Edinburgh festival fringe reviews 2025
All our reviews, as we get 'em
This page will be updated with new reviews throughout August. A selection of reviews will also be hitting your inboxes as round-up newsletters. Scroll down for reviews of:
Jeezus! - Wild Thing! - Windblown - Jonah Non Grata - DREAMGIRL - Up Your Ass - These Mechanisms - Aether - Ozzy Algar: Speed Queen - Trouble, Struggle, Bubble and Squeak - Women in Socks and Sandals - Paldem - Painkillers - The Horse of Jenin - Philosophy of the World - Brainsluts - Tom at the Farm - Red Like Fruit - Ohio - Fuselage - Consumed
Jeezus! – Underbelly
By Alice Saville
I watched Conclave recently and the main thought it left me with was how utterly, befuddlingly seductive the aesthetics of Catholicism are: the film’s handsomely-deployed palette of blood-red and snowy white and richly gleaming textures was mesmerising, full of satisfying symmetries and awe-inspiring luxuriousness. Those aesthetics are seductive enough to have (in my view) tricked the entire film industry into garlanding it with multiple awards, despite its odd, under-signposted ending that said nothing, really, about the actual Vatican’s ills. So imagine how powerfully those same aesthetics can work upon the mind of a teenage boy!
Directed by Laura Killeen, Untapped Award-winning musical Jeezus! works visual miracles in a fringe space, dispelling shabbiness in favour of a dreamy blue sky backdrop that seems to glow with divine love, creating costumes that drip with sequins and jewels and gold. It’s a heightened setting, one that sets this world up as a surreal place where reality and fantasy merge together, where desire has its own logic, and is as omnipotent as any deity.
Sergio Antonio Maggiolo and his real-life partner Guido Garcia Lueches perform this story together, with Maggiolo’s words, songs and lyrics creating a coming-of-age story about a Peruvian teenager named Jesús’s passionate obsession with his near-namesake Jesus. Too passionate. He’s obsessed with that handsome face, that naked torso, that sympathetic gaze that seems to tacitly endorse his unexpected sexual desires. Oh, and the drip: the license that Catholicism gives men to wear gowns, and go wild with gilt and gems. Jeezus! is an exploration of how generations of queer people have sublimated their desires into religion, finding an outlet for their repressed desires to look upon bare chests, to be surrounded and robed in beauty. And it’s also an exploration of how a guileless teenager can see it all so clearly, can cut through all that repression and hypocrisy to reveal things exactly for what they are, without even realising how dangerous that is.
Maggiolo’s narrative is full of heart-tugging naivety, as he encounters his sexuality with curiosity, not judgement. He’s never even heard the word ‘homosexual’, and his bigoted father’s attempted explanation is so prudish and confused that it leaves the door wide open for further sexual explorations. His mother, on the other hand, is full of compassion. In beautifully directed scenes, the pair mimic poses from religious paintings, Jesús draped over her lap in emotional if not physical torment.
More consolation comes from his relationship with Jesus, the original one, as this show’s fantasy ripens into something bracingly sacreligious. It’s not the shock it could have been, though, because story was never innocent. And nor is the world it’s set in. Maggiolo carefully sketches the political landscape of modern Peru, with its militarised power structures playing out on a domestic level, in Jesús’s father's dictatorial need to make his son conform.
Repressive regimes create silences and gaps, where things can’t be spoken. And in those spaces, strange things happen. Jeezus! is warm, inclusive, sexy and deeply odd. It deserves a bigger theatre but it fits perfectly in a small one, working wonders.
Wild Thing! – Summerhall
By Alice Saville
I forget to worry about climate change, sometimes, as it's pushed off the list with other world tragedies with more visible faces. I know real people are being affected – like the inhabitants of Oceania island Tuvalu, who are starting a staged mass emigration before their island permanently sinks under the water in 2050 – but its other costs are more nebulous, harder to quantify, bewilderingly abstract-feeling.
Tom Bailey’s Wild Thing, like his 2019 hit show Vigil, makes the abstract feel tangible. He takes the seemingly endless list of 46,000 species at risk of extinction and brings them to life, one by joyful one. A peculiar Obscure Bumblebee, buzzing up against the black curtain; an Arrogant Shrew who looks like he had an Eton education, a puzzling Cryptic Treehunter. The beasts are artfully grouped, their names said on a voiceover that seems to be tormenting Bailey with increasingly impossible challenges which he meets with wit and physical ingenuity. It’s invigorating to watch someone throw their whole body into an impression of a tiny insect. Makes you feel alive.
Then, he scatters the stage with dry bleached bones of every size, and death creeps into the room. In a nature-documentary-inspired section, Xavier Velastin’s visceral sound design puts us between the jaws of the Bali tiger as it gnaws its way through a still-warm carcass, reminding us how brutal nature is. But even so, it doesn’t deserve this treatment: this mass extinction event, as Greta Thunberg’s voice decries.
