Review: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Assembly George Square, Edinburgh Fringe

Written for The List

In detention with Mr Goodfellow, seven secondary-school pupils are forced – as if by magic – to perform A Midsummer Night’s Dream for some misdemeanour. However, the school setting is quickly dropped, forgotten for a bog-standard staging, and it starts to feel like we’re the ones being punished.

By not attempting any sort of interpretation, London-based Custom/Practice’s production has little reason to exist. It works only as an introduction to Shakespeare’s play – and even then, lacks the fun and invention to turn anyone onto his work.

Glittery, becloaked fairies twirl and float with forced elegance, while the four lovers suffer their entangled romances without any sense of impending chaos. The Mechanicals – led by Lorenzo Martelli’s pompous Bottom – have barely scratched the surface of the play’s comic potential.

Ultimately, Rae McKen’s company treat the play too demonstratively, such that Lysander and Demetrius literally leave the stage ‘cheek by jowl’, their faces squished together. The text is recited rather than embodied.

There is one exception: Mr Goodfellow himself, played with real rhythmic flair, both physical and vocal, by Lanre Malaolu.

My Mess, Your Shit

According to a 2007 study, one in a hundred women in the UK suffers from a clinically diagnosed eating disorder. That’s the highest rate of any country in Europe. What’s more, it’s dwarfed by the estimated proportion of women with a “serious issue with food” that evades such formal diagnoses. That’s one in two.

Doubtless, you’ve read statistics like this before. They’re the sort that can, if we’re being totally honest, land without much of a lasting impression. They get shelved somewhere in the back of our minds: just another of those facts of life. That’s where they exist for me, a 27 year-old male who has never come face to face with an eating disorder. Not properly. Not in a way that’s really affected my life. I’ve seen them across rooms and passed them in the street, but it’s not something I’ve had to confront, either as a reality or as an idea.

However two Fringe shows have forced it to the forefront from where it has refused to budge: Caroline Horton’s Mess at the Traverse and, two weeks later, Cristian Ceresoli and Silvia Gallerano’s La Merda (The Shit) at Summerhall.

Both productions tackle eating disorders head-on. Mess puts a name on it: anorexia nervosa. The Shit opts not to. There’s a lot in that distinction alone. The two are very different shows with very different aims. Both make great theatre. Only one is dangerous.

In Mess, Horton shows us a university student, Josephine, battling with the disease; how it is born out of her perfectionist tendencies and her desperate urge for control. There are colour-coded charts and calorific calculations. Food is just another opportunity to exercise extreme self-discipline, to do herself proud. Josephine eats four slices of apple over four hours. Trips to the Boots weighing machine are a treat. Laxatives and blackouts less so. “It’s not about food,” says Josephine. It’s about control.

Horton makes us understand the psychology of and recovery from anorexia brilliantly. Her candyfloss and fairy-lights aeshetic lets us see the world as Josephine does. It feels light-headed and giddy. Unreal. Manageable. Anorexia – at least, for Josephine – isn’t about vanity. It’s not a choice. It’s a compulsion; the only way to cope.

The problem, though, is that Mess frames the condition in purely psychological terms, as a by-product of Josephine’s personality. As such, she shoulders the blame alone. However, personalities don’t exist in isolation. Josephine’s need for control, her competitive edge; these are not root causes, but symptoms. They have their basis in a society that pressurises women – and men – towards perfection and tips them into neurosis.

There’s no avoiding that in The Shit. It is laid bare and read raw. Silvia Gallerano, sat naked on an oversized stool – a child on an adult chair, a life-model posing, a living statue on a plinth – delivers a furious, accusatory monologue in a quivering voice. Her lower lip is like jelly. Her ‘character’ – an actress – obsesses over her thighs, eats only apples for a week and, out of pure hunger, chews on her fingertips just as female octopi eat their own tentacles to survive.

This is not just about control, however, but about a self-esteem crushed like scrap metal. She refers to herself as “a small one.” Little wonder given a society that views her as nothing but a sex object and assumes she’ll comply. It must, she says, “be something in the way I talk.” She’s desperate to become tall, despite the fact that “the train doesn’t stop at your station every time.” When it pulls in, you have to be ready to catch it. You’ve got to be on at all times. Nothing shy of perfection will do.

By leaving the social context out, Mess risks making anorexia an abnormality, a disruption in certain individuals. The Shit, by contrast, has found a root cause and it is absolutely society’s problem. It looks to eradicate, rather than heal and is an almighty cry of ‘j’accuse', rather than 'je regrette'. My Mess, your Shit.

Review: Mies Julie, Assembly Hall, Edinburgh Fringe

Written for The List

Truly great productions of classic texts can reveal the play within the play. Who knew that beneath the staid formality of August Strindberg’s Miss Julie lurked a play as explosive and heartwrenching as Yael Farber’s South African-set rewrite?

Like Patrick Marber, whose After Miss Julie transposes Strindberg’s plot to post-war Britain, Farber strips the text down to a taut three-hander. In fact, taut is too loose: there’s not a smidgeon of superfluity here. Farber gives us the core nucleus.

What becomes clear are the atomic bonds – equal push and pull – between Mies Julie (Hilde Cronje) and her servant John (Bongile Mantsai). Relocated to a South African farmhouse, beneath which both sets of ancestors – black Xhosa and white Afrikaans – are buried side by side, their sexual entwining is a serious trangression, even if it mirrors the picture below ground.

From there, however, their situation swells to a monumental impasse. Three or four times they reach the cusp of eloping as equals, only for one or other to cough up some half-swallowed pride. Neither is quite willing to give up their claim to the land, to forget past grievances for the sake of a better life. They become two snare traps biting at each other’s metal jaws.

This is absolutely Miss Julie, but it is also absolutely contemporary. Play and setting mutually illuminate each other brilliantly. Strindberg’s drama is also stretched to its fullest. Farber’s text, which replaces John’s fiancé with his upstanding mother, is fiercely direct, invoking bald love and hate. Mantsai and Cronje play it with such full-blooded force – his physical violence matched by her stinging words – that the effect is devastating, even if the brusqueness occasionally snags.

Not that this Baxter Theatre production is all muscle and heart. Intelligent details abound – Cronje’s flicker of terrified Lolita when John suddenly, ferociously, reciprocates; John’s wine glass that shifts the status – and profound lines burst out. Essential.

Review: Boris and Sergey’s Vaudevillian Adventure, Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh Fringe

Written for The List

Nothing covers cracks like cuteness. Boris and Sergey are two faceless leather bunraku puppets that look like reconstituted old footballs sprung to life. They speak in gravelly Russian honks and have more than enough character to get away with a distracted show.

Manipulated by six hands each, Boris and Sergey start with wittily miniaturised Vaudeville turns. Sergey hops onto a balancing ball and wobbles around poison-tipped drawing pins. Party-poppers explode around him like tabletop fireworks. Boris follows with a drag recreation of Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights, a tiny smoke-machine belching into his face.

However, the second-half swerves off, dropping music hall for a poker-table fleecing then a misguided fantasy subplot about evil wraiths The Dark Ones. Boris and Sergey are best when most like us, as a bawdy and shambolic double-act unravelling. We never get to see them try and salvage the botched finale set up early on.

Nonetheless, Boris and Sergey are great company and their Vaudevillian Adventure makes a droll subversion of the Fringe as a whole. With more structural rigour, Flabbergast Theatre could take them far.

Review: And They Played Shang-a-Lang, The Stand, Edinburgh Fringe

Written for The List

If a semi-autobiographical jukebox musical about salad days in Scotland sounds grim -- and it should -- Derek Douglas’ nostalgia fest is surprisingly good fun. Local amateur company Craft Theatre’s 15-strong cast perform with such gusto and evident enjoyment that you can’t help but give in.

In reality, it’s more of a skit-night and mass karaoke session than a musical per se, but, at it’s best, Liam Rudden’s production has a tumultuous comic brio.

Douglas shows us a series of Bash Street Kids-style snapshots, from the playground to the smoking sheds. The school disco sketch is all familiar awkwardness; boys on one side, girls on the other, communication reduced to: ‘Will your mate dance with mah mate.’ A corking nativity scene, overseen by Niloo Far Kahn’s wannabe auteur schoolteacher, descends into chaos, particularly when one weak-bladder causes an unintended kind of angelic shower.

Slapdash and boisterous, with a cast that you just want to be part of, And They Played Shang-A-Lang is Chirpy-Chirpy (Cheep-Cheep).

Review: Nothing is Really Difficult, Assembly George Square, Edinburgh Fringe

Written for Culture Wars

Theatergroep WAK know how to make an entrance. In a wooden box in George Square, a man pushes up a corner of the floor and squeezes his way in, like a lost Great Escapee. Another falls through the wall, while a third drops in from above.

What follows is a punchy 40-minutes of headless running around with no particular purpose or direction and it’s totally infectious. This isn’t the sort of profound clowning that reveals human fragilities and foibles, but simple, slapdash, madcappery with no purpose beyond its own delirium.

If anything, it’s almost unashamedly – even unfashionably – blokish. The threesome grab their bits and waggle them about, stack themselves into a single toilet cubicle for a squished shit and just run circles round each other. There’s a great sketch of a long-distance runner, in which roadside water bottles swell into a Michelin-starred dining experience.

