Review: Sporadical, Forest Fringe

written for Culture Wars

Having scooped themselves a Fringe First and a Total Theatre Award last year with the manic and moving Crocosmia, Little Bulb return to Edinburgh as the Forest Fringe’s resident company for 2009. Their latest embryonic offering is an epic folk opera – equally quaint of title – that manages to catch the venue’s buoyant mood and spirited generosity with wonderfully shambolic aplomb.

Set up as a family reunion, of which we are all a part, Sporadical’s main thrust is in its ramshackle retelling of how our two adopted ancestral lines, the Welles and the Ferrys, became one; united and hyphenated by matrimony. With perky songs and painted backdrops, a five-strong company of actor-musicians recount a folklore concocted from traditional ingredients, such that mariners, mermaids, maidens and a murdered whore conveniently converge on the sea bed, fall in love and discover shared lineages.

There may not be much to it, but the actual course of narrative events is of little bother, since it provides a welcome excuse for a rambunctious hour in the company of Little Bulb. The jaunty harmonies that spring from accordions, guitars and melodicas, the tidy sprinkling of wit, the flurry of cardboard props and, most of all, the giddy, carefree energy of the performers all combine to make Sporadical a high-spirited cocktail that goes straight to your head.

Usually, I find myself begrudging work so wholly reliant on atmosphere and a consciously poor aesthetic. Gomito, for example, have riled me up no end with the lazy melancholy of rustic guitars, battered suitcases and shabby puppetry. With its bucolic costumes and carefully constructed village-hall amateurism, Sporadical certainly walks a similar path.

Where Little Bulb differ, however, is in their lack of conceit. Here, style is not used to compensate for content, dressing it up in order to disguise its flimsiness. Instead, the style is the content. If anything, it dresses down, allowing a relish of the tarnished performance that maintains the crucial tipsiness of atmosphere, which is initially constructed through personal welcomes and pointers to the bar.

We get onside with Little Bulb because their story is driven only by a need for stories. There are no portentous claims of deeper import and no self-important revelations dressed up to look pretty. Instead Sporadical is just hearty, silly, folksy fun.

Review: Crush, Underbelly

Written for Culture Wars

Not so long ago Second Life was just that: a layer of fiction, leisurely escapism. Now, according to Paul Charlton, reality has been supplanted. In Crush, Charlton suggests a schizophrenic society drifting into the virtual, always tempted to dive down the rabbit hole of Web 2.0.

Sam and Anna have been married for seven years. She was slimmer then. He was motivated and, even, charismatic.

Now, aged 29, Sam is conducting an online affair with a 22 year-old NQT to whom he once sold a book. “It’s not real”, he protests when confronted, but, as his marriage breaks down and his wife spends more and more time in the gym, the actuality of its consequences is plain to see.

Charlton’s text exists in the overlaps between two intercutting monologues. Sam (Neil Grainger) sits at his laptop watching Burnley take on Manchester City, intermittently trawling Google for titbits of useless information. Across the stage, Anna (Claire Dargo) is draped over an exercise bikes, pedalling vigorously but going nowhere. By the end, the gap between real and virtual existences has become a chasm, with far more than a mere marriage in the balance. Generally Charlton’s pacing of revelation is superb, although his killer twist (Anna is pregnant, Sam has bet their mortgage on the football) reads a touch too contrived. Certainly, it ups the stakes, but more with a sudden yank than a gradual wringing.

There is, however, much to be admired. Crush is a particularly astute glance at today’s disillusioned society. On the cusp of their thirties, Sam and Anna are indicative of a generation’s fear of genuine responsibility, its disinclination to difficulties and its inability to appreciate anything with the slightest of flaws. Both have walked from university (with 2:1’s, of course) into mediocre jobs and marriage only to become malcontent with their lot.

Dargo and Grainger put in strong turns, imbuing their confessionals with a sharp humour. They both play totally convinced of their own ethical rights and (excusable) wrongs. By having the husband and wife talk directly to the audience, director Ria Parry manages to create a genuine concern for both characters. You feel protective of the malleable Anna and desperate to slap Sam out of his virtual stupidity. By the final moments, when the couple come face to face for the first time, the fallout born of idiocy and addiction seems so impending that you feel a shout of frustration rising in your throat.

Smart, savvy and, above all, transfixingly human, Crush is a dipstick for a generation with its head in the sand, one that has totally lost connection thanks to its wireless connection. Let’s hope it proves a warning light.

Review: Land Without Words, Just the Tonic @ The Caves

Written for Culture Wars

“The pain has got to be there; I’m not interested in provocation.” Well, that pain certainly makes its presence known in Dea Loher’s tortured meditation on aesthetics delivered here with extraordinary force of feeling by Lucy Ellinson.