Since 2019, Bailey has gone on a long journey with his material, both metaphorically and literally. Projected images chart his long, painful trek through his performance persona the Penitent Mussel’s favoured shores, Salt Path-style: a silk sheet with the names of the threatened animals unfurls picturesquely over wild Nordic landscapes, rocks and wastelands. Then, the audience is invited to an interactive meditation sesh where we envisage our spirit animal trapped in a ball, like a Pokemon.
And maybe this is the part where I wanted honesty, not spirituality. I think I’ve reached a point where I’m sceptical about people making grand gestures that they then make art about, unless there’s a bit of introspective realness in there. Bailey didn’t show us whether the Penitent Mussel ever got fed up of feeling bad about climate change, ever threw away a plastic container it couldn’t be bothered to wash.
But if the ending loses the wit of this performance’s earlier scenes, there’s still something so intensely emotive about spending an hour in Bailey's company. He’s got this infectious sense of energy, playfulness and compassion that leaves you feeling alive, even if the memory of all those bones lingers.
Windblown – The Queen’s Hall
By Laura Horton
“A weeping palm is quite a thought” says Karine Polwart as she stands beneath Neil Haynes’ wild and beautiful set, an array of feathers arranged to evoke a palm tree. Windblown is a gentle hour, with flowing video projections by Jamie Wardrop and calm, ever-changing hues designed by Lizzie Powell to evoke the life span of the sabal palm, a tree that stood in the Royal Botanic Gardens for more than 200 years. Accompanied by Dave Milligan on the grand piano, Polwart intertwines folk songs, poetry and direct address to tell the story of the tree and its eventual removal from the Tropical Palm House.
I wondered at first whether this would be a piece about protectionism or resistance – but instead it’s a beautifully gentle story of acceptance and transience. The sabal palm has simply come to the end of its life; it had outgrown its space and was too frail to be moved during renovations of the Palm Houses.
Polwart celebrates the small team who tend to the palm. She recounts one interaction with someone who explains that, in the same way he gave his dog a treat every day, even on the day of his death, they will continue to treat the palm with love and respect. That life should be nourished until the very end.
Polwart was working at the botanical Gardens as a resident artist with co-composer Pippa Murphy in 2021, and the grief of pandemic runs quietly through the piece. As she describes how some of the plants origins are unknown, like so much is unknown, many parallels can be drawn – those cycles of grief, love and instability of life that we all experience.
As she talks through the plans for the Royal Botanical Gardens to expand and grow, one of the staff members says she’s excited for the people who will get to experience it in years to come: “you plant for the future, not yourself,” she says.
When the palm tree was finally taken away, a discovery was made: the palm thought to be a rare specimen was in fact “common as muck.” This was the real thrust of Windblown for me: no one was horrified that they had been tending and mending a common palm tree. The news was taken in humour, an elegant acceptance that everyone and everything is worthy of care, and nothing can last forever.
Jonah Non Grata – Assembly Rooms
By Ben Kulvichit
I am finding myself drawn to shows at the Fringe which have been resurrected. Mamoru Iriguchi’s Painkillers was originally made in 2014, and this clown-cum-experimental theatre piece by former Shunt member Simon Kane is from 2004. This particular curiosity shouldn’t surprise me – in my life as an artist I run a ‘scratch night’ for old, rather than new, work. Reanimations of the theatrical archive seem to be happening more at the moment on a bigger scale too – take Complicité’s Mnemonic, or 4:48 Psychosis. But where the latter examples were both silver jubilee celebrations of seminal works, I am more interested in these smaller DIY works with less obvious reason for returning. I’m curious about what feels like unfinished business for artists.
In the case of Jonah Non Grata, I felt acutely a sense of time travel; a glimpse into a performance scene around a decade before my time. A scene, perhaps, with less attachment towards sense-making or clarity of argument. An investment in silliness, but not in comfort. Jonah Non Grata has a very particular flavour, like liquorice tried for the first time. I came out mildly baffled, but delighting in that bafflement. I like liquorice.
So, what happens in the show? Here goes (spoilers aplenty, sorry): Kane, encased completely in a laundry bag, rolls in through the audience’s entrance door to a banjo cover of ‘O Fortuna.’ He emerges in sideburns and double-denim, and proceeds to engage the audience in a series of aborted attempts to solve some sort of vaguely-defined dilemma. It’s a bit like a church service bent out of shape: there is a lot of standing and sitting back down again, there are readings (from Ian Livingstone’s choose-your-own-adventure fantasy book City of Thieves), and at one point we sing along to a hymn (a hilariously reworded version of a Sacred Harp tune).