There’s a scatty distraction at play that means Nothing Is Really Difficult is never more than the sum of its parts, and it trades heavily on the charm of it’s unique venue. It delivers on the double-edged title – that suggest anything is possible and nothingness isn’t all that easy – but what you’ve got here is a zany little box of tricks.

Review: Gulliver’s Travels, King’s Theatre, Edinburgh International Festival

Written for Culture Wars

Gulliver’s Travels, the ultimate in grand tour gap years, becomes a carnival procession in the hands of revered Romanian director Silviu Pucarete. It’s undeniably beautiful to look at and frequently funny to watch, but Pucarete’s posturing production basically parades a series of Swiftian species before us to very little cumulative effect.

That’s primarily because he lets his staging shift its vocabulary from scene to scene. For a long while, it looks like he’s twisting the whole into hospital – and seems a canny bit of programming next to Waiting for Orestes: Electra. Women dressed as horses have crutches for front legs. A bedridden judge is vigorously sponge-bathed. Women covered in boils the size of babies heads indulge in a mass lancing session. Other pop out children like is nobody’s business, but their own, selling the sprogs off for a chef’s speciality, as in Swift’s short A Modest Proposal.

Yet, as the conveyor belt continues, this fades from view, replaced and forgotten. Lilliput and Brobdingnag, with their outsized citizens, are staged through shadowplay. A dishevelled drag act represents a Drury Lane prostitute. An ant-line chorus of bankers zigzag around before gathering like a cliff face of guillemots to eat a lunch of eggs. All this is utterly gorgeous to watch, but it reveals very little beyond the fact that – shock of all shocks – Swift was writing about human beings.

Perhaps that’s why Pucarete seems to beg the question of different species throughout. Horses – or rather Houyhnhnms – recur early on: human representations, real specimens capable of bolting through the stalls and hobby horses. There are suggestions of inter-species relations and two giant mice that scuttle across the stage. Again, it looks great, but to what ends?

The problem is that Pucarete is spinning image after image, most of which are inert representations without any spark of liveness. You watch, you admire, you melt and you yawn, then grit your teeth in endurance. By the end, Gulliver’s travels have become travails.

Review: How to Start a Riot, theSpace @ Surgeon’s Hall, Edinburgh Fringe

Written for The List

Mark Duggan’s death at the hands of the police sparked last summer’s riots: four days of violent disorder and looting all over England. But, as Worklight Theatre point out, sparks don’t catch without fuel and flames don’t spread without fanning.

This nifty little scruffball of a show doesn’t really detail that social context and it sometimes looks a little dazed, but there’s enough delicate probing at the established narrative to get you thinking.

David Cameron’s ‘mindless violence’ soundbite is interrogated, with patterns ruling out the requisite randomness for mindlessness, and different flashpoints are shown to have different targets: the police, the wealthy, faceless high-street brands.

Michael Woodman, performing alongside Joe Sellman-Leava and Callum Elliot-Archer, has clearly had his worldview turned around by recent events and the soft-spoken 23 year-old has started to question the state’s benevolence and perspicacity. The real beauty of How to Start a Riot is watching that embryonic thought process unfurl itself: a young brain starting to fizz with questions and inceptive ideas.

Review: Monkey Bars, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh

Written for Culture Wars

Two park bench grumblers are moaning about the modern world. Today’s streets are so rife with crime, one says, that the only viable option is to stay indoors and risk getting rickets. And as for kids these days – with their too-short shirts and their hair gel, going round mugging and rioting and stabbing – well, the less said the better. “They should just improve!” says the other. “Yeah, our generation should just generally improve.”

‘Our generation’ because these are not the words of bitterly nostalgic old men spat out by life, but of Sid and Zachary, neither of whom has yet celebrated their 12th birthday.

Sid and Zachary are two of the 72 children that Karl James, co-director of Tim Crouch’s The Author, interviewed or recorded in conversation with one another. Their words were then taken by Chris Goode, edited together into a script and placed into the mouths of adult actors. The transformation is enormous. The actors don’t twitch and fidget. They speak in their own voices, clearly, crisp and even, always taking real care with the thought process behind the words.

And yet, those words are squiffy and roundabout, naïve and misplaced and confused and regurgitated. Yet in spite of this, or rather because of this, they are variously poignant, profound and gently terrifying.

Monkey Bars is as densely simple a piece of theatre as you’ll find. You know exactly what you’re watching, and yet, at all times, you watch it in several different ways at once. Sure, on the surface, Goode gets us to listen to what these children have (had) to say afresh, but there’s much, much more to it than that as well.

What might have been dismissed as childish babble is instead played as considered thought, intended rather than spluttered. Eyes seem to search for the right phrase, rather than for whatever word might do or happens to spring to mind. Statements become those of an individual, not just luke warm air from a.n. other pair of childish lungs. We don’t take them entirely seriously – it’s not simply a matter of listen to what children have to say and follow it. Instead, we consider where these statements come from and what, really, they say about the world.

In some instances, it’s just the childish mind in all its scatty, freewheeling, gobbledegookish beauty. Some of the conversations are played as stock situations, so that childish chatter stands in for first date small-talk or coffee-break musing. A job interview starts with favourite sweets and builds, in a bid to sort wheat from chaf, to killer questions: “If you were like, like, a like bubble-gum creature, what would you do.” This is tremendously, unfailingly and adorably funny; the sort of thing an E4 comedy commissioner might storm in and programme immediately, trading on its Creature Comforts style of cuddle-ified reality.

However, doing so would be to shy away from Monkey Bars’ real heart, which is the very particular – and rigorously critiqued – window on the world it offers. Essentially, Goode gets us to see children as both subjects and objects; as views on the world and, crucially, in the world; as products of it.

So, for example, when two men play Muslim boys discussing the concept of haram or when two woman playing girls musing on British pride (“We’ve helped so many people in like countries in war”), you glimpse the process of active indoctrination. As such, you look into yourself and see that, somewhere deep down, absolutely entrenched, the same feeling exists, uninterrogated or swallowed whole.

Or, for example, when the subject of aspirations crops up as children discuss fame or the (material) trappings of success, you start to see the world we’ve made and the values that society – unconsciously – passes on to the next generation.

Or, for example, the way you see adults' talk reflected back, picked up and mangled by the child speaker. They natter about paparazzi and money and the fact that “our taxes go to the Olympics.” Sometimes, they just tell it straight: that, to them, adult voices sound permanently angry.

Monkey Bars is not a neat show. It’s many different things at once and, what’s more, has the curious property of being as satisfying at ninety minutes as it would at either sixty seconds or two weeks solid. Honestly, I can’t decide whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. That’s because it’s neither; it’s just a thing, because so is Monkey Bars itself.

What James and Goode have discovered and present is not simply 90 minutes worth of content, it’s not really a show per se. Instead it’s a mode of looking at and talking about the world that is inherently enjoyable and instructive. Monkey Bars is inevitably a tincey bit unsatisfying because that mode is so consistently satisfying; you want it to cover everything and, in 90 minutes, it clearly can’t. A neater show might have confined itself to a single topic presented in the same manner. A neater show would be worse.

I could go on – about the way that one child’s brain seems to overload as he fizzes of the topic of war and onto that of leg cramps, about the way that a performance poem about cake shows the way that children assess the definites, about the importance of singing to jelly, about the way conversations are really ways of making sense of the self, about the scorched trauma of witnessing a car accident, about the eloquence of addiction being the worst thing about adulthood, about the beauty in the care of the actors and the stage as a space of ideas – but I also can’t, because my brain has been frazzled by the Fringe and my backlog has been mounting while I struggled to untangle Monkey Bars' complexities. It is so much in so little. And ultimately, is anything as important as the world we pass on to our children?

Monkey Bars is on at the Unicorn Theatre 25th - 30th September.

Review: Beats, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Fringe

Written for Culture Wars

Technically speaking, Kieran Hurley’s Beats is illegal. In accordance with the Public Order Act’s ruling on raves, if 10 or more people to gather together in the presence of “amplified music (‘wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats.’)” you’ve got the makings of a rave.

Next to Hurley on the stage, Johnny Whoop is playing just such a succession of repetitive beats, so any performance of Beats with an audience of more than six (alongside Hurley and his team) is illegal. Mind you, less than six and it’s criminal.

Hurley’s refined, technicolour storytelling riffs on the idea of repetitive beats. It’s 1994 and Channel 4 are hyping a new American sitcom called Friends. In Livingstone, 15 year-old Johnno McCreaddie is downing his SNES controller and sneaking off to a rave for the first time.

Meanwhile, Robert, a 41 year-old policeman, is standing by for a raid. His father was a steelworker who joined picket lines at the now-defunct Ravenscraig Steelworks and always viewed Robert’s choice of career as a betrayal.

As the clock tick-tocks past his curfew, Johnno’s mother sits awake at home, wondering what’s become of him. Later, when she picks him up from a police station, bruised and disorientated, she has an urge to make him feel the way his absence made her feel.

Hurley’s picture is one of incessant cycles: conformity growing out of rebellion and vice versa. Just as every baton strike spawns a sub-culture, he suggests, every picket line tilts a child towards the establishment. The values of one generation are taken down by the next.