An unnamed artist alone in her studio questions the purpose and possibility of art. In the wake of a recent visit to K, a far off war-torn city, her practice has suffered paralysis. She knows that art has a place in a world of such possible devastations, but only insofar as it can truly pertain to them. Not beauty for beauty’s sake, then, but revelation, rumination and reality; not Georgia O’Keefe’s Petunia (“a supermodel image of life”), but her Ram’s Skull.

Attempting to paint her experiences, the artist is confronted by the ineffability of the horrors she has witnessed. Sure, she can capture the image of K, but how can she make manifest its essence? “Fear is white,” she blasts, “I can’t find the white.”

Lucy Ellinson is a phenomenon. She tears the text open as if ripping off a scab to re-expose a wound. Words clacker from her mouth with the rhythm of a typewriter, then stop; suspended mid-epiphany. Every choice she makes is elevated with detail and curiosity. When she takes off her top, for example, she doesn’t simply remove it, but trails it slowly over her face to catch its contours. Momentarily, its stretched hollows form the agonized skull of The Scream by Edward Munch.

In fact, Munch’s icon recurs throughout: first as her clenched claws prize open her face, then in the clay mask moulded over her features, pierced by her tongue. Is it a silent scream of horrors witnessed or of frustrations felt? Such details are testimony to the density of Lydia Ziemke’s direction, which must also take credit for the various masks that materialize on Ellinson’s face. As the clay dries, there appears a layer of ash and, later still, the pure white of Pierrot make-up, gradually cracking. When she eventually washes the dirt away, the clay seems to become mascara streaking down her cheeks.

Lest all this sound biased towards the cerebral, the combination of Loher’s (slightly over-wrung) text and Ellinson’s total embodiment packs an emotional punch. The artist’s pain translates into a heavy-hanging pathos and there is a humour peppered throughout, albeit so born of distress that laughter seems unthinkable.

As a whole, Land Without Words is perfectly knitted together, permanently and wholeheartedly in tune with the aesthetic principles extolled by its protagonist: bodily over beauty. The result is a gripping piece of performance that leaves behind thumping and insoluble conundrums, both ethical and aesthetical.

Slow-burning Stars

Just thought I'd flag up this little blog for The Stage about the sort of shows that fly under the radar within the fast-paced culture of the Fringe.

Review: Trilogy, The Arches @ St Stephens

Written for Culture Wars

At its very pinnacle, art has the ability to make criticism redundant. Trilogy does just that. It is so important, so intelligent, so passionate, bold, heartfelt, honest, amusing, absorbing and valiant that such words simply fade into insignificance. No matter what gets written, criticism will never muster even the tiniest fraction of its worth.

Nic Green, a 28 year old artist based in Scotland, asks what it means to be a young woman today. In two attitude-altering hours teeming with ideas, politics and, most of all, courage, Green and her company dissect an inherited, outdated feminism to find a voice that is resolutely, powerfully their own. At one point, they manage to physically envelope the past, extending immense respect and gratitude while taking hold of its baton and stepping onto its podium. The guard has been changed. Now is their time – and, alongside them, through them, thanks to them, it is ours.

To start, Green and Laura Bradshaw step onstage and introduce themselves as an apple and a pear respectively. Fifteen minutes later, as the culmination of the first part, they share the stage with thirty other naked woman and dance. Together, washed in a sunset-like glow, they are an impressive group: markedly individual yet simultaneously abstracted.

In the second – and most accomplished – section, the company recreate and riff off the 1971 Town Bloody Hall debate, in which Germaine Greer delivered her notorious ‘Mozart’s sister’ speech. Under this microscope, the feminist leaders of the seventies seem a curious mixture: we respect what they are saying, but, at times, not the manner in which they say it. They disrupt proceedings, catcall and undermine their counterparts, in particular, misogynistic writer Norman Mailer. They seem like adolescents that have elevated themselves in their own mind, with adult opinions but childish actions. We respect them deeply, but they are no longer electable ambassadors.

Finally, Green proffers a lecture on Jerusalem, the adopted anthem of the suffragettes and, ever since, the Women’s Institute. Alongside this, she introduces a web-based extension of the project – http://www.makeyourownherstory.org/ – providing instructions for participatory use. Here, perhaps, is the first trace of immaturity in her work, as one or two of her suggested activist actions, such as re-facing a male statue in honour of a female inspiration – retain traces of student-esque irony. That said, it remains empowering and forceful.

By the time we come together to close with a rousing version of Hubert Parry’s hymn, your feelings of solidarity are deep-set and heartfelt. There is only respect for those earlier volunteers and members of the audience who similarly opt for nudity. Clothed, you wish you could do more than sing.

Trilogy is, without doubt, one of the most important, profound, challenging and transformative works I have ever seen. It stands heads, shoulders, knees and toes above the majority of the Fringe programme. To go is to hang off Green’s every word, to soak up every image, and, most of all, to feel long-held assumptions, anomie and apathy slipping away.