Kane brings to this an unstable and ambivalent energy – he doesn’t seem at all sure what he is doing, if it is working, or whether he should be doing it. An audience looks to their host for safety – to feel that they are in good hands – but Kane offers minimal guidance and no reassurance to his audience volunteers. How in control of this situation are we, and how in control is he? The show is purportedly inspired by the Book of Jonah. I don’t know my Bible stories nearly well enough to hypothesise how this manifests in the show’s material, and I suspect Kane would tell you it doesn’t matter anyway. There is no key to this particular puzzle box.
Just at the moment when you feel the show might break under the strain of its carefully concocted awkwardness, it does just that, as Kane decides to flee his own theatre. Act 1’s ‘Fight’ turns to Act 2’s ‘Flight’; a pre-show announcement has already drawn our attention to the running man on the emergency exit signs (is he running, or are we just looking at him from above?), and Kane simply walks out the door, leaving us to stew. Do we follow, or do we stay….?
When he eventually returns, the show morphs into something new and delves deep into the belly of the whale, taking us into more imagistic, fictional landscapes: the ambient hum of cruising altitude, a spot-lit suspension on the moon, a lonely room at the Marriott hotel. In each of these situations, Kane is a figure abandoned, the ‘scourge’ of the Earth (or is that ‘gourd’?). There is a sense of being hopelessly lost – of having exhausted all of the City of Thieves’ forking paths and finally run out of road. We might begin to wonder at this point how – nay, if – Kane will tie this all together. Fools. This would be to extinguish the delectable mystery of it all.
Jonah Non Grata invites us to choose our own adventures, to see in the show’s esoteric runes whatever we want to see. In the accumulating, gleefully absurd about-turn surprises of Kane’s reverie of forsakenness, I see some sort of lesson (in the Biblical sense) about giving up looking for answers, and what one might find in the space beyond a desire for certain ground. Why has Kane looked at his own forking paths and chosen to bring this show back? What is his grand intention for us? Need there be a reason, in the end?
Oh, and I didn’t even mention the song about Sonic the Hedgehog.
Jonah Non Grata is at Assembly Rooms to 24 August
DREAMGIRL – Underbelly Cowgate
By Holly Williams
Do you trust strangers? Karen Houge wants to know not just if, but why – what are the reasons that make us warm to people or be suspicious of them? Most people warm to her: she’s a blonde-haired blue-eyed white-skinned Norwegian, with a winning smile and self-confidence that ought to read as reckless or even irksome, but is entirely charming. Inspiring, even.
DREAMGIRL is a show about journeys: about how, at 25, Houge joined a group of refugees from Syria and Afghanistan in Greece, as they set off on a journey to Germany. Houge was about to start clown school – but she decided to make a film about them first. This spine of the show is compelling, especially Houge’s hair-raising stories of being arrested herself by border guards, and how she got off various charges (promising a Serbian judge a job on her parents’ farm). And her main point is a sharp one: that she will be fine in almost any situation, because of where she is from and how she looks, while the brown men that she travels with are met with instant suspicion.
It is rare and frankly bracing to hear a young white woman remind audiences of just how extremely safe young white women travelling alone actually are – to encourage us to trust strangers, to be brave, to believe the best in people. After all, the prevailing narrative of our time is how terribly terribly vulnerable women are, all the time, perpetual victims-in-waiting. But, Houge calculates, she’s had maybe 50,000 interactions with different people over the course of her life, and only two have done her any harm. And hey were men she already knew. She refuses to “give them the power to make me scared”.
Within DREAMGIRL, Houge goes on a lot of side quests that involve light audience participation, from attempting to recreate the Peace Camp she attended as a girl, getting people to build their dreams out of Lego, and – more grimly – asking us to vote on who should be thrown off a sinking boat, with real people depicted by plastic fruit and veg. But the jaunty, whimsical tone of her set-ups and storytelling can overwhelm the narrative and derail its sense of momentum; despite being made with “dramaturgical support” from comedian Elf Lyons, DREAMGIRL could be considerably tighter.
But even if Houge often seems to wander off the path of her own story or meander away from its most urgent political points – after all, the refugee crisis is surely about more than just ‘trusting strangers’ – she is an undeniably gorgeous presence to spend an hour with. No wonder everyone who meets her trusts her: in the show I see, she has the entire audience eating out of the palm of her hand
DREAMGIRL is at Underbelly Cowgate to 24 August
Up Your Ass – Zoo
By Laura Horton
Is the queue for Up Your Ass?
Yes.
It’s 11.30am and every time someone asks this, or the usher shouts anyone here for Up Your Ass? there is a wave of smirks and snorts. Stood with my coffee and reading the content warnings, I think the choice for this to be a morning show is an interesting one.
As soon as I saw it in the Zoo programme, I knew I needed to see this European premiere of Valerie Solanas’s infamous 1965 play Up Your Ass – full title: Up Your Ass or From the Cradle to the Boat or The Big Suck or Up from the Slime. It’s billed as a comedy, and the play has rarely been performed. Now being staged as part of the Big in Belgium showcase, I was fascinated to see what theatre makers Lieselot Siddiki and Nona Demey Gallagher would make of it.
