no means restricted to its chosen niche market. On the
other hand, the current show may not be every Austen-enthusiast's cup of
tea either. However, Steve Dawson's play about an imaginary encounter
between the 'pornographic playwright' Brett and the 18th century author
of most beloved romantic English prose will reach a good deal of
theatre-goers in between the two extremes. As Austen battles to finish
her very last story before her death, and Brett is struggling to
overcome a writer's block, both authors are desperate to surpass their
own limitations when it comes to writing love scenes. Their characters,
being developed before us, gradually begin to receive each other's
treatment - even though the pair's duel is not exactly a bed of roses.
The main charm of this piece is contained in the very exercise of
literary cross-fertalisation between regency-style elegance and the
language of the gutter, which is generously seasoned with hilarious and
timely one-liners. I also liked Nathan Butler's effortlessly delicate
portrayal of Jane, who I'm sure will appeal to the widest possible
cross-section of the audience too. Duska Radosavljevic
Janis Gilded Balloon
Born 1943, died 1970. Age 27. Pioneering female singer in the
testosterone-fuelled world of sixties rock. Fatal casualty of that same
world. That was Janis Joplin. Her legacy is still celebrated and Nicola
Haydn's one-woman show gives a fascinating if lurid insight into the
private and public personas that created a legend. Plain, dumpy,
acne-scarred, insecure, Joplin was an unlikely star. On the eve of her
death from an overdose in an LA hotel, she describes her escape from
Port Arthur Texas, wild years in San Francisco before moving on to front
Big Brother and the Holding Company, where she found fame and more
thanks to vigorous heroin use by band members. In fact, all her adult
life Joplin would take any substance on offer - the more illicit the
better - and seemingly ball anyone who took her fancy. Alternately dippy
and hardnosed, Janis reveals how her trademark traits, born out of
rebellion against the tedium of the small town values she grew up with,
became her undoing as she evolved into a full-time junkie. While Haydn's
bubbly script could find more light and shade in what amounts to a
straight-ahead biopic format, she shines as the troubled rock diva.
Wearing a feather boa a la Pearl - Joplin's posthumous bestselling album
- in both speech and song Haydn nails that boozy, deliciously rasping
voice and infectious cackle. No mere mimic, she captures Joplin's edgy
confidence, in the process allowing us to share some of that magical
charisma. Nick Awde
Simon
Jenkins
Plus One Laughing
Horse at the Counting House
Part of the Free Fringe, young comic Simon Jenkins opens with the usual
'Where are you from?' chat with the audience, before passing the mike to
guest Matt Brown, who does fifteen minutes or so before Jenkins' main
turn. Between them, the show runs barely a half-hour. Both comics are
personable but clearly beginners, each telling a string of essentially
unrelated jokes, with no continuity or transitions and, partly as a
result, each having to rely on notes to remind themselves of the running
order. Brown actually hands his notebook to someone in the front row, to
prompt him and grade the jokes, and Jenkins ends the show by reading a
poem he hasn't gotten around to learning yet. Though Brown affects a
hearty drinking-buddy persona and Jenkins is more laid-back, neither has
developed a real identity or style of delivery, and so the random
selection of stories, about flatmates, dating problems or the
differences between Glasgow and Edinburgh, are strictly generic. Jenkins
is marginally the stronger of the two, if only because he loses his
place less often and screws up fewer punch lines. Gerald Berkowitz
Pete
Johansson Underbelly
Comedian Pete Johansson is in his thirties and has discovered that's
different from being in his twenties. He is married, and has realised
that's different from being single. Other discoveries include the fact
that pregnant women go a bit bonkers, that being a bit out of shape at
the gym can be embarrassing, that some of the women he dated when he was
single were a bit strange, that men have difficulty understanding women,
that size-0 fashion models are not most men's idea of beauty or
sexiness, that it is dangerous to answer any question a woman asks about
how she looks, that men and women have different arguing strategies, and
that in fact men and women are different in a lot of ways, including
their attitudes toward anal sex. In short, he is a thoroughly generic
comic with thoroughly generic material and, while some of his jokes work
and he is amiable enough, there is nothing in his act to make him stand
out from dozens of other thoroughly generic comics with thoroughly
generic material. Gerald Berkowitz
Jumpers
Sweet ECA
Focusing on the mentality and motivations of those who commit suicide by
jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge, 'Jumpers' fails to effectively pull
off this difficult theme. The central story of two women - one a
tourist, the other intending to commit suicide - is scripted rather
predictably and too often tends towards cliché.