Review: Internal, Mecure Point Hotel

Written for Culture Wars

Internal is carnivorous. It preys upon its audience, feasting on our individual characters before spitting us out into the city half-eaten. Like the Venus fly trap, it draws us in of our own volition, before snapping shut and gorging itself, first chewing through the Achilles’ Heel then worming its way parasitically into your head to fester.

This is theatre that is not afraid to be nasty. Not Ravenhill-Kane-in-yer-face nasty, but wounding-scarring-real-world nasty. It manipulates; it betrays your trust; it seduces; it rejects.

To reveal too much about the mechanics of Internal as an event is to break it's powers, but the piece perches in the gulf between speed-dating and group therapy. Five audience members come face to face with five performers. They treat you to an intimate experience with a stranger over a shared drink. Then Internal turns on you, exposing you to others and, more destructively, to yourself.

Essentially, Belgian performance collective Ontoerend Goed have created a hall of mirrors that reflects with a warped honesty. The image of yourself that comes back at you is rarely pleasant, but always recognisable. Your least favourite features are made prominent, but they remain yours.

Using the behavioural techniques of pick-up artists, made famous by Neil Strauss’ bestselling exposé The Game, Internal’s performers have an almost universal success rate in seduction. They extract everything they need without seeming to twist your arm. Everything we give, whether personal histories or more immediate actions, we give freely. We betray ourselves. We could do no other, but we only have ourselves to blame.

Crucially, however, the piece never masks its own manipulation. Even before entering, you witness the previous participants exit; on leaving, you see the next five. The walls are covered in letters written to audiences long-forgotten. Like The Smile Off Your Face before it, Internal hinges on being a conveyor-belt that churns through people. Without making this obvious, it would never hold up ethically.

For me, the piece’s ethics become blurry according to its motives. Does it put us through such sore and morally-suspect experiences, for our future benefit or for its own gratification, simply to prove that it can? Is it a kindness born of cruelty or a display of its own dominion? That Internal is both at once makes it all the more interesting.

It is a brilliantly conceived, superbly executed, brutal experience that I cannot honestly recommend highly enough or – paradoxically - at all.

Review: Oh, My Green Soap Box, Pleasance Courtyard

Written for Culture Wars

“It’s going to be the biggest campaign ever”, enthuses Lucy Foster, a self-proclaimed revolutionary. It’s going to change the world so radically and fundamentally that nothing will remain the same. It will be like a world that has only ever looked at its feet staring at the sky for the first time.

Or, she might get sidetracked. She might meet a nice young man and fall into bed with him. She might meet a not so nice, not so young man and do the same. She might forget about time entirely and enjoy the empty satisfactions of lying next to another body, soaking in its warmth. She might just drink beer and eat chips.

Oh, My Green Soap Box is a scatty, but smart, theatrical essay about good intentions and guilty consciences. We can, she says, always do more; we can always act better. There will always be polar bears that need saving. (This is Foster’s chosen cause.) Perhaps, then, we can give ourselves a break occasionally. Maybe it’s alright for us, as humans, to fold in the face of an insurmountable heap of responsibilities. But maybe, Foster grapples, maybe it’s not.

While there is something rather touching about this roundabout inconclusiveness, Foster’s argument always sits a bit close to the fence it straddles. Spreading her material more thickly, condensing it, would add urgency to the central dilemma about the ethics of inaction.

However, this softly, softly approach pays off with the unexpected call to arms of her final image. Having created an arctic habitat from a white sheet draped meticulously over three chairs, she drags it offstage with an aching slowness to leave behind a barren, inhospitable landscape. It is an image that cuts through an overfamiliar understanding of environmental politics and lands the consequences directly, powerfully, in your lap.

As a performer, Foster is a likeable presence. Just. She is always a touch too controlled and measured in her delivery and you find yourself wishing that she’d let go, abandon the fixities of the text – quirky and thoughtful though it is – and really talk to us as people.

She manages it occasionally, most notably in her delightfully ridiculous propaganda video, in which she takes to London’s streets and parks dressed as a cuddly polar bear. As she converses with the bemused populace, admitting the flaws in her own attempts, she manages to make her point about everyday ethics and heartily entertain at the same time. Behind the fluffed mask, Foster seems most comfortable, willing to drop her guard, and if she could find that the live performance Oh, My Green Soap Box would snowball.

As it is, it’s an agreeable but modest start to an ambitious crusade.

Review: Anomie, Zoo Southside

Written for Culture Wars

How Precarious, of all people, can bemoan our addiction to all things mediatised is utterly beyond me.

In Anomie, the young dance-theatre company suggest that each of us treats urban life as a computer game in which we are the sole hero. Through the presentation of six characters, each of whom lives an unfulfilled, asocial existence governed by a single ruling principle – an obsession with film, say, or online social networking – Precarious portray a generation disengaged from each other and from reality.