On a black curtain some text is projected, detailing the context for the play – the reasons for its infamy. Valerie Solanas asked the artist Andy Warhol to produce Up Your Ass. When he not only said no but also lost her script – the only one she had – she shot him, fearful that he was trying to steal her ideas.
We open in a big American city, two figures emerging at the top of scaffolding to beat drums and pump out music, providing the underground atmosphere of downtown New York City nightlife. Bongi Perez, our protagonist – a thinly veiled Solanas – enters in pleather chaps and an American flag hoody and sits, legs open wide, bold and unapologetic.
The scene that unfolds is cartoonish and frenetic, a style that sustains throughout the play as Bongi escorts us through her life on the streets of the city. A series characters in various states of dress pass by and shout “you got a twat by Dior” descending into catcalling “your twat ain’t all that” as they run or ride on a children’s electric sports car around the Bongi and the building. Visually, there are nods to Pop Art – a line of ketchup bottles and Andy Warhol wigs.
Bongi says “I’m not a watcher, I’m a woman of action” and what follows are a series of fragmented scenes that seem to offer provocations more than fully realised drama. Bongi is played with a deadpan, simplistic address, while the others multi-role as a cast of caricatures. It feels disjointed, and sometimes strangely flat.
Throughout, the point is hammered home: “men have made this world a sinking ship.” Living in a violently misogynistic world, I don’t think there is necessary need for subtlety here and Up Your Ass certainly isn’t subtle. One character, Ginger, looks around the stage for a turd she’s lost; she plans to eat it at dinner, because men appreciate women who know how to “eat shit.” Accepting an offer to the dinner party, Bongi gets frustrated with how non-sensical the men are, while Ginger is accepting, almost adoring: “he’s brilliant – you can’t understand him.”
As a piece of writing, Up Your Ass is satirical and almost adolescent at points. It’s fascinating as an artefact of its time, but I wish it had been explored and framed more in the context of Solanas’s actions, rather than as a mostly faithful production of her script. Bongi talks about the SCUM manifesto – something Solanas published in 1967, where The Society for Cutting Up Men argue that it is up to women to fix a world ruined by men and that the best way to do that is to overthrow society and eliminate men. Which is also the entire thrust of this play, a fictionalised precursor to the manifesto.
There are powerful moments, as when Bongi talks about creative passivity: she breaks from her own mild tones when one of the men asks what women’s talents are, to shout “ENDURANCE”, before a silence descends. That moment more than any other has stayed with me – maybe that’s what the relentlessness of this play was trying to invoke, the futility and frustration of living in a patriarchal world and having to find the stamina for survival. Ultimately though, I do wonder whether this play is more of a historical curio than a complete play ripe for more revivals.
Up Your Ass is at Zoo to 24 August
Chat Sh*t, Get Hit – Summerhall
By Holly Williams
Female rage, and how we aren’t allowed to express it or even to feel it, is a zeitgeisty topic: the sort you see pop psychology books and pop songs about, a truism of both 2020s feminism and of therapy speak. But that’s surely because it has a tang of truth for many women: we have been socialised to be nice, and squash the rage. And that can’t be good for us.
Martha Pailing is, in many ways, an ideal person to make a one-woman show on the topic. She’s exactly the sort of woman who no-one expects to be angry – and forgive me if the following seems a reductive description of personal details, because they actually are relevant here, in a show that is about how we are read and perceived and boxed-in. Pailing is short (5’2”, she makes a point of telling us), and ever-so smiley; her humour is self-deprecating and anxiety-riddled; she looks younger than her 31 years, explaining that she gets mistaken for a teenager when going back to work in the same Blackpool chippy she did in fact have a job in at 15.
But she’s also very, very angry. And part of that anger stems from being a woman that people overlook and underestimate and diminish. Not least her ex, who unleashed her boundless fury by a) breaking up with her and b) then “deliberately and meticulously” breaking every rule she put in place so they could both keep their lives and jobs in London on track. Hence returning to her parents’ home.
Chat Sh*t, Get Hit, directed by Ursula Martinez, features a long list of other things Pailing is now pissed off about, including over-priced coffee, earning less than everyone she knows, and displays of public affection on escalators. Pailing’s comically well-observed litany of irritants is echoed later in the show by the audience’s: she reads out our anonymous suggestions, a cathartic blood-letting that proves both heartbreaking and funny. The day I see it, things that made us angry ranged from “slow walkers” and “the SNP” to “starving children” and “my brother’s suicide”. It works like a reverse, grumpy version of Every Brilliant Thing. Every Sh*tty Thing?