While both leads demonstrate fair acting ability there is no opportunity
to engage or empathise with them. This is perhaps due to the brevity of
the scripted character interaction and development, which is frequently
interrupted by scenes with masked mimes. The mimed sections - designed
to illumine issues raised in the plot - are not objectionable in
themselves. The very slight interaction between the realistic characters
and the mimes works surprisingly nicely, lending a cohesiveness to the
piece, and acknowledging its abstract style. The most effective moments
of the play are created physically, particularly the tableau of the
bridge, represented by a long piece of material held at intervals to
create its iconic shape, and a single piece of rope held in front.
Nonetheless, the mimes still lack the precision of movement required to
make them wholly engaging and, like the rest of the production, remain
unpolished. Lana Harper
Russell
Kane's Fakespeare Pleasance
Comedian Russell Kane set himself the challenge of writing a modern
comedy in cod-Shakespearean style, and the result is pretty much a
technical success though somewhat more hit-and-miss as an hour's
entertainment. As a writer, he's got the rhythm and rhymed couplets
down, and a few sprinkled 'thees' and 'thous', along with nice coinages
like a suicidal 'self-toppage' catch the cod-Elizabethan flavour. For
the pedant, a nice touch is his take on Shakespeare's signature extended
similes, with something described as being 'as disrupted as a Ryan Air
passenger with moderately heavy luggage,' while a suggestion is
dismissed as 'less likely than Jim Davidson in a burka'. As those
examples suggest, much of Kane's comedy depends on name checks, with the
audience laughing pavlovianly to every mention of Piers Morgan, Jeremy
Kyle, Ant and Dec or Howard from the Halifax. The plot has something to
do with a disgraced banker given the opportunity to regain his fortune
by destroying an African country's economy, and the only surprise is
that he hesitates. Sadie Hasler provides some comedy as his loyal
secretary-mistress, though Kane himself seems more at home in the
non-Shakespearean warm-up sequence. Gerald Berkowitz
Kataklo
- Love Machines Assembly
Leonardo da Vinci's mechanical and anatomical drawing studies serve as
remote inspiration for Kataklo's new show. Not that you'd be able to
guess by looking at the ensemble's flourescent costumes, pointless
swimming caps and plastic feet, or indeed the set consisting of what
looks like six moving sails. To make matters worse this is all
accompanied by some mind-numbing electronic music and mostly
disappointing choreographies. Much as you may try to attribute some
semblance of meaning to this display of vacuity, you'll be repeatedly
defeated by the spectacle's persistent refusal to yield any coherence.
At times it looks like the piece might be about the difficulties in
communication between men and women - but I am not entirely sure that
the eight creatures on the stage are indeed envisaged as representatives
of the homo sapiens species. This is not helped by the fact that the two
main protagonists at first descend onto the stage from a hanging saddle,
only to find that by the end of this hour of 'transformation' - there is
no going back. I can only say that Leonardo is bound to be turning in
his grave. Duska Radosavljevic
Shappi
Khorsandi
Pleasance
The core of Shappi Khorsandi's show is how ill-equipped she is to be a
political activist or even commentator, a role the press and TV keep
trying to cast her in, since she's one of the two British Iranian women
they've heard of. Her problem is that she either comes at causes from
the wrong angle or keeps wandering off the point. Reading Anne Frank's
diary as a teenager, all she could think of was what a fourteen-year-old
boy's diary might have included. Joining a protest march, she gets lost
in the syntax of the chanting, and she can't help feeling that a party
with the words National and British in its name must be a good thing.
But it is quite likely that Khorsandi will not get all the way through
her prepared material on any given night, so happy is she to be diverted
into spontaneous digressions and byways of thought. She is particularly
adept at working off the audience, on this occasion developing
profitably comic lines of thought and even running jokes off the
presence of a couple of pre-teens and their half-Iranian mother.
Gerald Berkowitz
Killing
Alan Underbelly
In the medieval epic Sir Gawain And The Green Knight the hero must
undergo a quest within a quest within a quest - to keep a potentially
fatal appointment, to live up to a symbolic bargain along the way, and
to discover the legitimacy of his claim to honour through the other two.