Problematically, all of this applies in equal measure to Precarious’ particular breed of media-dependent theatre. It’s ironic: they lament the influx of digital technology into society while wholeheartedly succumbing to it.

Worse still, the multimedia used is entirely responsible for Anomie’s being a complete shambles. Televisions on mechanised pulleys flicker and display malfunctioning messages. Images slip out of sync with one another, even as the live action loses time with the fixed images onscreen. Legs, for example, appear five seconds after a body has stepped behind the screen. Their attempts to project into three dimensions, admirable though they are in theory, utterly fail: blurry, pixelated images don’t read with clarity and target surfaces are missed.

Not only is there no evidence of careful craft, the material technology onstage becomes a concern as flat screens collide and threaten to keel over.

When they go cold turkey on this habit, however, things improve immeasurably. With just four mattresses, they create the urban architecture simply, clearly and wittily, even managing to maintain the desired implication of digital culture. Likewise, an amorous, yet disturbing, duet takes place either side of a mattress, disembodied arms reaching through a hole in its centre to explore another anonymous body. Far more is achieved with the tools of reality, choreography and performance.

Precarious are clearly inventive practitioners with something worth saying, but you wish these media-junkies would turn off the television, face the music and dance.

Review: Orphans, Traverse Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

Helen and Danny have just sat down to a celebratory dinner and in walks Liam, his T-shirt sodden with blood, his eyes wild and white. The three just stare at one another. Nothing’s said, nobody moves. Wine glasses remain unchinked, frozen mid-toast. It’s as volatile an opening as you’ll ever see.

Jittery with shock, Liam has just witnessed a young man viciously attacked by a knifeman, slashed all over rather than stabbed. He cradled the victim in his lap until, suddenly, the man leapt up and legged it; bleeding and running, running and bleeding. As the evening wears on, however, it becomes apparent that the inconsistencies Liam lets slip may not be the result of memory blanks after all.

Onto this wiry but tautly-strung frame, Dennis Kelly pegs a wealth of ideas, primarily concerning familiarity, gated communities and the fear of outsiders. He asks how much loyalty we owe to family and why a culture of tremulous distrust perpetuates.

More than this, though, Kelly’s writing thumps like a heart straining to contain itself, pulsing at three-times its resting rate. His ability to underpin even the most mundane of topics, instructions for steaming rice, for example, with a lurking menace is incredible, as is his talent for diving right into a character’s illogical argument. In fact, Kelly’s dialogue gives a star-turn here, as sentences dissipate and contort, mere nothings reveal deep truths and ill-chosen words slip out and spark raw dispute.

However, there is a sense that his dexterity for dialogue conceals the slenderness of the plot portrayed. The play’s thrust is the stilted emergence of a truthful version of an event past and, although Kelly maxes out the tension throughout, Orphans is never more than a tightly knit and impeccably crafted playlet.

At times, perhaps, Jonathan McGuiness and Claire-Louise Cordwell as the married couple mishandle the text, spelling it out with a slight, but perilous, staginess. By contrast, Joe Armstrong prattles through it with perfect ease, words tumbling scattergun off his tongue.

With Garance Marneur’s set of silhouetted spikes looming over the family home, Roxanna Silbert’s production gains a vaguely dystopian edge, while remaining firmly lodged in the present. In is this balance of the warped and the recognisable lays the daunting, haunting power of Orphans.

Review: Zemblanity, Bedlam Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

At last year's festival, Le Navet Bete picked up a Total Theatre nomination for Serendipity. Zemblanity, another hour of madcap and explosive buffoonery, proves their success was anything but the result of happy coincidence.

From raw materials of leggings and lycra, make-up and muscular contortions is made a chorus creatures filled to bursting with potential energy. Each twitches with an ingrained animal anticipation, stilly salivating before they explode into the headless frenzy of sperm in a petri-dish. Tumbling around the stage, they seem forged from tightly-coiled springs and slinkies.

Together, they are are tight-knit and well-balanced unit. Where one is an effete and airy presence, another is an open-mouthed, fiery force; one, a louche, creeping reptile; another, an armour-plated beetle with a big appetite. Yet, in spite of such differing modes, the foursome plays with the utmost of complicity and total, unwavering commitment.

In their midst is the hapless Hans, the bowler-hatted butt of the mischief. In the hands of Nick Bunt, however, Hans is no mere lynchpin. With each remonstration of our laughter, Bunt cranks up the comedy, punishing diaphragms like an ever-tightening corset. His combination of po-faced naivety, futile authoritarianism and warped German accent - think Dutch vowels and clipped South African consonants - is deadly.