But Chat Sh*t also includes more abrasive, abstract moments: sound sequences of barking and vomiting, as Pailing takes inspiration from her parents’ impulse-led dog, and an over-extended, surreal storybook narrative about a sweet little mouse that can turn itself inside out. We also hear a long quote from trauma specialist Gabor Mate, about women’s suppressed rage resulting in auto-immune diseases. It’s all interesting, and engagingly performed – but feels like it hasn’t quite been crafted into something more than the sum of its parts yet. The tone wavers somewhat unsatisfyingly between the super-relatable irritation at the annoyances of modern life and rotten boyfriends, and a more mysterious, profound, deeper rage. For a show about letting go, it still feels like Pailing is holding back.
Chat Sh*t, Get Hit is at Summerhall to 25 August
These Mechanisms – Assembly @ Dance Base
By Ben Kulvichit
At the Fringe, it can feel like everyone is on the hunt to discover this year’s hot young things, truffling for the pupal talents of early-twenties hopefuls fresh from training. Well, maybe they’re looking in the wrong places.
Christine Thynne is an emerging artist in her eighties, performing her first solo show, These Mechanisms, made in collaboration with choreographer Robbie Synge. Thynne began dancing aged 68, after taking a class for over-60s at Dance Base, where her show is now programmed. She has long been concerned, however, with the body and what it can do, having trained as a physiotherapist in the 1960s. Not that any of this is offered as exposition in These Mechanisms, which sidesteps the well-trodden path of autobiography (it’s not hard to imagine the feel-good narrative version of this piece about overcoming stigma and finding a new lease of life). Rather, in the vein of artists such as Quarantine or Jérôme Bel, it’s more akin to portraiture, centring Thynne at this particular moment in her life, but letting the body speak, first and foremost.
Onstage, Thynne is in her element and instantly likeable, pulling off the art of a warm audience welcome and gentle, reassuring self-deprecation – things may not go to plan today, she briefs us before embarking on the show, so “worst case scenario, do not resuscitate”. She banters with her onstage ‘helper’ and sound designer, Calum (Paterson). We listen to her record a granular description of a series of movements – “bend arm to full flexion, roll over left shoulder” – and then watch her perform these manoeuvres to the playback of her own voice. She manipulates step ladders, wooden planks and jerry cans of water into simple systems for the transferral of energy, weight and support. She negotiates the job of arranging these materials and running back to the microphone in time to deliver a verses of a looping rap.
Her tasks flirt with risk and cheekily undercut our expectations of what an octogenarian performer might choose to devise for themselves. Paterson’s sound design isolates and loops fragments of Thynne’s speech, and occasionally indulges in lush guitar pieces (depending on your temperament and threshold for sentimentality, these either imbue the mundane physical tasks with beauty, or stray dangerously into schmaltz; it’s a bit of both for me).
Whilst age is certainly an active ingredient in These Mechanisms (and ‘emerging 83-year-old artist’ is an attention-grabbing lede), its delicate, balanced and open-ended choreographic material is more holistic than that. After all, everyone’s bodies have their own limitations, idiosyncrasies, knowledges and desires, and we all have the potential to do new things with our bodies that expand how we think about and exist with them. Watching the show, my mind takes a detour to pro-Palestine protesters putting their bodies on the line, and headlines highlighting elderly people amongst those arrested for decrying the proscription of Palestine Action. Thynne and Synge’s piece makes a case, quietly but firmly, for exploiting the possibilities that always exist within limitation – of risk, discovery, courage and joy.
These Mechanisms is at Assembly @ Dance Base to 20 August
Aether – Summerhall
By Catherine Love
This review can only ever capture the tiniest part of Aether, TheatreGoose’s dizzying new show. It’s a mere smudge on the windowpane of what they’ve created; the visible matter to the vast, unknowable anti-matter of the universe.
This is what TheatreGoose are interested in: the great unknown. As the show begins, they tell us that everything we can see in blue – the heavy velvet curtain that hugs around the small performance space, the whiteboard markers laid out on the desks in front of us in the Anatomy Lecture Theatre – represents what we know about the universe, what we’re able to see. And everything else in this room and the city beyond is what we don’t know. The invisible mystery.
It's a bold opening gambit. How do you make a show about all the things we can’t see? The answer is with a performance that’s part magic trick, part lecture (though don’t let that put you off), and part existential crisis. It begins with a beauty parade of elementary particles (yes, really) before interweaving the stories of multiple women from history: fourth-century Egyptian mathematician and philosopher Hypatia, teenage Victorian medium Florence Cook, vaudeville magician Adelaide Herrmann, and astronomer Vera Rubin. Loosely holding everything together is the fictional narrative of Sophie, a PhD student working with data from the Large Hadron Collider and obsessing over the secrets of the universe.