Failing the second threatens the first, but the sobering and maturing
experience leads to success in the last. Playwright Phil King has
translated that into modern terms, with Alan a shallow prince of the
City who must learn whether he is capable of commitment to anything
deeper than instant gratifications. But King follows the plot of the
original too closely, and most of its elements, including the framing
challenge and a surprise revelation of a key character's identity,
aren't believable in the modern context. Exactly what self-discovery
Alan is striving for is never clear, nor is how his adventure takes him
toward it. An expressionistic nightmare sequence and the occasional
appearance of puppets clash unfruitfully with the rest of the play, and
we are too often told the meanings of events rather than having them
dramatised. The cast directed by Simon Pittman and led by Peter Stickney
as Alan strive earnestly to make clear and dramatic what is too often
static and opaque. Gerald Berkowitz
King
Arthur New Town Theatre
When it comes to epic verse drama, what we usually get nowadays is a
struggle of contemporary theatre makers to make it all accessible to
today's audiences through considered and exciting design and performance
choices. Contemporary writer Lucy Nordberg presents herself with the
opposite type of challenge by choosing to render the legend of the
liberal Christian ruler King Arthur into a 'renaissance' mode. Illicit
love, courtly intrigue and a rustic play within the play are all
harnessed here in the interest of exploring the theme of kingly hubris,
and Nordberg's wordy script is duly set by director Andy Corelli on a
decidedly stylish contemporary stage. Many playwrights and poets have
succumbed to the challenge of rewriting classical themes, texts and
characters and giving them a deeper, more playable, more contemporary
voice. However, they often had a formal reason that was more significant
than just being an imitative exercise in style. Nordberg's iambic
pentameter play does not appear to carry any such reason at all, but at
least her exercise achieves an adequate imitation. Duska
Radosavljevic
King
of the Gypsies Pleasance
Pauline Lynch's monologue play is based on interviews, and verbatim
excerpts in various voices are heard throughout, almost like inter-scene
music. But the bulk is an invented monologue by actor Paul McCleary, not
as king of the gypsies but as an ordinary modern member of the tribe who
intermittently channels ancient voices or racial memories. Those
sections are the weakest, as the little information they give, such as
the theory that the Romani were originally natives of India enslaved by
the Turks, is not especially important to the play, and they do not
successfully evoke either mysticism, poetry or a sense of cultural
history. Somewhat more successful are the speaker's own stories, from
his amiable telling of the legend that the Romani are cursed because it
was a Gypsy who made the nails for the Crucifixion to a schoolroom
sequence in which the child's innocent questions betray the teacher's -
and, by extension, the whole larger society's - complete ignorance of
Romani history. But the strongest effect of the monologue lies in the
total ordinary guy-ness of the speaker, communicating better than
anything he says that modern Gypsies are just people trying to get
along. Gerald Berkowitz
King
Ubu Zoo
At just 50 minutes long, UCLU Runaground's is a heavily edited version
of absurdist Alfred Jarry's controversial Ubu Roi, but a highly
successful one nonetheless. Brilliantly adapted from the original by
Luke Davies - who also directs - the script keeps the plot essentials,
throws in modern references, then frames the whole thing with twisted
vaudeville. Telling of the rise and fall of the eponymous character and
his wife - played superbly by Evan Milton and Hannah Berry- this
production gives the ridiculous a hearty embrace. The gallery of bizarre
grotesques parade before us in what is a highly charged and highly
amusing piece of absurdity that condenses and updates a classic, making
it fresh, exciting, and most importantly, brilliantly funny. The staging
is simple but effective - it never tries to do more than is necessary.
Likewise with the performances; there is little room here for serious
character development, but the cast present the story in a highly
engaging and entertaining fashion very much in keeping with the
exaggerated absurdity of the original. One leaves the theatre with the
very strong feeling that here is a production that really understands
what and why it is, and that delivers precisely its intended result. Joseph
Ronan
Kit
and the Widow Edinburgh Academy
The veteran cabaret duo have been playing the Festival for almost 30
years, and continue to produce an hour of guaranteed pleasure for those
who like their entertainment witty, musical and ever-so-mildly risque.