It’s fascinating then to see Hurley not taking sides. Yes, you suspect his allegiances lie with the scattered ravers rather than the battering raiders, but both ultimately both come in for criticism. With surreptitious references to the student protests at Millbank Tower, he extends in into the present, so that politics seems as transient as musical trends. He asks us, without being explicit, to imagine an alternative.

Yet, Beats works just as well without all this. Hurley is such a genial, captivating storyteller: gentle with his words and caring of his characters. The story itself might fall out as expect: you know from the moment Robert and Johnno are introduced that they’re destined to cross swords. However, there are some delicate moments, in particular his paralleling of the mutual blood-pumping hysteria of ecstasy and aggression, and some choice phrases.

There’s also the beautiful gesture of juxtaposing the quiet act of storytelling with the noise and light of rave culture. Johnny Whoop’s thumping music and Jamie Wardrop’s throbbing video projections fill the room and Hurley, sat quietly at a wooden desk with a glass of water and a house lamp, looks like a storyteller in the eye of an electric storm.

Review: Strong Arm, Underbelly, Edinburgh Fringe

Written for Culture Wars

At 14, Roland Poland – Roly-Poly to his classmates – weighed 20 stone. Not these days he doesn’t. Not after a first anxious trip to the gym led to him become first seriously hooked, the seriously ripped. Where once was fat, now there’s only muscle and Roland has his sights set on the Mr Britain crown.

Finlay Robertson’s debut play is a portrait of an obsessive society, but doesn’t quite find the right hook to really land its punches. Yes, Roland becomes a scathing portrait of vanity – literally bringing himself to orgasm while watching himself pump iron on account of the amount of protein in his diet – but Strong Arm never fully indicts anything beyond the world of extreme bodybuilding. It does everything but extend Roland’s lifestyle from a product of society into a metaphor for it.

Nevertheless, it offers a brilliant insight into a mind we might otherwise dismiss rather speedily and stands as an illustration of the primacy of body-image. Robertson fixates on just the right gory details of heavy-lifting: the muscle tears, “bleating” kidneys and the veins that pop through dehydration. There’s no avoiding the fact that Roland’s body is as unhealthy as ever – and his mental state twice as twisted.

Robertson’s smart to take the role himself, fitting neither Roalnd’s obesity nor his muscularity so that both exist in full in the imagination. He’s a great performer: never seeming to act, yet always totally in control of the story in Kate Budgen’s focussed production. Even the way he lifts a metal chair, as if it were made of nothing, completely sows the absent strength and his final pouched posing skewers the absurdity of the whole. James Turner’s design, four rusting, warped mirrors, adds a Frankensteinian atmosphere, though incorporating different coloured lighting states feels like a cheap way of varying the tone.

Review: Chapel Street, Underbelly, Edinburgh Fringe

Written for Culture Wars

Insecurity rules, OK? Joe and Kirsty might look down their noses at a world full of “mingers” and dickheads, but beneath the blustered superiority, both are deeply apprehensive.

It is the world that has made them that way. Theirs – by which I mean ours – is a realm of simulacra and airbrushed perfection; a Baudrillardian wonderland without a hair out of place. Everything is fake. Everything is identikit. The “never-ending conveyor belt of perfect pussy;” the energy generated from caffeinated drinks. Even the people aren’t originals, but recycled composites: one’s a mix of George Clooney and Lenny Henry, another of Keith Chegwin and a potato.

Joe and Kirsty are Google-babies in a world that can’t measure up to computerised simulations. She goads a teacher for daring not to pluck an answer out of thin air, falling short of Wikipedia. He dismisses those around him as “battery hens.” Yet both fail to understand the implication that, to those they scorn, they fall just as short. “I know everyone thinks I’m a prick,” puffs Joe, “but I’m better than them, so fuck it.” The young have lost all notion of humanity; they make no allowance for our common frailty or individual foibles.

Gradually, their two intercut monologues encroach on each other, as both head out on a Friday night towards Chapel Street. There’s a church at the end that’s been turned into a bar and it’s outside, during a incident-ridden evening, that Joe and Kirsty meet, rather coyly, rather awkwardly and with a vague aroma of urine knocking about.

Young playwright Luke Barnes is a prodigious talent. Not content with one clever little corker at this year’s festival in Bottleneck, he’s gone and written another. Chapel Street is a scorcher; a Disco Pigs for the pro-plus generation. Sure, it’s not saying anything that isn’t being said elsewhere, but his diagnosis of the underlying psychology – all glaring splinters and unseen planks – is pinpoint and written with real explosive flair.

Cheryl Gallagher’s direction, pared right back to the conventions of stand-up, smartly uses microphones to seed ideas of both performance and mediatisation. With the flotsam of Friday night – street furniture and party wigs – she dishevels both characters beyond dignity. Cary Crankson is a fine cheeky chump, with just the right snarling aggression, but Ria Zmitrowicz is superb as Kirsty. All frizz and spasm, she is insecurity bubbled up to the surface and made manifest in eye-rolls and lip bites. Her voice is an upward-inflected mewl, also questioning and quivering. In fact, she bleats.

Barnes probably takes one step to far in the end for the sake of story, forgetting that humdrum, anticlimactic everyday life can be full enough on its own, but nonetheless, Chapel Street announces a young playwright to keep tabs on.

Review: Oh the Humanity and Other Emotions, Northern Stage at St Stephens, Edinburgh Fringe

Written for The List

Isn’t self-consciousness a ball-ache? It ups the ante, rather, as if all eyes are on you and you’re barely making sense, let alone delivering the goods, and you still haven’t found what you’re looking for, you’re not meeting your potential or matching the past and, to top it all off, your trousers have fallen down.

Thankfully American playwright Will Eno is at hand with these five precision-honed shorts, each an eloquent metaphor for existential angst, capable of raising both spirits and smiles. There’s a sports coach facing the press after a dismal season, personally and professionally; an airline spokesperson offering bereaved relatives awkward sympathy after an accident; and two lonely hearts recording dating videos and tentatively testing the waters of the big, wide world.

Eno’s texts are delicious – witty and wise – and Erica Whyman’s production does them real credit. Classily staged on a suspended platform, itself seemingly hanging in the balance, it boasts superb performances from Tony Bell, John Kirk and, in particular, Lucy Ellinson. Frank, funny and consoling, this is pretty much what theatre’s for.

Review: Songs of Lear, Summerhall, Edinburgh Fringe

Written for The List

Imagine King Lear in pill form, the Shakespearean equivalent of Willy Wonka’s Three-Course Dinner Chewing Gum. Or contained in a single firework. What about Lear: the new fragrance from Christian Dior?

Baffling as this all sounds, it’s pretty much what revered Polish company Song of the Goat does with the play. By translating it into a choral song cycle, they give us a non-natural version of the play – ineffable as opposed to Brechtian – in which Shakespeare’s plot is all but obliterated.

Instead, it’s distilled to its tonal properties. A ten-strong choir – five men, five women – harmonise through ten songs by Jean-Claude Acquaviva and Maciej Rychly. Each is born out of a segment of the play, without fully dramatising it: ‘pictures through sound,’ as director Grzegorz Bral explains. The first, ‘In Paradiso’, is a hymn conjuring England’s hills and sun through stained glass windows, but others grow dark and discordant, as Lear’s brain frazzles and his kingdom splits. After each song, Bral steps forward to contextualise the next.

Gradually, out of a recital, a thin layer of drama emerges. Cordelia sits in a chamber weeping through puberty. Gabriel Gawin’s Lear examines his daughter as one might a racehorse. Later, he surveys his fractured land like a man stood over an open grave.

But it is the music – or rather the sensation of it – that really gets to you. Walls of vibrato and sharp throaty wails surge through the room and, bit by bit, without you really knowing how, it takes you over.

This is essence of Lear, desiccated and condensed; sensed rather than watched and absorbed until it hasn’t just got under your skin, but right into your bone marrow. For the half hour that followed, I was static electricity, too knock-kneed to stand. It is a full-body detox; catharsis pure and simple and transcendent.

In a Fringe chock-full of profanity, Songs of Lear is something sacred.

Review: Perle, Assembly Roxy, Edinburgh Fringe

Written for The List

Perle shows a life on pause. A man sits in front of a television, feeding it one VHS tape after another. At first he seems like any other screen-junkie, swapping the big wide world for the small screen, but gradually an unshakeable grief reveals itself. Square-eyes, it seems, don’t shed so many tears.

Based on an anonymous 14th century poem, Dancing Brick’s live-cartoon is a duet between man and machine. Thomas Eccleshare remains silent, too brittle to speak. His words appear in onscreen speech bubbles. Elsewhere, he reaches behind to pick up a line-drawn phone in Serge Seidlitz’s animation or make himself a 2D sandwich. Still hungry afterwards, he simply rewinds the tape with an impish smile.

Perle won’t show you grief in a new light; in fact, it takes a superbly delicate, upbeat performance from Eccleshare to stave off sentimentality. Instead, it’s a perfectly-formed miniature, slight but exquisite. The metaphor of television unlocks the original: home-movies stand in for memories and the world fades to black and white. In short, Perle’s a gem.

Review: Rainbow, Zoo Southside, Edinburgh Fringe

Written for The List

Playwright Emily Jenkins can’t resist a flourish. In Rainbow, three vaguely interlinked monologues, barely a noun goes unadorned and awkward similes come thick and fast. Like ill-educated cheetahs.