At times, however, the manic energy veers too close to onslaught and Zemblanity could use more clarity and structure. The piece retains something of the rehearsal room: anything goes but, at the same time, everything goes, resulting in a patchwork quilt stitched arbitrarily together. Though this rhythm grants them an anarchic unpredictably, allowing musical numbers and non-sequitors to spring from nowhere, it can daze and confuse.

As it is, Zemblanity is utterly infectious, but if they can harness future material while keeping the chaos, Le Navet Bete stand set to be the very best of bonkers.

Review: A Fistful of Snow, C Soco

Written for The Stage

For eight long months, Oscar-winning screenwriter Chester James has been manning an emergency food reserve 1,000 miles south of the North Pole.

Alone and paralysed by writer’s block, James awaits the inspiration to repeat the success of his debut film, The Nullarbor Gunslinger, living “groundhog day for dicks” and whittling time away in conversation with an inflatable reindeer head and other constructs of his imagination.

Although amusing throughout, A Fistful of Snow serves little purpose beyond providing a vehicle for Danny Alder. While it showcases his gentle flair for surreal humour, the script (co-written with Chris Hislop) feels like a series of pre-existent skits knitted loosely together. Flashbacks and flights of fancy take over, impeding the possibility of really interrogating James’ solitary situation. Darker elements and desperation are too easily glossed over.

That said, the light-hearted material makes for an enjoyable hour and there is a certain charm about Alder. More likeable than charismatic, he gets an audience completely onside, such that it doesn’t much matter that laughs are gentle ripples more often than bursting explosions.

All in all, A Fistful of Snow is a shaggy but pleasing distraction slightly let down by its lack of punch.

Review: 6.0 - How Heap and Pebble Took on the World and Won, Pleasance Dome

Written for Culture Wars

With summers hotting up and polar ice-caps melting down, Dancing Brick ask us to spare a thought for the world’s figure skaters in this surprisingly poignant and cerebral clown show.

It’s been five years since Heap Cruziack and Pebble Adverati last laced up their skates and danced competitively, but now, in spite of the extinction of ice-rinks, the world champions are intent on a glorious comeback. Thus, dressed in glacial-grey chiffon, they take to the wooden floor and skate with polished smiles and clumsy feet. It’s a stunningly simple idea that captures the clown’s essential conflict of optimism and futility.

Admittedly, Thomas Eccleshare and Valentina Ceschi fail to wring this premise for every last drop of comic potential, but in return they forge an unexpected tragedy out of the iceless-dancers.

On the surface, Heap and Pebble are shrewdly observed caricatures of sporting professionals. Eccleshare, in particular, revels in the absurd inanities of media-speak and the faux-humility of their podium routine is spot on. However, by the time they come to actually perform their faltering free dance, Heap and Pebble seem utterly hopeless. They are broken and empty, entirely stripped of purpose like two masterful marionettes come unstrung.

In order to achieve this, Eccleshare and Ceschi sacrifice a rounded, satisfying structure in favour of something more stuttering. They sag as often as they hit hilarity – their icy recreation of the Apollo moon landings being a particular comic peak – but there are also moments of delicate beauty. All it takes to suggest Heap and Pebble’s former glories, for example, is two fingers gliding around the miniature ice-rink of a plastic garden chair.

Though 6.0... is not the most immediately gratifying theatrical experience, it has the intelligence, depth and imagery to linger with you through the Fringe. In fact, the more you think about Heap and Pebble’s plight, the more they’ll melt your heart.

Review: The Lamplighter's Lament, Bedlam Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

A bearded Victorian figure in a top-hat, overcoat tails swishing behind him, strides along a road. From a pocket of his three-piece suit, he plucks an immaterial ember of light, winds back his arm and throws it upwards, illuminating a tiny patch of the world from the streetlamp above. An empty existence punctuated by an infinite task: switching on, switching off, switching on...

Between dusk and dawn, he sleepwalks to the sea, awaking with soggy socks and cold feet. Between dawn and dusk, he wallows in gloom, haunted by memories of a wife lost to its waves.

As a company, Gomito’s modus operandi is built on their absolute faith in the magic of theatre. True to form, The Lamplighter’s Lament is a fragile, homespun piece composed of images that shatter at the first spark of cynicism. However, here they keep the mechanics just about concealed enough to stave off such concerns.

Structurally, The Lamplighter’s Lament is a string of moments half-glimpsed, shady impressions in the strictly rationed light. As such, it functions like a comic strip, leaving us to fill in the gaps and surviving intact as a result.

Of most interest is the touching exploration of emotional dissociation born of grief. The lamplighter moves through time without conscious exertion, as if cushioned by a caring world: clothes jump to his body, breakfast appears in his hand. He is there, but not there, until – following a visitation from his wife’s ghost – a coat hung up drops resolutely to the floor and reality returns sharply into focus.