Aether deals with mysteries both natural and supernatural, questioning the limits of scientific knowledge. It’s one of the knottiest and most intellectually dazzling shows you’re likely to see at the Fringe – or anywhere, for that matter. Where else can you get particle physics, seances, Plato’s Cave and musings on the mathematics of takeaway orders all in one hour? And if that sounds dry and academically aloof, it’s not. Performed with precision and dynamism by the four-strong, black-clad ensemble, this is a knowingly, joyfully theatrical piece, filled with humour and movement and glorious little flourishes. Like the clever use of an overhead projector, or the way the performance leans into its lecture theatre surroundings.
These words are, of course, a paltry approximation. I can’t even begin to describe all the small gestures of the performers, the expressive flicks of wrists and movements of eyes, the countless tiny and sometimes invisible elements that add up to a feeling, an impression. The rest is lost, unseen, forgotten. Gliding by in front of me and escaping my limited, fallible perception. But, as Aether suggests, the mystery is part of the joy.
Aether is at Summerhall to 25 August
Ozzy Algar: Speed Queen – Pleasance Courtyard
By Holly Williams
Welcome to the last launderette in the Isle of Wight. Ozzy Algar, a Gaulier-trained clown, is Pet: the old woman who runs the ‘Speed Queen’ laundry shop, who knows all the mucky secrets of the island’s inhabitants, and who wants to get her hands on yours, too. And she does: at one point, the audience are encouraged to take off their socks, which she pegs on a washing line held by an audience member. There was a slightly sniggery reticence from the audience on the night I watched, baffling given Algar manages the crowd work with a quick wit. But I was more than happy to de-sock for Pet, a character both eerily ominous and wistfully whimsical – I mean, I’d probably have given her whatever she asked for.
Algar is swaddles in a great coat and headscarf, with white make-up that’s part clown, part old lady whose eyesight is not what it once was. Her hands are held like arthritic claws, and she has a creaky old rusted-hinge of a voice – but when she fixes you with a piercing stare, there’s a hint of dangerous mania dancing in the eyes.
Directed by Tanika Lay-Meachen, Speed Queen spins funny-haha and funny-peculiar together in careful balance, as Pet regales us with uneasy stories from the island: it’s history and residents, its former glory, and current decline. Her tales have a mysterious, supernatural edge but are often cut with a telling, or banally funny, contemporary detail. One adulterous couple saw a strange light in the island’s hedgerows, that revealed vision of its history and future, from Roman soldiers to a 15-story TK Maxx.
Pet was a showgirl, once, performing at the Ventnor Winter Gardens – “seven shows a week and 12 on Sundays” – and there’s a lovely interlude where Algar strips off to reveal lace-frilled undergarments and gives us a song. Overall, the piece hangs together delicately, and feels like it could benefit from greater linking material or a stronger through-line. But Algar’s compellingly weird storytelling and oddball comic timing has got cult-following potential. If shivery character comedy about English eccentrics – think League of Gentlemen – is your thing, then give Speed Queen a spin.
Ozzy Algar: Speed Queen is at Pleasance Courtyard to 24 August
Trouble, Struggle, Bubble and Squeak – Pleasance Courtyard
By Holly Williams
Victoria Melody’s ‘thing’ is to embed herself with groups of hobbyists – pigeon racers; beauty queens – and then make a show out it. Her latest is based on her time joining an English Civil War historical re-enactment society, as a good distraction from a bad divorce. The inspiration was reading about the Diggers, a group of 17th century religious radicals who wanted to reclaim England’s common land and grow their own food on it. Unfortunately, she accidentally wound up joining the wrong side – becoming a musketeer for the Royalists…
Directed by Mark Thomas, this a fringe-perfect format; Melody stands in front of us in her (rather adorable) red woollen musketeer outfit, telling her story with an infectiously enthusiastic directness. Placards topped with the faces of people she encounters along the way, an embroidered banner, and buckets of knitted vegetables surround the stage (I covet the veg). But Trouble is less about The Diggers themselves or her fellow re-enactors – although their earnest commitment to historical accuracy does become a running gag – and more about a community Melody also becomes embedded in, on the Whitehawk council estate on the outskirts of Brighton.
There, to put a somewhat simplistic glaze on it, she finds people living out the sort of principles the Diggers were espousing hundreds of years ago – and getting shit done rather than waiting for permission. Brian takes over an empty community kitchen to cook food during Covid. Dave protects the surrounding countryside from developers by documenting a rare beetle. So it is there that Melody decides to re-stage a battle between The Diggers, played by local residents (who need a little cajoling, then get VERY into it), and a parading army of boo-hiss landlords and soldiers, gamely played by the historical re-enactors.
Melody is excellent company – self-deprecating, twinkly, passionate about how remarkable ordinary people can be – and Trouble makes for a completely heartwarming hour. It’s also pretty up my street, as a lapsed Quaker whose parents took me to see Light Shining in Buckinghamshire as a child because they were so into the Levellers, the Diggers, and the Ranters. (God love Caryl Churchill, but for any radical parents reading, Trouble would be a much more child-friendly introduction for littler revolutionaries). If anything, I’d quite liked to have had a bit more nitty-gritty on the Diggers and yer man Gerrard Winstanley… but this is a very accessible show, whether you’re a Civil War nerd or have no idea about any of it.