If someone sweats, it’s ‘like a horny pig’. Breasts are ‘like erupting molehills’. Someone turns red ‘like the girl in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,’ presumably Violet Beauregarde, who morphs into a blueberry.

Irritating though this is, Rainbow’s real flaw is in not revealing its purposes. Its three characters – a debt-collector with a fondness for Radio 4, a bullied schoolboy seeking a safe-space and a seedy teacher trying his luck with a pupil – have too little in common for thematic resonance. As their respective stories skim each other’s edges, so that characters and locations recur, the connections and echos are too slight for Rainbow to add up to more than the sum of its parts.

Jenkins directs this clunky production herself and too often her cast play the surface emotions before telling the story, making Rainbow seem overwrought as well as overwritten.

Review: Meine faire Dame: Ein Sprachlabor, Lowland Hall, Edinburgh International Festival

Written for Culture Wars

When you actually think about it, Lerner and Loewe’s 1956 musical is pretty, well, fucked up. Based on George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, it shows middle-class speech-therapist Henry Higgins pluck cockney flower-seller Eliza Doolittle off the streets and painstakingly rewire her to pass for a high-society belle. FOR A BET. That won, Higgins decides that he’s fallen in love with her and, though there’s some ambiguity in the ending, she only goes and reciprocates. So that’s alright then.

All of which explains why you’ll find Frankenstein’s monster playing the organ in Christoph Marthaler’s scathing – and infinitely more honest and humane – takedown of the original. By the end, Eliza and Higgins are an elderly, bickering couple: still together, but sick of the sight of one another. “You can only make someone suffer endlessly,” she says, “if they let you.”

Meine faire Dame: Ein Sprachlabor (My Fair Lady: A Language Laboratory) is more or less a jukebox musical, co-opting pop songs and opera alongside corrupted versions of Lerner and Loewe’s iconic ditties. The Swiss-German director sets the action in a blandly institutional 1970s language-lab, with five twitchily self-conscious pupils in cubicles chanting tongue-twisters back at Graham F. Valentine’s bitter, bullying and often blind-drunk Higgins. Behind them, a television screen shows the Queen sitting for a portrait and a shopping channel hawking foundation; outward appearances are apparently everything.

Eliza, at this point, speaks in horn-voiced explosive squawks, always too loud by half, that seem to burst out of her throat. Each sentence gets a look of distaste from Higgins. Everything she does is uncertain and ungainly. A flight of stairs poses particular problems – and draws some brilliant clowning from Carina Braunschmidt. During one group-therapy session, she offers a mawled rendition of Wham’s Last Christmas as a solo piece, to the tuneful laughter of those around her.

Mind you, her classmates are hardly smooth slicksters: one sweats profusely, another hacks up bits of apple. A duet of Silent Night gets an hilariously stilted dance routine of hip-swings and knee-bobs. Only when they excuse themselves for the privacy of the toilet (lavatory? restroom?), do they come out with something beautiful: exquisitely sung opera.

In these terms, Higgins is most certainly the villain and, at the production’s heart, is the command to look beyond surface ticks so as to live and live let. In the end, we’re all socially awkward, but some of us show it more than others. Of course, they end up running the show and setting themselves up as standard-bearers, forcing their own ways on others. “The rules are rules,” and that’s all there is to it. Ultimately, conformity – borderline fascistic as it is – is on trial here.

Marthaler’s production has too much going on to detail its every trick – its stretched sense of time is particularly remarkable – and yet, its main thrust is rather slim-line. As soon as you realise that this is a critique of Lerner and Loewe, the implicit social criticisms become fairly obvious. Nonetheless, it is genuinely hilarious – sometimes earned, sometimes by simple dint of Marthaler’s ballsy iconoclasm – and refreshing honest; a call to arms for the sweaty, stammering and socially-anxious screwballs of the world.

Photograph: Judith Schlosser

Review: My Elevator Days, Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh Fringe

Written for The List

What do we leave behind in an ever-changing world? The old man in front of us will never get the 19 million Google results of Grace Kelly, with whom he shares a birthday, nor the blue plaque of the artist that goaded him as a child. Given his borderline hermitude, can he even hope to linger in someone’s memory?

Following his dog’s death, he’s left with only an elevator for company. ENOK, he calls it, the maker’s name as seen in its mirrors. It’s a symbol of technology, in a world that gets ahead of him, but also of permanency and temptation, a forbidden treat when doctor’s orders dictate that he should use the stairs. ‘That elevator is your worst enemy,’ he recalls.

Gentle and sage, Bengt Ahlfors’ play rambles around, forgetting the elevator for other topics. As such, it struggles to really satisfy, fraying towards the end, but it’s a pleasurable and soothing diversion that never loses sight of harsh reality for cutesy smaltz. Alexander West, whose voice is all thistle and heather, makes a charming guide.

Review: Waiting for Orestes: Electra, King’s Theatre, Edinburgh International Festival

Written for Culture Wars

Slow, smooth and silent, bar the creaking stage underneath, five men in wheelchairs roll onstage and form a procession, at once funereal and military. They stamp and spin, before turning their heads out to the audience and chuckling clownishly.

Tadashi Suzuki’s hospital-bound take on Electra confines every character to a wheelchair. Electra sits still and fixed, her legs folded beneath her, waiting for her brother Orestes to return and avenge their father’s murder. Clythemnestra stands upright on hers, dragged onstage by a nurse like Boudicca in her chariot, possibly a visual reference to Pozzo in Waiting for Godot.

To my mind, like Godot, Suzuki’s Orestes never comes. His death is announced before his arrival and when he comes he’s not the man we expect: much older than his mother, wrinkled and hunched. Could he be a figment of Electra’s imagination, constructed to enable her to do the deed herself? Could it all be fantasies whirring around a frazzled mind? “Dreams,” says Clythemnestra of her own recurring nightmares, “are to blame for everything.”

Suzuki’s staging is almost a concert recital of the play – using a whittled down version by Hugo von Hofmannsthal first seen in 1903 in which Electra is “an obsessional neurotic. The action is dead still. Text is percussively declaimed. It should be boring but it’s not: the whole is too absolutely focused – coiled-tight as if ready to spring – for that; the institutional imagery too stark and pristine.

Review: Tea Is An Evening Meal, Northern Stage at St Stephens, Edinburgh Fringe

Written for Culture Wars

Sat around a sturdy wooden kitchen table, we’re served tea by Faye Draper, who’s playing mum, as it were. There are biscuits to boot. Bourbons and Custard Creams, if you’re interested. Each of us has a mug of our own, presumably accumulated over years of token gifts and charitable activities. The room feels familiar and warm.

Giving is a recurring motif at Northern Stage, where a morning’s theatregoing can see you come away with a third-pint of milk, an inspirational banana and a bag of retro sweets on top of this genial teabreak. Erica Whyman’s team have built a venue on small acts of kindness, on heart and care and home-made cookies; a worthy home-from-home in Forest Fringe’s absence.

Presented by Third Angel, Tea Is an Evening Meal is the homeliest of all. It might be light on thinking, a survey that elevates breadth over depth and descriptive detail above all else, but it lets your mind wonder to a personal space. There’s a nostalgic glow, rich and snug, that takes you off to family and rainy afternoons and malt loaf and scrabble with a vaguely Proustian twang.

Ostensibly, Draper’s aim is to examine the Northern character through its idiosyncratic table manners. An extended section on the vagaries of meal times trots through the universality of breakfast, before opening the thorny issue of dinner, tea and supper; a topic that needs a round-table discussion. Instead, we can an oblong that slowly – saltily – transforms into a map of Britain.

Really, though, it’s an ode to kitchen tables: to stubborn children refusing their greens and Christmas dinners that repeat year on year. Draper walks behind us, placing a hand on our shoulders and allocates us characters, not to play, but to stand in for momentarily. Someone’s the grandfather imagining what it’s like to sit at the head of the table, having never had the chance due to older brothers and grown-up children. There’s the man alone at a restaurant, stood up perhaps or just content with his own company, and the girls guzzling milk before a night on the town.

Draper makes a thoroughly likeable host and, slight though it is, Tea Is An Evening Meal is a tender charmer.

Review: Thin Ice, Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh Fringe

Written for The List

What sets Thin Ice apart is not so much its narrative – a disjointed love triangle between academics in the Arctic Circle – as its remarkable depth of thinking. Beneath the slight surface, it’s as dense and tightly packed as a glacier.

What’s strange is that, at the same time, it seems so lightweight. The plot is a little too neat, perhaps; always well-constructed story, never quite life-like; the staging, a little straightforward, missing a bit of rip-roaring theatrical firepower.

And yet, Shams' writer-director Jonathan Young festoons it with big ideas, all connected with admirable elegance, without suffocating the story. Not lightweight, then, but fleet-footed.

As the Nazis are reconfiguring Europe, German expat Professor Steinberg is testing the ice’s constancy. Young smartly parallels the race for Lebensraum with the displacement of Greenland’s indigenous tribes by various scientific communities and neatly plays rational scepticism off against native belief systems. Chuck in notions of history, political ideology and climate change and you’ve got a hefty brain-feast that more than holds the attention for 90 minutes – a rare Fringe feat.