The specifics of the narrative are, at times, too fuzzy and, as a whole, it is over-reliant on the mystery of the lamplighter’s fantastical powers, but such is the gentleness born of an atmospheric sound design and likeably soft performances that Gomito get away with it.

Yes, The Lamplighter’s Lament is guilty of the sort of sentimentality and slightness born of uninterrogated devised theatre, but it’s enchanting stuff nonetheless. Providing, of course, you allow it to be so.

Review: Barflies, Barony Bar

Written for Culture Wars

Step into the oaky musk of the Barony Bar, where Grid Iron serve up their latest site-sympathetic offering, and you’ll see drinking establishments for what they really are: wombs into which we regress.

The air droops with a smell familiar and comfortable, yet stale and bodily. The glare of natural light is supplanted by a heavy, warm glow. It’s as if the air is padding, ready to catch you when you stumble: an atmosphere like symbiotic fluid that incubates but stagnates, inside of which we mewl and puke, babble and flail.

Inspired by the writings of Charles Bukowski, Barflies pays homage to the bar and its soothing powers of inspiration. Yet the skill of Ben Harrison’s production is to damn even as it glorifies. Its inhabitants seem at once the romanticised bums of American lore and the rancid arseholes of Scottish life. Yes, they are free, but in a toy world devoid of daily responsibilities. Their inspirations need no confirmation from beyond its bounds; their behaviour need not subscribe.

Barflies tumbles through the blurred loves and lusts of Henry Chinaski, an unearthed writer whose barstool doubles as his office. Through the saloon doors stagger a bedraggled array of women, each of whom drifts slowly into his arms. There’s the manic, infectious Cass; the haughty, expressionless Margerie and Sarah – a sober literary agent responsible for Chinaski’s discovery. As she literally beats him into shape, Sarah becomes a witch in Henry’s writing, shrinking him down to six inches and finally – in a glorious moment of simple stagecraft – using him as a sex toy.

Harrison coaxes fine performances from his cast. Keith Fleming – last seen as a perma-pissed Peer Gynt – cements his position as Scotland’s premier portrayer of alcoholics. His Henry seems to have grown around the bar like ivy, typewriter and Bud always within easy reach. In him is a vintage blend of gentleness and fire that lurks under an infantile passivity, as he is led one way and another by booze and birds. Alongside him, Gail Watson seems a one-women harem of hazy alcoholics, each utterly distinguishable, keenly observed and superbly executed.

Visceral, intelligent and always engaging, Barflies finds life and soul in the dregs of society. It is time at the bar very well spent.

Review: Stand By Your Van, Pleasance Courtyard

Written for Culture Wars

If you have even a single, solitary brain cell, its best to avoid Stand By Your Van at all costs. Inspired by American ‘Touch the Truck’ endurance contests, in which the last contestant maintaining contact with the vehicle drives it home, Stand By Your Van condenses 80 gruelling hours of competition into 80 gruelling minutes. One Texan competitor, we are told, shot himself around the 24 hour mark. Given the conversation rate employed by Anna Reynolds’ play, that seems about right.

Relying on the standard formula of situation comedy, Reynolds place a range of characters into a single set of circumstances and – ta-da – conflict materialises. However, beyond the equation itself, she manages to get nothing right.

Her characters are so one-dimensional it’s a wonder that they’re even perceptible. There’s The Religious One; The Middle-class One; The Pretty One; The Infuriatingly Laddish One; The Infuriatingly Girly One; The Old Lady One, et cetera, et cetera. Ta-da.

Even more destructive is the fact that Reynolds forgets to bother to develop the conflict. Instead, time fast-forwards to the ‘exciting’ bits, characters pad their way around the van, changing formation and then – ta-da – conflict. Sporadically, Reynolds doesn’t even need that to further the plot. Instead, she simply decides that a certain character’s time is up and – ta-da – the hand comes off the truck, its game over, cheerio, goodbye, next chapter.

It must be said that – incredibly – the audience lapped it up, whooping and jeering along, laughing in all the right places and interacting with Tarrantesque host Phil ‘the Lip’ Daniels (Darren Strange) throughout. Admittedly, there are a couple of performances good enough to earn your sympathy; in particular, Gary Mackay as The Jokey one and Neil Jones as The Geeky One.

In short, just like the culture it sets out to satirise, Stand By Your Van is vacuous, tiresome and dumbed-down to stock. Upsettingly awful.

Photo property of Menagerie Theatre Company

Review: Hugh Hughes in...360, Pleasance Courtyard

Written for Culture Wars

With their blend of whimsy and wide-eyed wonder, no one else could pull off Hugh Hughes’ performance lectures. Such is the contagion of his unfaltering enthusiasm that you cannot resist sharing in his worldview.