But the ultimate focus of Trouble is more on the here-and-now, and persuasively so. And Melody’s story of the big ‘battle’ on the council estate, and how they found a community garden in Whitehawk in its aftermath, left me feeling as warm and fuzzy as one of her hand-knitted leeks.
Trouble, Struggle, Bubble and Squeak is at Pleasance Courtyard to 24 August
Women in Socks and Sandals – Zoo Southside
By Catherine Love
Two women enter holding a long wooden plank. We’ve seen this before; we all know how this slapstick gag goes. Yet Danish physical theatre company DON GNU manages to consistently surprise. Just as I think I’ve got the measure of this tricksy, slippery performance, it does something else that startles, delights or enrages. This is what, at its best, the Fringe is for.
Women in Socks and Sandals is a sort of self-referential in-joke, offering a female take on DON GNU’s earlier, all-male production M.I.S – All Night Long, a playful interrogation of contemporary masculine identity. As in that previous piece, wooden planks and bouncing yellow yoga balls are the central props, but now we get to see what happens when women enter this world of posturing and machismo. How do the demands of patriarchal capitalism bend female bodies out of shape?
A trio of clowning performers in office gear and (naturally) socks and sandals scrap and scuffle, contending for ways to wield power while staying sexy. They nudge each other back and forth along an improvised seesaw – the aforementioned plank balanced precariously on a plastic crate. They each comedically appeal to us, the audience, for approval. In one particularly brilliant sequence they competitively flick their hair at one another, turning femininity into a weapon that pits woman against woman. One performer uses her long, thick mane to completely cover another; alluring head tosses quickly turn into violent, brain-juddering movements that hurt just to look at.
A hilarious filmed segment identifies the company’s targets, using the inherent absurdity of advertising tactics to underline the contradictory demands placed on women today. We must be strong yet feminine, powerful yet agreeable, low-maintenance yet elegant. The show itself is a glorious rebuke to all this, as these women’s bodies do extraordinary, silly, beautiful, ridiculous things, defying the same stereotypes they invoke. Performers Nadja Bounenni, Giulia Quacqueri and Paulína Šmatláková – who also collectively choreographed the piece – are all ludicrously skilled, their antics making me gasp and guffaw by turns.
The underlying ideas are not new. We know this shit. Those of us who inhabit female bodies live this shit day to day. But the communication of those ideas is ingenious and surprising and playful in all the best ways. Like I said, it’s what the Fringe is for.
Women in Socks and Sandals is at Zoo Southside to 10 August
Paldem – Summerhall
By Holly Williams
When working out what to recommend on the fringe, journalists (Exeunt included) tend to grab hold of whatever names they recognise. It’s an imperfect system, if understandable – and it’s meant that Paldem, the debut play by David Jonsson, star of Industry and Rye Lane, has probably had both a helpful and unhelpful amount of attention. To be fair, it also has a tempting premise: Paldem is billed as an “anti-romantic comedy” about two friends who stumble into making amateur porn.
The set-up is juicy: Meg and Kevin used to date, are now just mates, but still have that crackling charge to their bantering dialogue (this sometimes zings and sometimes feels quite effortful). Kevin (Michael Workeye), an aspiring filmmaker, accidentally leaves a camera recording when they hook up in his flat – and while Meg (Natasha Cowley) is initially furious, she soon finds herself mesmerised by the footage. By how thin and hot she is, yes, but also how beautifully they respond to each other, how right they look together. It’s a strangely touching scene, watching someone’s conception of themselves change in real time – and the one moment of really truthful writing in the play.
From this compelling start, Paldem looks like it’s going to develop into lots of interesting directions and then just… doesn’t. This script feels many drafts away from ready. Character decisions often don’t quite make sense.
I know it is annoying when critics review shows for what don’t do, rather than what they do. But I also think that if your play sets up certain subjects and then doesn’t deliver on them or develop them, it’s a fair thing to critique. So, these are some topics that Paldem signals it’s about, but leaves pretty undercooked…
Sex and commerce: It’s a live moment to talk about what it means to make money from filming yourself having sex and putting it on the internet. Directed by Zi Alikhan, Paldem stages that – lots of scenes in underwear, projected via a live-feed from the camera onto a big screen – but it doesn’t really talk about it. How do they feel knowing strangers are watching them have sex? How do they feel about suddenly becoming sex workers? Do either of them really need this money? Do they care about parents, friends, bosses, other partners finding out? Who knows. If there are they any anxieties about fucking on OnlyFans – and I imagine there might be some – they remain blissfully unexplored.