Review: 2008: Macbeth, Lowland Hall, Edinburgh International Festival

Written for Culture Wars

Macbeth. The title of Shakespeare’s most pulse-racing play even sounds like a heartbeat, so how has TR Warszawa’s blockbuster staging managed to make it an easy ride rather than a white-knuckle one?

This is, after all, a production that comes with its own fireball. A surging fog of flame balloons out of the stage, blasting faces in the front row with heat. There are the loud rat-a-tats of sub-machine guns, smoke grenades, flares and, um, short-circuiting tumble dryers, but still there’s all the suspense of a tramp’s trousers. What is it Macbeth says about sound and fury?

That may be the point. Grzegorz Jarzyna’s production takes place in a vast frontage with oblong prosceniums onto separate spaces in Fort Glamis. It could just as easily be a film set, as a military compound. Hollywood staples abound. A wall of voice-automated television screens displays satellite images and statistics and face-time communications. There are point-blank shootings and stock anonymous henchman, praying barefoot when ambushed. Duncan is dispatched with a single stab to the carotid artery, so that blood spurts out like beer from a freshly-tapped keg. It’s all a bit Call of Duty: Black Ops and while that’s a valid criticism – the horrors of war replaced by its clichés – it's hardly the stuff of visionaries.

In fact, before we even see Cezary Kosiñski’s fixed stare of a Macbeth, he’s painted as a freewheeling maverick, disobeying Duncan’s and-that’s-an-order with schlocky, cocky heroism. Actually, I should say Major Macbeth, who, with his second-in-command Captain Banquo (I know, ridiculous), storms a softly-armoured Middle Eastern compound. Given that Jarzyna’s production premiered in 2008, it at least starts with an edge of genuine – not to mention troubling – prophecy.

Herein lies Jarzyna’s political point: that the West is no more immune to the paranoia and cruelty of dictatorship as those they seek to remove from power. Kosiñski’s Macbeth grows to believe himself a god, invulnerable, thanks to the whisperings of a ghostly Uncle Sam and a carniverous white rabbit. To bear bad news is to take a bullet to the brain and finally, Macbeth remains alone and unguarded in his fortress as Macduff’s army approaches. His head is severed from his body and held aloft, echoing the kills that won him first Cawdor, then crown. It’s the neatest cycle of power, you ever saw.

That’s one of two problems with Jarzyna’s production. It suffers from the very thing that it sets out to critique, namely, glibness. But the loss of tension is down to the loss of Macbeth’s timeframe. At a whizzbang 110 minutes, Jarzyna fast-forwards through the plot so that any foreboding evaporates. Tension takes time because suspense needs stillness. Jarzyna just gives us special effects and spectacle.

Photograph: Stefan Okolowicz

Review: As of 1.52pm GMT on Friday April 27th 2012, This Show Has No Title, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Fringe

Written for Culture Wars

Daniel Kitson has done it again. What that might mean, I’ve only a second-hand inkling. Despite eight consecutive Fringes, I’ve never yet “been Kitsoned,” as he puts it in this brilliantly self-conscious corkscrew of a show. As of 1.52pm… is a picture that contains itself and continues ad infinitum.

On a stripped-back stage, Kitson sits behind a trestle table with a manila folder in front of him. There would have been more: a set – a revolving set no less – projected films and a cast of six, but he and Jen Platt only finished writing it on 1st August. Instead, he’s reading the script: stage directions, character names and all. We’ll just have to make do with imagination.

That script turns backflips with the reflexive flair of Charlie Kaufman. It has three separate layers: Daniel, to be played by Daniel Kitson, sat in an office struggling to write a play; Dan, the subject of that play, “a fictionalised version of me played by an actor who is not me,” who is struggling to write a play with his co-author Jen; and Max, the 70 year-old subject of that play, in hospital explaining his lifestyle of absolute disposability, of taking nothing with him from one day to the next, to his care-nurse Carrie. Got that? No. Well tough, Kitson’s not going to slow down, his uncompromising style is refreshingly extraordinary; he leads, entertainingly enough, that we sprint and squint to keep up. Besides, it only gets more complex.

Because Kitson – the reader – keeps popping out to offer explanatory footnotes about the story behind the story. Because Daniel’s writing Dan and Dan’s writing Daniel – like that Escher sketch of a hand drawing a hand drawing the first hand – and both are writing Max and Carrie into existence, which, in itself, has all the trappings of Kitson’s previous work: “vaguely allegorical, quasi-existential” whimsy.

“I am sick of the quiet fucking dignity of unwitnessed fucking lives,” he yells, even as he recites another such life into existence.

This total knowingness – bloated self-aggrandizing and pinpoint self-satirising – elevates As of 1.52pm... above the usual writer’s block stock. So to does it’s extraordinarily considered dramaturgy, largely smuggled in disguised as laughter lines. Daniel’s stalled writing-life, as coffee cups mount alongside frustrations and self-celebration, becomes an imagined slapstick routine, incessantly tumbling from chairs, down blackboards and out of windows. “I’ve had a fall,” runs the punchline of a writer battling to live up to his own reputation.

The question is always ‘What happens next?’ and, in Max’s core character trait, Kitson quiet probes at the idea – and impossibility of – re-invention. Max tags the things he leaves behind, but how – ponders Dan – to tag the tagging implement. How, in other words, do you start afresh without entirely disappearing? In all this, too, is the question of our complicity; Kitson sits there berating us, the fanboy audience, as an idea, yet entirely not meaning it personally. We drove him to this with our incessant demand for more of the same, our critical acclaim, our rabid ticket booking that sees his tickets hoovered up in split seconds, snorted to feed addictions.

In any other hands, this sort of hyper-reflexivity would be an indulgence at best and, more likely, an irritation. Hell, it’s an indulgence in Kitson’s hands but he’s so knowing, so withering about his own indulgences that it’s just a total, unadulterated pleasure throughout.

Review: Morning, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Fringe

Written for Culture Wars

Simon Stephens’ plays often leave me bruised. The bash me about in my seat, peeling back my abdominals and going to work directly on my gut. I flinch and wince, utterly rapt by the utterable.

Morning, by contrast, let me be. Apart from a sharp intake of breath, as a rock smashed into a skull – as represented by a scaffold pole shattering through a plastic bin – I felt relatively at ease in its presence. My stomach intact, not tatters.

Yet when I left the theatre, I walked to the bar unthinkingly, poured a pint of water and stood, cross-eyed and shell-shocked, empty of all thoughts and feelings bar one: exhaustion. Perhaps the Fringe had frazzled my brain and perforated my defences, but Morning wrung me out. It is theatre as carbon monoxide: colourless, odourless and deadly.

Not seeing it coming, then, makes working out how and why it had this peculiar effect difficult. It is unremittingly uncaring. At its centre is Stephanie (Scarlet Bilham), a 17 year-old girl with no trace of basic human compunction or compassion. She does what she feels like without a flicker of thought for others or impact. Part of the golden-ticket generation, she expects bailing out as a birthright and that natural talent (sketching in her case) will see her through. She hands her brother’s iPod Touch to the friend she idolises, Cat (Joana Nastari). “Won’t he mind you stealing it?” Cat asks. “Yeah probably.” At home, upstairs, Stephanie’s mother is in the final stages of terminal cancer.

Stephanie and Cat honeytrap her boyfriend Stephen (Ted Reilly), luring him into the woods with fantasies of a threesome whirring through his brain. There they toy with him, hogtie him and obliterate him; children trapping and tearing the wings off a fly. Why? For kicks? As experiment? Because of mum or social pressures? Rather just because its possible, even because it’s in their nature. Stephanie is a girl, who kills. The world has become a virtual space like any other, in which only I exists: an obstacle to be navigated. The eyes aren’t windows to the soul, because there are no eyes to look in. They are one-way windows. Other souls don’t count.

The rest of the play concerns the repercussions. Stephanie carries on as usual, visiting Stephens parents, almost expecting him to reappear as if her actions have had no consequences. Her mother’s death splinters that view of the world. Her realisation that reality comes around and goes around, leads to a final, guttural rant, declaring the world and all its contents shit, that grows from hellish tantrum to nihilistic raving. “There is only terror. There is no hope.”

Sean Holmes’ production for the Lyric Hammersmith’s Young Company – an admirable decision in itself on the grounds of refusing to see young people’s theatre as a subsidiary – takes place on a bare stage bar the apparatus of a crime scene, or murder investigation. The world is to be worked out. Cold, bleaching lights spot nothing in particular. A clinical white tent, the sort that house dead bodies in woods, stands to the side. An industrial fridge and a fish tank provide strange trappings of domesticity and a laboratory. At the back of the stage, a technician sits in front of his computer. He hardly moves, only turning round to look at the action occasionally. Mostly he stares at the screen, a picture of atomised, addled and screen-addicted youth. In many ways he is Morning’s subject.

The writing is even more detached than Stephens’ usual dislocated style. In fact, it feels like notation, almost like Braille. The teenage cast play it seemingly without action or intention. Sentences are blurted at other people. Even expressions of warmth or affection feel like accusatory charges. This is cold, cold and unfeeling.

And yet, I can’t help but feel that it’s tries too hard, so determined to paint the world in shadow that it paints a shadow, but not the world. Stephanie doesn’t feel real, but she doesn’t feel real because she has no humanity, she is motiveless and unrepentant, an idea rather than a person. In the end, I think that’s it: I didn’t believe a jot of Morning, but sitting in its presence – a black hole artwork – utterly eviscerates the viewer. Morning didn’t pound my guts, it ran off with them. When I stood, I collapsed.