As always, Kit Hesketh-Harvey does most of the singing while Richard
Sisson plays the piano to self-penned comic songs ranging from the
topical - a calypso number about Obama - through the not-so-topical - a
mock Schubert lieder about cosmetic surgery. There's a jolly song about
economic doom and gloom, a sweet one about the end of an affair, and a
salute to TV competition winner Susan Boyle that manages to rhyme 'Les
Miserables' with 'lost my marbles.' This year's show is a little lighter
on political satire than recent years, which is fine with me, as I and
most of their fans would much rather hear them sing songs like 'Get a
Room', '27 Reasons to be Gay', and their unique take on 'Scotland the
Brave'. This is hardly cutting-edge stuff, and the K&W audience is
notably older and more settled-looking than the typical fringe house -
Kit calls them the Edinbourgoisie - but only Fascinating Aida come close
to the urbane wit and polish of this always-reliable pair. Gerald
Berkowitz
Knuckleball
St George's West
In baseball a knuckleball is an
unpredictable pitch designed to rattle a batter. One of the characters
in William Whitehurst's two-hander is a working-class guy whose days of
glory with a best buddy on the high school baseball team are behind him,
and who can't believe his luck in catching the beautiful, sexy,
high-class girl who loves him. But the girl has a couple of secrets that
are going to be the emotional equivalents of a knuckleball. The play
footnotes Terrence McNally's Frankie and Johnny, Ed Graczyk's Come Back
To The Five And Dime and Tennessee Williams' Cat On A Hot Tin Roof on
its way to finding its own voice and focus. The fact that the big
revelations are telegraphed so long in advance that we can't be as
rattled as the guy is doesn't weaken it as much as you might fear,
because it isn't about the surprises but about what happens to both
characters, and to their relationship, once the secrets are out. Judy
Merrick and Bryan Kaplan convincingly play two people attempting to deal
with thoughts and emotions they've never had to exercise before, and as
extremely unlikely as their situation is, they create and sustain a
reality that makes you believe and care about their struggle to find a
way toward an ending. Gerald Berkowitz
Lady
Bug
Warrior Spaces@
The Royal College of Physicians
More of an inspirational talk on a children's theatre set than a
conventional stand up comedy, Vicky Ferentino's show is certainly one of
a kind. Not least because she is doing it so to tick it off her to do
list. She personally greets everyone on their way in and out of her
quirky world in which she is the superhero named Lady Bug Warrior and
whose mission it is to ensure some common courtesy in this world, as
well not taking things personally and telling the truth to herself.
There are real pearls of wisdom here mixed in with some crafty
punchlines and lots of character sketches. Often they are the kind of
portrayals done in child's hand - good natured but revealing, and she
doesn't shy away from some dark undertones either. In any case, one
can't help but admire her as she shares her tale of rescuing her self
esteem from the pits of loveless, hopeless suburbia and going off to New
York to find her own voice. And there's nothing mind-blowing about it -
it is just a simple feel good heroic piece.Duska Radosavljevic
Land
Without Words Caves
In Dea Loher's monologue play an artist already suffering from a
creative block and crisis of confidence goes to Kabul, where the
horrors, particularly the sight of one badly wounded child, paralyse her
creativity even further - and have you spotted the problems already?
First of all, the two halves of the text don't hang together logically -
you don't have to be an artist to be horrified by war, and you don't
need war to create artistic self-doubt. Indeed, I'm not even sure the
script ever explains why the speaker went to Kabul (My mind may have
wandered for a few seconds), so the connection between the two seems
arbitrary rather than organic. And remember that wounded child? The
whole focus of her description is not the horror of war, but the
emotional pain of the artist on seeing her, and that is patronising at
best and offensive at worst. There is some interest in the first half of
the monologue, as the artist explains how each style and approach to her
art proved disappointing, but even there the play has a structural
problem. The internal logic of the plot requires the artist either to
return from Kabul ready to create a masterpiece or driven to suicidal
despair, but all Loher gives us is despair-once-removed in the mention
of another artist (not named in the play, though the programme says it's
Mark Rothko) who did kill himself when he reached an artistic dead end.
As the speaker Lucy Ellinson writhes around a lot to indicate internal
agonies, and covers her face in clay, sand, dirty water and anything
else she has lying around, to show self-abasement. Gerald Berkowitz
Last Night Things Happened...