Hughes’ power is to make us feel special, both as collective audience and individuals therein. He greets us in the queue, remembers names and then plays perfect host, breaking ice and spinning connections amongst his audience. Within minutes, he has transformed us into a parish and, from that point on, Hughes is preaching to the converted.

This ritual is crucial to the success of 360, since, as raw material in and of itself, Hughes’ story-fuelled examination of friendship and perspective is flimsy. In fact, it’s a fundamental foundation of Hughes as a persona. Without the atmosphere of goodwill forged, Shôn Dale-Jones’s embodied emergent artist from Anglessey would seem nigglingly naive and even unstomachably indulgent.

In both Floating and Story of a Rabbit, Dale-Jones has made a virtue of these traits, which allow him to simultaneously clarify and delicately parody postmodern theatre. Reincarnated for 360, however, Hughes seems closer to character comedy, somehow simplified and more ordinary.

Gone is the homespun detritus with which to raggedly recreate events. Instead, Hughes weaves a story from the paired-down resources of language and physicality alone. Skipping between 1978 and 2007, Hughes attempts to regain his childish perspective on life having found it entirely eroded by a skulking, sulking colleague. As such, accompanied by childhood friend and perpetual prankster Gareth, he sets out to climb Mount Snowdon, to take in the panoramic view and reset his perspective.

There are some smart and ticklish moments along the way and Hughes’ control of his story is impeccable. Despite swirling into all manner of chaotic tangents, he maintains a tightness and economy of narrative throughout. However, the material itself never overcomes its slightness and, excepting its infectiousness positivity, remains uncharacteristically unaffecting.

360 comes off, but it does so without excelling. Hughes’ defection to the comedy listings is perhaps symptomatic, as the act has lost its unique theatrical perspective and become just another story-based stand-up persona.

Review: My Life with the Dogs, Pleasance Courtyard

Written for Culture Wars

You expect wheezing accordions and battered suitcases of New International Encounter, not bass guitars and megaphones. However, My Life with the Dogs replaces the sepia-toned, rustic comforts of their European Narratives Trilogy with the grit and grime of urban existence, telling the true tale of nine-year old street-urchin Ivan Mishukov and his canine companions.

As such, we’re in contemporary Moscow, where the shell-suit still reigns supreme and radios crackle with Nirvana and Frank Sinatra. In its midst, Ivan lives with his alcoholic mother, suffering regular beatings and banished to the kitchen whenever Uncle Boris comes round to “drink vodka and do the noises.” One day, having interrupted this ritual, Ivan ambles innocently out of the door, down the stairs and into the streets, where he is eventually adopted by a pack of wild dogs.

Welcome though the company’s aesthetic shift is, My Life with the Dogs goes easy on the city’s perils, letting out a whimper where it needs to bare its teeth. As such, all is made cuddly, from the Disneyfied strays in woolly hats to Alex Bryne’s Elvis-impersonating paedophile. While the intention may be to show through childish eyes, the result is to mute the story’s drama.

If they miss its nature, however, NiE capture the look and sounds of the city beautifully. With careful lighting, including a perfect shift to the all-encompassing orange glow of dusk, and an inventive sound design, whereby a megaphone cannily simulates the products of mass mediatisation, NiE create a city suddenly self-conscious and repulsed, lured by transmissions from an exciting elsewhere.

Ivan’s story is told with simplicity and clarity, despite sagging slightly when it prefers generalisations over particular events from his street life. What it lacks, however, is the company’s ability to interrogate their own craft. The mischief – even the wilful, joyous anarchy – that has marked their previous work is sorely missed here, as Ivan seems too in control of his version of events. Byrne’s direction neglects the need to play, to go too far and, with it, the ability to really entertain.

If the European Narratives Trilogy made NiE a safe bet of the Fringe, they have themselves suffered from playing it too safe. It flashes with former innovations, but remains a show too docile with little bark or bite.

Distrust Amidst Misrule

Standing out from a crowd of 2,098 is not easy. For the next month, however, it will become a necessity for each individual show under the umbrella of the Edinburgh Fringe. If a production is to find an audience, an audience must find that production. The magnitude of the festival makes prominence a virtue.

As such, the Fringe is a festival desperate for attention. It is a classroom of frantically-waving arms eager to share their thoughts; a toddler tugging incessantly at your trouser-leg. The need to be noticed is overwhelming. You can see it on the poster-plastered surfaces. You can see it in the eyes of those thrusting flyers into hands. Most obviously of all, you can see it on the Royal Mile: a cobbled horror where one-upmanship rules and idiocy rises exponentially.

Within this peacocking culture, reviews take on an unusual status. Since a sure-fire way to attract an audience is with an assurance of quality, a good review becomes an asset. It sets a particular production apart from the amateurism that stalks the Fringe. Criticism becomes currency. It is boiled down to its component parts and endlessly regurgitated.