Review: Captain Ko and the Planet of Rice, Underbelly, Edinburgh Fringe

Written for Culture Wars

Captain Ko and the Planet of Rice sets its audience a puzzle. It is a triptych of short, almost entirely distinct pieces, each with its own style, that seem hazily connected. The challenge is to work out why.

Theatrical triptychs are curious things. In visual art three component parts form a whole; they exist side by side and can be compared in the moment of viewing. In theatre, they take place one after another, usually in a specific order, such that each informs the next and makes you re-evaluate what came before. Captain Ko… does this beautifully; it starts entirely in metaphor and provides the information needed to decode it later on. Three things recur: teacups, flying saucers and time warps.

It starts with a wryly-observed pastiche of a 1970’s sci-fi show, in which Captain Jane Ko (Valentina Ceschi) and her sidekick Spark (Thomas Eccleshare) explore a distant world. We get a theme tune and catchphrases, cotton-blue spacesuits and cutesy phazers. The Planet of Rice disrupts their equipment and distorts the usual laws of time and space. Moments start to repeat themselves, confusing the Captain, and the narrative gains an unexpectedly melancholic edge: “What the future holds, we don’t know” Ko announces, with a pioneer’s puffed chest, “but rest assured we are not afraid of it.”

This gives way to Ceschi’s mime solo in which an old woman – a very different type of future – makes a cup of tea, circling the kitchen opening drawers to creaks and fiddling cutlery to tinkles. Like Ko, she gets stuck on repeat, piling up cups on the table, before reality starts to shuffle with fantasy. A drawer opens with a horse’s neigh. Another contains a gun. Synapses short circuit, until an alien approaches and offers a kindly, comforting hug. It’s a truly touching moment, as terrifying as it is tender.

Third comes Sergei Avedyev, a Russian cosmonaut who spent 747 days in orbit and, as contact dwindled while the USSR disintegrated below him, slowly lost track of time. His capsule becomes a world of its own. It’s both thought-bubble and, given his child-like dependence on those back on earth, a womb.

Both Dancing Brick’s commitment to the triptych form and their faith in audiences is really admirable, but the connecting the three threads is its own reward. There’s little added nuance beyond the understanding of dementia in terms of the Planet of Rice, where one’s own world becomes an unpinnable alien realm. Inventively staged though it is, albeit narrating what it might have shown, the third segment repeats rather than develops the central thought.

The main problem, however, is that Dancing Brick’s dedication to their ideas at times allows the theatre to fall out. It’s the second mime sequence that does it. It may provide a lull in time to fit the content, but it’s twice as long as it needs be. By the time we’re out the other side and into the third segment, Dancing Brick have come too close to loosing us entirely. It could dearly use an additional layer of self-awareness to poke fun at its own theatrical fixity and avoid the semblance of technical exercise.

The whole is undoubtedly considered, momentarily devastating and fleetingly funny. It just forgets the need to engage in its desire to perplex.

Review: The Price of Everything, St Stephens / Flâneurs, Summerhall, Edinburgh Fringe

Written for Culture Wars

There is a curious three-way conversation at this year’s Fringe. In one corner is nihilism, a foreboding sense that we are, shall we say, screwed; that there’s no way out. It’s there in Ontroerend Goed’s All That Is Wrong, in Morning by Simon Stephens and in Rob Drummond’s Bullet Catch. Then, as Andrew Haydon has astutely pointed out, there’s the notion of recovery – a long, slow and rocky process - as found in Caroline Horton’s Mess and Blink by Phil Porter.

Thankfully, the third competitor in this forward-looking rumble is more optimistic. It wants to use the current situation as a springboard to something else, something better. It wants to reinvent the world and rewrite the social contract so that kindness governs our behaviour, not suspicion or fear.

What’s interesting is that the two shows I’ve seen that best exemplify this are both performance lectures: Daniel Bye’s The Price of Everything and Jenna Watt’s Flâneurs.

I’ve always thought the term ‘performance lecture’ a little odd. Like Miranda Hart (seriously, Matt, Miranda Hart?), part of me just wants to snap ‘It is a lecture. It just is a lecture,’ since lectures are – and, yes, this is inherent within the form – a mode of performance already. Performance lectures don’t look all that different to TEDx Talks or the Royal Society’s Christmas lectures, but the word ‘performance’ somehow makes the whole seem palatable. It takes the edge off. Learning and having fun.

Performance lectures also look similar to theatrical monologues in the mould of Mike Daisy or Spalding Gray. The difference, I think, is that they don’t invoke the performer’s subjectivity in quite the same way. They use the trappings of academia – slides and demonstrations and the like – for a semblance of objectivity, so that anecdotes recounting personal experience are primarily used to exemplify and stand-in for something wider. Then again, you could probably smack the term performance lecture on The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs without loss (or gain).

In Edinburgh, both Bye and Watt are using the form in order to preach peace. They use remarkably similar routes, starting from the world as it is and moving towards something utopian and reinvigorated.

Bye begins by wittily dissecting the notion of monetary value. He canters through a survey of what things are worth – the elements, organs and raw materials that make up your body, the arts, Fernando Torres and, crucially, milk. With echoes of Dave Gorman, he talks us through an eBay auction for an air guitar that eventually sold for over £800. With an infinite stockpile imaginary friends and the like, Bye claims to have made more than £6000 by, as he puts it, “fleecing idiots.”

He didn’t of course, but it nails the point – obvious, but easily overlooked – that value isn’t fixed and that just one person willing to pay over the odds is the motor of inflation.

Watt, meanwhile, starts by recounting random attack on her friend Jeremy, on a train, in front of other passengers, who did nothing to intervene. She takes us through her own experiences of Edinburgh in terms of the nooks and crannies, shadowy alleys and pedestrian subways that she’s afraid of: “The geography of our daily lives is plagued with violence,” she says.

Both Watt and Bye want to reclaim the world, to regain control, civility and basic human respect. Bye tried out some random acts of kindness – buying coffee for the person behind him in the Café Nero queue, littering a shopping mall with £20 notes and instructions to spend it on a gift for a stranger – and found his faith in fellow man rather dinted. He tells a story, always careful to nod to its fiction, in which transactions are based on giving, fairly, respectfully and gratefully, in the knowledge that one day the ‘favour’ will be repaid. I use quotation marks because Bye’s system is ultimately one of trade without currency and it is no less liable to be exploited. But that’s not the spirit. It shows just how small the step would be if everyone took it together.

Watt’s society of flâneurs – proactive bystanders all ready and willing – works similarly. Like Bye’s system it hinges on community, on everyone jumping on board, so that we all know any intervention will be backed up by others. In both utopian visions, there’s strength in numbers.

In terms of performance, Bye and Watt both exude gentleness. He uses charm and humour, she uses delicacy and charm. You listen because they’re worth listening to and, moreover, because they’re leading by example. Watts admits to her own anxieties about stepping in and how she’s trying to overcome them; Bye’s good deeds work likewise. If they can do it, you think, well so can I.

However, both shows also recognise it’s not enough just to talk utopia into existence. Bye dishes out milk and hands over £20 for an audience member to start another chain of good deeds. Watt passes round membership badges for us to wear, testifying to our willingness to weigh in. Sure, they’re small gestures, but better a small gesture than no gesture at all.

It reminds me of something that Chris Goode said (as so often) about theatre that says and theatre that does. Flâneurs and The Price of Everything do. They might not succeed and they might not overturn the order of things, but they cause small ripples, real ripples, and send you out into the world with better intentions.

Edinburgh Round Up: All That Is Wrong; Mess; NOLA; Coalition

Written for the New Statesman

In Edinburgh, the how can sometimes overshadow the what. Fringe audiences are won over by artistry, more than they are by art. After all, if you’ve got something urgent to say, the middle of the world’s most crowded art’s festival is hardly the most effective platform. This year, however – even if it’s too early to spot the recurring themes – the Fringe seems to be full of fighting talk.

Even those Belgian provocateurs Ontroerend Goed, usually more interested in affronting their audiences, have turned their gaze outwards. In All That Is Wrong (Traverse, times vary) 18 year-old Koba Ryckewaert chalks up a mind-map of the world’s ills on a huge blackboard. Homophobia and insomnia. Multinationals and baldness. Little Miss America. Sex sits by pain. Religion is hooked onto war. Right in the centre, there’s the letter ‘I’.

Starting with personal concerns – introversion, divorced parents – she works outwards to the big unsolvables. That initial I seems smaller and smaller, increatingly entangled. She calls to mind a mathematician cooking up a theory or a homicide detective connecting clues. Or just a new-minted adult, indignant and idealistic, trying to work out her place in a world of age-old problems. Scales seem to fall from her eyes. The need for solutions gradually softens, even if the umbrage remains. True, as an extension of verbatim theatre, with subject onstage, the quotation marks limit the scope, but this is a quietly resonant sideways slant on the coming of age story.

Caroline Horton’s Mess (Traverse, times vary) is another. Josephine, much the same age as Ryckewaert, finds the world just as problematic. She copes by rigidly controlling the way she eats. There are charts, comfortingly colour-coded, and calorific calculations. Trips to the Boots weighing machine are a treat. Laxatives and blackouts less so.