Underbelly
This play tells the story of a boy's journey home and his encounter with
numerous captivating characters, each with their own touching and
hilarious story. There is an air of fantasy and the absurd, reminiscent
of Alice in Wonderland, except that it is a darker rendering of Lewis
Carroll's celebrated tale. SUDS exercise an imaginative approach to
costume. A large piece of cloth, for example, hangs over an umbrella to
create the illusion of a larger-than-life obese man, played with gusto
by Beth Cannon. The piece, written by Chris Harrisson and directed by
Alex Sayer, is visually enchanting, thanks to its vibrant physicality
and sometimes disturbing imagery. Definitely worth seeing, if only to
witness the actors transform themselves into the many weird and
wonderful characters. In particular, Mildred (Lily Pollard) and Mitch
(Sam Caseley) - a couple who have been fused together by lightning -
whose constant bickering and maddening behaviour suggest the influence
of Tweedledum and Tweedledee. There are moments in the play which had me
speechless with laughter, particularly the 'mime' who is imprisoned for
'silent anarchy'. Overall, a thoroughly enjoyable experience, which has
the audience engrossed from start to finish. Sophie Robins
The
Last
Witch Royal
Lyceum Theatre
Rona Munro's speculations on the half-legendary story of the last woman
to be burned as a witch in Scotland unsurprisingly gives a twenty-first
century colour to the eighteenth-century events. She imagines Janet
Horne as a woman with an almost Falsaffian love of life, and the
imagination to believe that magic would be possible if she only knew the
words, or at least that it is fun to believe it might. Her vitality
gives her an authority that makes the villagers half-believe in her, and
that, along with his fear of her sexual energy, is enough to move the
ambitious new sheriff to push through a prosecution, conviction and
execution. So, while Munro does leave the door slightly ajar for
supernatural and demonic forces to be at work, the play becomes about
the clash between a large woman and a small world frightened by her.
This puts a lot of weight on actors Kathryn Howden as Janet and Andy
Clark as the sheriff. Howden strides the stage with a natural energy and
authority that are as theatrically appealing as they are clearly
life-affirming and not demonic, and even in the prosecution and torture
scenes it is Janet who clearly holds the power. Clark turns what could
be a stock villain into a small man frightened by the passion the witch
inspires in him and fighting to repress that as much as to prosecute
her. Strong support comes from Hannah Donaldson as the witch's daughter,
who may ironically be pushed toward her own Satanic pact by her mother's
fate, and by Vicki Liddelle as a particularly brave neighbour.
Gerald Berkowitz
Andrew
Lawrence
Pleasance Dome
Andrew Lawrence is a miserable git. That's his stock in trade,
complaining about just about everything. He hates critics, shop clerks,
policemen, waiters, cheese, Coldplay, Gordon Ramsay, anyone ahead of him
in a queue, the latest Star Trek film and anyone who likes it, and
sometimes even his girlfriend. What carries the hour is the sheer force
and eloquence of his invective, as any one of these topics is likely to
set off a motormouth string of excoriating adjectives gradually building
in violence and obscenity and more likely than not to end with the word
vagina or one of its shorter synonyms. The sheer eloquence and invention
of these rants is awe-inspiring, and if they're not always exactly what
you could call funny, they generate an exhilaration closely akin to
pleasure. Even when Lawrence is being relatively calm and unruffled, a
seemingly innocent sentence is likely to take a surprisingly grotesque
or obscene turn, and his repeated assertion that he doesn't particularly
care whether we laugh only encourages further naughty delight and
laughter. On the other hand, those who have seen Lawrence in past years
will recognise some stories and rants being recycled from earlier shows,
and it may be time to retire the older material. Gerald Berkowitz
Micaela
Leon - Kabaret Berlin C
German chanteuse Micaela Leon dedicates her current act to eight of what
she calls Weimar Girls, heroines in various ways of 1920s Berlin
culture. The list is eclectic, ranging from Marlene Dietrich to
revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, each introduced with some background, a
moment in character and a song from the period appropriate to the
individual image, though little attempt is made to imitate the styles of
the performers in the group. The spoken sequences are the weakest parts
of the hour, much of what is said, including the names themselves, lost
in Leon's accent and the impersonations are generally poor. The songs,
ranging from the trivial to the dramatic, are stronger, and Leon might
profitably discard the concept in favour of a simple recital.