As the festival continues, Edinburgh itself increasingly resembles the Milky Way. By week two, the publicity materials that pepper the city have sprouted star-ratings. Spangled banners are wallpaper-pasted over posters and stapled onto flyers until every surface is made starry. Edinburgh becomes a city of constellations; a belt shop for obese Orions.

Being thus commoditised, reviews acquire – or rather, are prescribed – a certain value. The festival-goer is tricked into an unthinking acceptance of such products. Furthermore, given the number of shows that she will not see for herself, reviews often come to stand for the festival-goer’s impression of a production. There is little chance of verification and, as such, criticism becomes gospel.

Yet, the irony is that criticism is perhaps at its least trustworthy during the Edinburgh fringe. Only this week, Mark Shenton put forward a strong (though far from infallible) case for the supremacy of professional critics, in which he alludes to the shortcomings of criticism at the Fringe. In my eyes, the flaws are legion.

First among them is the sheer number of critics passing judgement for the month, each of whom is working according to a different standard and, indeed, individual tastes. Star ratings, which always give the illusion of being standardised, are here so relative as to be higgledy-piggledy. A shows’ critical reception becomes a matter of sheer luck dependent on the particular critic shipped off to review it. When one considers the scale of the operation, there can be no correlation of taste or expertise to the attribution process.

To further complicate matters, there are the politics of the individual critic – not to give too many slamming, to save the five star review, to give off an impression of moderate and level-headed judgement – and the ease/entertainment value of ridicule, whereby the critic elevates his or herself above the work. (I am not excluding myself from either of these wrongdoings, though I hope that I have got better with time. My first Edinburgh review back in 2005 culminated with an incitement to aim for the temple when invited to throw soap at the solo performer. I shan’t name the show – the damage has been done.)

Then there is the number of reviews that a given show will receive over the course of the festival. Accordingly the chances of a range of critical receptions are so high that a great proportion of shows will pick up at least one four-star rating. Moreover, it leaves reviews cancelling one another out. The regularity of five-one split, and even a full house of one through five, is far greater than in any usual critical culture.

Add to this the almost absolute anonymity granted to the Edinburgh critic and the whole system becomes dangerously close to collapse. I have written before about the need to understand a critic’s perspective in order to fully understand and appreciate his or her output. One must know their usual starting point, their biases and prejudices in order to fathom their position in relation to your own. In other words, critics are not themselves above judgement: they must earn the individual reader’s trust and, equally, the reader must determine how must trust to give.

In Edinburgh – barring a few notable exceptions that tend to write all year round – the above is simply impossible. Instead, the vast majority of criticism is attributable only to the publication in which it appears: Time Out, The Scotsman, The List, Three Weeks, Fest and so on, to each of which we ascribe a certain reliability value. For example, the Scotsman is deemed more trustworthy that Three Weeks, The List more so than Fest. The application of a certain standard across even a single publication’s writers, however, is clearly flawed.

All this is deliberately provocative. Over the three weeks of the festival, it is impossible to rely solely on luck and a good show will inevitably stack up more good reviews than a poor one. Aggregates, awards and audiences prove a fairly reliable guide. However, it certainly does impact upon the more obscure and challenging work at the Fringe. Work that defies populism, that seeks its own logic and sticks to its guns, that aims to interrogate before it entertains. In other words, difficult work suffers most from a critical culture that has become over-saturated with opinions.

And that, I believe, is an argument for the value of professional critics.

Welcome to Edinburgh

I'm not there yet. In fact, there's a whole eight hours of day job ahead of me. Not to mention the four hours of languidly paced train journey with which tomorrow will begin.

But inside my gut, I'm on my way already. I'm strolling down the Royal Mile thankful to no longer be an insider. I'm sitting in the Pleasance Courtyard sipping on a beer, musing. I'm declining flyers and discussing nothings. I'm avoiding battered sausages and Scotch food metaphors (which crop up in criticism with alarming regularity). I'm exhausting myself. I'm fizzing.

The reason for this post is to get that familiar apology out of the way. The one that haunts the blogosphere at irregular intervals: I have been remiss at posting. I'm sorry. It's not you, it's me. Work's been tougher recently. I've been busy. I've been lazy. I've been watching too much television - good television (Freefall; The Street; um, Friends), but too much nonetheless. I hope you can forgive.

I promise that change is coming. I have big plans for the next month. The blog will be updated on a regular basis. There will be reviews for Culture Wars, blogs for The Stage, thoughts that occur in the middle of a rainy night, reported conversations and, perhaps, even the odd something that makes sense. I'm also intending to police criticism at this year's festival and, to that end, I'll be shaming the worst of the critical outpouring in a (nasty and totally uncalled for) feature entitled, wittily (!), 'What gives you the write?' or, more simply, 'Oh, Shut the Fuck Up'.

Happy August. Bring on the binge.