Mess is a kids’ show. For adults. About anorexia. The candy floss and fairy lights aesthetic rubs against the subject matter brilliantly, as it manages to show the world as Josephine sees it. It feels light-headed and giddy. Unreal. You can’t see the protruding bones that cause her boyfriend to flinch, but you know they’re there. The realities of the illness, when they come, are casually mentioned, rather than gorily detailed. Acid reflux? No biggie. Horton doesn’t try to shock us into action, she tries to make us understand and empathise. Anorexia isn’t about vanity. It isn’t a choice. It’s a compulsion. The only way for some people to cope. “It makes you feel invincible,” says Josephine. It’s the sort of insight – pinpoint and counter-intuitive – that could only come from experience.

Even if it ends by having it both ways – realist and feelgood – Mess’s bravery comes from its level-headed, even-handed candour. The brilliance comes from the opposition of form and content.

That’s exactly what Look Left, Look Right’s NOLA (Underbelly, 15.30) is lacking. Verbatim theatre so often does, deeming real-world import enough to dispense with theatricality. Shows like London Road and DV8’s Can We Talk About This, both seen at the National this year, prove the possibilities and leave conveyor belts of talking heads like this enquiry into the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico looking dully po-faced.

More than anything, though, verbatim theatre needs a strong argument that still reflects both sides. NOLA establishes culpability – improper safety procedures and a clean-up operation that mostly saved face – and lays its charges. Toxic dispersants – “the cheap and dirty way to deal with an oil spill,” according to marine toxologist Susan Shaw – were used to break up a million barrels worth of crude oil. Doctors cite recurrent symptoms. Local fishermen talk explain their stalled businesses and lack of compensation. The media focus on black-stained birds. Yet, there’s a lack of concrete statistics and key voices are missing: politicians and, apart from one anonymous employee, BP itself. They were NOLA’s villains from the start and it’s betrays its own purposes.

Speaking of which, Nick Clegg bears the brunt of Coalition (Pleasance Dome, 14.00). Thom Tuck plays Lib-Dem leader and DPM Matt Cooper in the final year of the coalition’s term. It’s all gone, well, a bit wrong really. He’s gone from messiah to pariah in four years. Backbenchers are threatening defection, his energy secretary has resigned over new nuclear power policies, triggering a by-election, and public perception considers him a “yellow amoeba.” Unsurprisingly, the Tory Chief Whip – Phill Jupitus drolly blending the Cheshire Cat and Mephistopheles – is circling overhead.

It’s entertaining enough, but Robert Khan and Tom Salinsky’s satire hops episodically from crisis to crisis, where it needs to stack them high. A Lib-Dem TV debate training camp is the highlight, but after a while Tuck’s tantruming has nowhere else to go. Just like Clegg’s Lib-Dems, Coalition overreaches itself; more surface than substance.

Review: Best in the World, Northern Stage at St Stephens, Edinburgh Fringe

Written for The List

Only the other day Usain Bolt declared himself the ‘greatest athlete to live’. Alex Elliott might take umbrage with that. In Best in the World, he proposes another: a balding 52-year-old with a hefty circumference by the name of Phil ‘The Power’ Taylor.

Taylor throws darts – or, to use the vernacular, slings arrows – like nobody else. Since 1995, he’s racked up 36 world titles across three competitions and, by Elliott’s estimation, stepped up to the oche around 12 million times over the course of his life. ‘The dartboard doesn’t discriminate,’ says Elliott; Taylor’s status as the world’s best is not just undisputed, but indisputable. This affecting, uplifting little inspiration from Unfolding Theatre knows that we can’t all become world champions, but arms us with inspirational bananas and urges us on to new heights and personal bests.

Elliott’s certainly leading by example in Annie Rigby’s production and, while his three-dart average may be a tepid 42.33 (last season Taylor’s was 117.35), you get a real sense of the diligence and discipline he’s putting into his performance. ‘I won’t use the upward inflection,’ he says of a line he’s just delivered, before repeating himself. There’s real care in the way he addresses us directly, making gentle eye contact to ensure no one gets left behind. It’s a performance that makes you aware of its own meticulous craft without ever demonstrating it, and it’s beautiful to watch.

Admittedly, his material, written by Carrie Rodney, is a little unfocused; the survey of sporting heroes isn’t wide enough to justify not confining itself to darts and the selfishness of self-sacrifice goes uninterrogated. Elliott chose to miss his father’s funeral to honour a commitment to perform in Spain, a decision he stands by, but one needs further unpicking in terms of impact and ethics. We need to know not just what it takes to take to take on the world and win, but also what it costs.

Review: Machines for Living, Zoo Venues, Edinburgh Fringe

Written for The List

‘Writing about music,’ Frank Zappa famously said, ‘is like dancing about architecture.’ Well, there’s plenty of the latter in Let Slip’s perky Fringe debut: a goofy, spoofish critique of the Brutalist ideal that gradually caked Britain’s cities in concrete from the 1960s onwards.

Newlywed architects Roger and Wendy have a dream: ‘to create homes fit for heroes’; high-rise havens of 20th century living, purpose-built for convenience and community. It can’t last, of course. Ego kicks in and Roger’s buildings reach Icarus-like for the sky: monuments as opposed to homes.

This is JG Ballard via the Mighty Boosh, all couched in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Warped weirdos – all performed with admirable comic gusto – creep out of the concrete. But there’s also brainpower alongside the buffoonery, and Let Slip brilliantly skewer the empty lifestyle slogans imposed by aspirational consumerism (‘Regeneration for a new generation’).

It’s still a tad uneven and fragile, but Machines of Living shows real promise and marks Let Slip out as a young company with that rare thing: a distinctive voice.

Review: One Hour Only, Underbelly, Edinburgh Fringe

Written for Culture Wars

Do you have to fake it to make in Britain today? That’s one conclusion to be taken from Sabrina Mahfouz’s savvy and taut two-hander, in which a young British Asian male steps into a brothel for the first time. AJ’s keen to maintain his macho outward appearance in front of Marley, a sex worker on her first shift, who adopts a Polish accent in front of clients.

As in J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, they get to talking, rather than tapping and, as both gradually shed protective layers, they reveal surprising depths. Marley, for instance, is a forensic biology student and picks apart AJ’s pretences with the eagle-eyed precision of Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock. With defences dropped, the possibility of friendship – perhaps even something more, something real – flickers into life.

Mahfouz’s writing is smart, without ever labouring its point. In fact, it hasn’t really got a point, per se, it’s just a small momentary encounter, a single hour seen in real time, that reflects a wider political context without forcing one thing to the foreground. Even if the initial situation is a little pat, it’s within the bounds of possibility and, moreover, handled truthfully and tenderly.

Its best feature is in using the way we watch drama, forensically, to misdirect us into unjustified assumptions. Marley, in particular, slips out of every cliché that you try to pigeonhole her into. The accent sends you one way; her studies send you another; her lack of crippling student debts another still. People, it seems to say, are beyond presumption and pinning down.

Occasionally Matt Wilde’s direction can’t resist completing the image, but he’s drawn great performances from Faraz Ayub and Nadia Clifford as the two young Londoners that reset each other’s cynicism and return to the world outside a little wiser, a little less cynical and a lot more humane.

Review: I ♥ Peterborough, Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh Fringe

Written for Culture Wars

Peterborough, for me – as, I guess, for a lot of people – is a train station. A bog-standard train station, in fact, with long concrete platforms, white metal stalks, blue corrugated roofing and a WHSmiths. The sort of station that, by saying nothing about a place, tells you all you need to know.

Joel Horwood’s play confirms those assumptions – of overcast, small-town banality – even as it pledges allegiance and affection. It is at once an ode to and a rant against; one clouded by the fondness of formative experiences and the frustrations of clipped wings; one that seems to say, “This may be a shithole, but it’s my shithole.”

For a long time, I ♥ Peterborough is harder to pin down. That’s largely to do with Horwood’s direction, which – watched in a certain way, probably the wrong way – makes his text seems slipperier than it actually is. In fact, for the first half, I was utterly adrift in this little shot of bleak tenderness. I didn’t know who was who and what was what.

It was the fake cigarette that did it. On a raised platform in the middle of the stage, there’s the corner of a living room, wallpapered in ochre florals. It doubles as a stage, lit by two footlights, that could be the corner of a grotty local pub. On it are two men; one sat behind a keyboard, younger, in a sequinned bow tie and bagger blazer; the other naked but for compacting briefs and smeared make-up. The older man puts on a bra, stuffs it with chicken fillets, and slides into an airy satin gown. He pulls out an electronic cigarette, glowing green at the tip.

And, that single act throws everything into question. The e-cigarette represents a real cigarette, right? So by extension the man in women’s clothes could represent a woman. Or, given Scotland’s ban on smoking onstage, the e-cigarette might not be all that problematic – a witty gag, best glossed over – and the man in women’s clothing could represent, well, a man in women’s clothing. You see my difficulty.

Now the dilemma is that I don’t think that was Horwood’s intention as director, but the fluid multiplicity, the shifting sense it caused, was also what I initially loved about I ♥ Peterborough. The staging seemed to turn Horwood’s text inside out and back again. Swirling around in this story – first a love-story between a man and a woman, then another, between father and son – I found this indistinct, expressionistic sense of Peterborough the place poured off the stage. The city was the only thing that felt solid.