Appropriately, her singing is strongest in the best-written songs,
including the Eisler-Brecht Supply and Demand, the Hollander Liar Liar
and the Weill-Brecht Threepenny Opera finale. Though performing in a
small space with a single muted piano accompaniment, Leon is miked in a
manner that exaggerates her occasional shrillness and produces the
disorienting effect of the singer being over here while her voice comes
from somewhere over there. Gerald Berkowitz
Lilly Through The Dark Bedlam
This offering from the young River People is part live performance, part
puppetry, part story theatre, and almost uninterruptedly touching and
delightful. Its dark fairy tale is about a girl so saddened by her
father's death that she chooses to die to be with him. But the journey
to death passes through a kind of limbo where she literally jumps ship
to search for her father, meeting instead a string of comic, threatening
and comforting figures who guide her toward a decision of whether to go
forward or back. Lilly is a small puppet, with the four live performers
taking turns narrating, operating her and playing the other characters,
who include the impatient ferryman, a girl lost in limbo, a tree that
takes away memories, and the moon who rules over all. I think that quite
young children could understand this story and even explain Lilly's
decision to their parents, and I know that children and adults would
both respond to the story's delicate beauty, the skill and invention of
the telling, and the moments of pure theatrical magic. Gerald
Berkowitz
Little
Gem Traverse
There's enough plot in Elaine Murphy's portrait of three Dublin women to
carry a soap opera through an entire season, but what dominates the play
is not the over-abundance of melodramatic incident (some of which we
might have lived without) but a growing admiration and empathy for
characters stronger than they themselves realise. Grandma Kay is tending
her dying husband and considering her first vibrator; mother Lorraine,
who hasn't felt human contact since she threw her junkie husband out
years ago, puts a tentative toe into the dating pool; and young Amber is
up the duff by a guy inconveniently off to Australia. In the course of a
year or so there will be a birth and a death and a new suitor for
Lorraine, and each of the women will prove more adaptable and resilient
and capable of happiness than they might have guessed, and we will have
been carried along on their emotional journeys. The play is structured
as interlocking monologues, with none of the actresses ever interacting
with each other, but Sara Greene (Amber), Hilda Fay (Lorraine) and
especially Anita Reeves as Kay create a reality and draw us into it,
guiding us to see their world and engage fully with their emotional
adventure. Gerald Berkowitz
The Lost Letters of Mr. Corrigan Quaker Meeting House
The Newbury Youth Theatre has produced a wonderful show for this year's
Fringe. Amongst a beautifully crafted set - dozens of mounted
letterboxes, walls with yellowing maps, a floor carpeted with letters
and piles of old mouldering boxes - the imaginings of a tired, lonely
clerk are brought to life on stage. Mr. Corrigan reads undelivered
letters, hoping to restore them to their rightful owners, or failing
that, to the person who would benefit most from receiving them. Directed
with imagination and pathos, the show reminds us of the romance of
writing and receiving letters. The sizeable cast all deliver committed
and skilled performances with professionalism, energy and exuberant
dedication. The performance also has a live musical accompaniment,
adding a cinematic feel to the scenes forming in the mind of Mr.
Corrigan. With charming characterisation and effective touches of
physical theatre, this is one of the best pieces of youth theatre I have
seen in a long time. Oliver Kassman
Love
Letters
on Blue Paper
Spaces at the Radison
Arnold Wesker's very minor play might have the potential of being a
quietly moving study in the ways British reticence and emotional
closedness are subverted by true feelings, but it would require a more
skillful production than this attempt by the Up In Smoke Theatre, which
just underlines all the script's weaknesses. Wesker imagines a dying old
man whose wife can only communicate her feelings through letters, even
though they're in the same house, letters that he not only does not
acknowledge, but shows to a friend. So dying man and friend talk about
dying but not about the letters, man and wife are rarely in the same
room, wife and friend barely notice each other, and the wife is heard
mainly in recorded voiceovers of her letters. At best, the play comes
across at a heavy-handed attempt at pathos and irony, and the production
has all the earmarks, including uneven acting and discrepancies in the
apparent ages of the performers, of well-meaning amateur theatricals. Gerald
Berkowitz
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(Some of these reviews appeared first in The Stage.)
Reviews - Edinburgh Festival - 2009