And, boy, does Horwood treat it beautfilly, skimming through the decades and musical trends, alighting on race riots and ingrained homophobia, sweeping through the identikit high street chains that set up shop. You feel it as a city that dresses to impress, but still looks cheap; one that applies concealer to the cracks, where blood and lipstick blend. Insular and dysfunctional. Grimy and incestuous and a world in itself, comfortably awful. It is both heart and ♥.

All this seeps out of Horwood’s gorgeous text, swirling and dizzy, like Enda Walsh ripped out of Ireland and replanted in the Fens. It’s full of sumptuous morsels: brick dust on breath, mixed donner smiles, car crashes between legs.

Gradually, for me at least, it coheres into a quietly devastating tale of betrayal; a son (James Taylor), bullied and awkward, who backs his father – both literally, on the keys, and more – and a father (Milo Twomey), who fails to return the favour the following day, trotting off on the pull instead. Eventually, flight is the only option. Or, as Hew – the distraught son – puts it: “Sometimes you have to blow things up, so you can start again.”

Review: Would Be Nice Though..., Pleasance off-site, Edinburgh Fringe

Written for Culture Wars

The jobs market is in disarray, but it’s got nothing on this site-specific, interactive mess from Odd Comic.

Set in a real-life working employment agency, Would Be Nice Though... sets its audience up as candidates for an unspecified position. We’re given name badges based on nervous ticks and sent upstairs for the traditional awkward wait outside the interview room. One candidate starts talking about her urge to urinate when under stress. Another demonstrates her thought-process when faced with a killer question; pulling on the strings of her waistcoat as if inflating a lifeboat. It’s surreal and all too recognisable.

It’s also immediately obvious that they’re plants – and that’s fine. However, more problematic is their running the application as candidates, seemingly on a whim. You’d think some official might intervene, but no one else arrives. The whole set-up just gets blown apart. We’re asked to buy into and play along with a scenario that simply doesn’t adhere to its own logic.

In reality, this is site-specific sketch comedy and there’s very little reason for its more forceful attempts at interactivity. I’d happily watch Holly Bodmer and Dot Howard playing two manic applicants getting overly comfortable, prying into personal belongings and answering the phones. They find some great images in the mix: legs that sprout from desks, skirts that match the upholstery. Occasionally, they get gag-heavy (roll-play anyone?), but the final humiliating shuffle out of the office, in which Bodmer and Howard lie prostrate and inch their way down the stairs and off the premises is delicately surreal.

However, the string of kooky tasks that precede it are nothing but vacuous, out-of-place party games. Find the end of the sellotape? Fashion a sentence from words stuck to stationary equipment? Please.

Review: Hell’s Bells, Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh Fringe

Written for The List

Seventeen years after being dropped one series in by the BBC, Mrs Milliner is back on the television. Well, a television really. In a cramped recording studio, its creative team are preparing to record a DVD audio commentary.

However, Sacha Douglas, who once played the show’s chipper cockney maid, has since risen from Bond films to A-list, so it’s left to writer Carmen -- now running kennels in Shropshire -- and the series’ faded star Phyllis to reminisce and snipe. Meanwhile, hat historian (and genial dullard) Simon keeps trilling on about the trilbies and other headpieces that became the fans’ favourite.

Eat, Shoots and Leaves author Lynne Truss’ amicable comedy is perfect Radio 4 fare, even if it doesn’t really have anywhere to go. She conveys a real sense of Mrs Milliner’s flimsiness through the snide remarks and Truss nails the polite, but cutthroat, bitchiness of the Beeb. And, indeed, of the business of show as a whole, where success is so fickle that a single show can be one person’s launchpad and another’s last stand.

Review: Irreconcilable Differences, Gryphon Venues, Edinburgh Fringe

Written for The List

A couple. A car crash. Who lives? You decide.

In reality, Benjamin and Pollyanna are clinging to life from their adjacent operating tables. We see them in an abstract limbo, tied together at the wrists, scrapping for our sympathies in order to survive. Past feelings are thrown out as the couple, long since separated, dish the dirt on one another, unpicking the half-healed scabs of their relationship: affairs, suicide attempts, violence, abortion, euthanasia. (All that’s missing is stem cell therapy.)

Traces of nostalgic affection remain: three taps on the hand say, ‘I love you’; the memory of their first encounter stirs beneath the surface.

As a portrait of a car-crash relationship, Alan Flanagan’s script -- part balloon debate, part domestic -- is punchy and heartfelt, if rather hackneyed overall. However, the interactive element, on which the whole so clearly hangs, is nothing more than a gimmick. In the end, our decision is entirely arbitrary; both sides are overstuffed with pros and cons and there’s no real-world significance to the choice. Who lives? Who cares?

Review: Nggrfg, theSpace on the Mile, Edinburgh Fringe

Written for The List

Aged 16, Buddy aspires to grow up to become Canada’s Prime Minister. His teacher pooh-poohs the idea: ‘Because your bl …’ He checks himself. ‘I’ve never known a politician as – um – flamboyant as you.’

Buddy’s too camp to be black and too black to be camp. Time and again, he slams up against these twin prejudicial pistons. As a young actor, he can’t fit the casting cliches – leading to an amusing audition for a gangsta role. Caught skipping in the playground aged seven-and-a-half, he’s rechristened Toby, a brand-new ‘slave name’.

With subject matter like this, there’s an inevitably potency; not least because it feels intimate and raw. Nonetheless, the framework and performance register are so stereotypically confessional, Nggrfg feels almost like a teenage diary adapted into an audition piece that demonstrates versatility. Lively though writer-performer Berend McKenzie is, he can’t quite find the things in Buddy’s story that make it a one-off.

In fairness, the stories are better than the often grindingly literal staging, so if you can look beyond the format, it’s not worth striking off entirely.

Review: The Prize, Underbelly Bristo Square, Edinburgh Fringe

Written for The List

Gold and silver are mere split seconds apart. Hair’s breadths. There’s just as little between Olympians and Paralympians: a ladder that slips; a bout of meningitis; an IED underfoot. Life may not be fair, but – as the London 2012 hopefuls and former medallists featured in Steve Gilroy and Richard Stockwell’s verbatim piece demonstrate – it is what you make of it.

Certainly, The Prize gives a real flavour of the thrill of competition and the sacrifice of training, but there’s little here that you can’t get from BBC coverage. An elegant and fluid staging keeps it above Creature Comforts and different speakers are really well juxtaposed, but there’s too little overarching structure for any sort of contention. Golden-ageist ideas about honourable amateurism and concerns for British sport post-2012 aren’t convincingly backed up.

As such, it’s hard to get overly excited about The Prize – a case of nothing ventured, nothing gained. Nonetheless, Gilroy’s production is the most mature and unproblematic handling of disability, gender and race I’ve seen on a UK stage. Gilroy shows us the people, never the bodies – and that alone is medal-worthy.

Review: Blink, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Fringe

Written for The List

For 40 minutes, Blink tingles. Jonah and Sophie’s peculiar relationship tickles like a feather on a foot or champagne bubbles at the back of your throat.

Jonah likes to watch. Sophie needs to be seen. They fall in love from afar, conducting their peculiar romance through a webcam, comfortably detached from the blemishes of reality. As they drift into the virtual, however, both start to crave something more, something real. She shops online just to receive post. He breathes in bacon sandwiches. Then, to Sophie’s delight, Jonah dares to start stalking her. Mutually unacknowledged dates take place at 50 paces.

However, just as they’re about to meet, Phil Porter’s play trips itself up with a sudden unnecessary swerve into cliché. It’s such a shame, because it distorts the ideas he’s handled so exquisitely and shatters the fragile romance spun by Joe Murphy’s nonetheless excellent production. Don’t be put off, though. Blink’s still a real treat. Hannah Clarke’s superb and sensual retro design rubs brilliantly against Porter’s text, and Harry McEntire and Rosie Wyatt are button-cute as the bristling sweethearts.

Review: Mr Carmen, Assembly Roxy, Edinburgh Fringe

Written for The List

Try as she might, Bizet’s Carmen can never throw off her determined suitor, Don José. Wherever she runs, he follows, unshakeable in his affections. Don José is the stalker par excellence.

In the hands of AKHE: Engineering Theatre, this relentless pursuit becomes a game of theatrical graffiti. Carmen’s name appears; José’s forever follows.

If graffiti is about leaving one’s mark, tagging surfaces to say, ‘I Woz ‘Ere,’ theatre is oppositely ephemeral. Maksim Isaev and Pavel Semchenko ingeniously conjure the two names: in semaphore and squirty cream, in vinegar coughed into lights and wisps of scented smoke. Roses become paintbrushes. Cigarettes become quills. The two names materialise then vanish: ever-elusive, yet always incapable of escaping each other. José’s knife finally, inevitably, flies into Carmen’s chest of its own accord, as if pulled in by her gravitational force.

The sheer invention is astonishing, particularly when one-upmanship really kicks in, and AKHE’s many Rube Goldberg contraptions seem to reconfigure the order of things. So too is the show’s sensuality: smells sweet and sour fill the auditorium, somehow catching the essence of Bizet’s plot by themselves. Just stunning.