Race and class: Kevin is Black, the performatively woke Meg is white, but also performs a fondness for Black culture and slang (it’s unclear exactly how posh she is, how fake she is; there are allusions to her being a “Tatler to a T” but her accent is harshly East London rather than rah). But Meg’s cultural appropriation and dating snobbery – she’ll hook up with a Black guy but would never stick at a relationship with him – is only really tackled in a final fight, when she turns up at Kevin’s flat with an awful, very rich white boyfriend. (Why would she bring him there? No explanation is offered.)
The intersection of sex-as-commerce and race and class: Does making money from OnlyFans hit differently for this probably-rich white girl and for a Black man living in what we’re told is a dodgy part of town? We never know! The fetishisation of Black male bodies, by white women, and in porn, is also flagged as a fascinating theme – there’s brief discussion of the weirdness of “ebony” as a porn category – but barely developed. And the way the production actually stages visual admiration, right down to where the camera lingers, is always for Meg’s white, thin, female body, not for Kevin’s. So his late complaint that she fetishizes him has nowhere to land.
Making art: She, we’re told late on, is an artist; we know he makes films. How does making porn feel for people who want to make art? Nope, no idea I’m afraid.
Despite all this, Paldem is often line-by-line entertaining, and Workeye and Cowley really bring it life with caustic, rapid-fire performances. There’s much promise, here – but it ultimately left me feeling as unsatisfied as a bad one-night stand.
Paldem is at Summerhall to 25 August
Painkillers – Summerhall
By Ben Kulvichit
There is no actual magic in Mamoru Iriguchi’s Painkillers, set on- and back-stage at an illusionist’s show. Or rather, there is plenty of it, it’s just in the mind; in the slips and cracks of structural repetitions, theatrical reversals and gradually peeling layers.
Iriguchi is a Fringe stalwart, with a catalogue of curious, offbeat and very distinctive shows. Typically, they each employ a marvellously eccentric costume which obscures or recasts the body in some way — there’s the cartoonish lion costume from whose jaws Mamoru’s not-quite fully swallowed head emerges in EATEN, the giant cyclops made of shimmery fringe in What You See When Your Eyes are Closed / What You Don’t See When Your Eyes are Open, and the head-mounted projector and screen in 4D Cinema.
In Painkillers, a solo originally made in 2014, that costume is a plump, knitted body suit, reminiscent of a cocoon, the Michelin man or Louise Bourgeois’ fabric sculptures. The form is of a curvaceous woman’s body – complete with a sleek black dress and high heels – and contains many delightful surprises and some intimate anatomical detail. The body belongs to Anastasia, the magician’s assistant. This soft, woollen shape can catch bullets, be sawn in half, and receive flying knives without feeling pain.
Or perhaps it does. Like a doubting Thomas, Iriguchi pushes a microphone unceremoniously into its fraying wounds, to the sound of pre-recorded fleshy squelches. Deeper inside, voices and memories can be heard. This body’s reality is never fixed, and every anchor point Iriguchi establishes in the show’s fiction is thrown into question minutes later. Is this body Anastasia’s, or is it actually a woman named Mari? Perhaps the magician she is in love with, who shoots her in the heart, is not named Alessandro but Mamoru. Why is the audience member who volunteers to write their name on a fatal bullet also called Mamoru? Is Mari/Anastasia also actually the technician who speaks to the assistant through the intercom in her dressing room? Who is the person who looks back at the assistant in her mirror, looking almost exactly the same but older? Does the world explode in technicolour when the assistant has an orgasm, or does the colour drain away?
Iriguchi constructs this system of many concurrent possible worlds and identities with impressively minimal means — live speech versus lip-syncing, repetitions of material with slight variations, and a simple rotating backdrop are used to toggle between different theatrical realities. They do all this with the consistently sunny and slightly awkward performative affect of a children’s television presenter. The disarmingly sincere naïvity of Iriguchi’s onstage persona rubs up against the metatheatrical slyness and sexual frankness of his material. The result is utterly charming, surprising and funny, and by the end of this odd, beautiful hour, its many threads have been knitted together into a humbly moving, elegant meditation on the confusion of pain, bodies and identity in their many mysterious guises.
Painkillers is at Summerhall to 25 August
The Horse of Jenin – Pleasance Dome
By Holly O’Mahony
In the Palestinian city of Jenin, a sculpted horse stood as a symbol of freedom for 20 years. Sixteen feet tall, it was designed by German artist Thomas Kilpper, built with the help of local teenagers, and made from a patchwork of scrap metal – debris from homes and an ambulance destroyed by the IDF during the Second Intifada. The horse was eventually uprooted and confiscated by the IDF during a raid in 2023, following Hamas’s 7 October attack, but with its 20-year presence coinciding with actor and comedian Alaa Shehada growing up in the city, his by turns playful, self-deprecating and deeply moving solo show recalls memories largely made within eyeshot of the metal horse.
Shehada takes us through his life, from being born into a family of spirited, doting relatives in the early 1990s to discovering and developing his love of performing at The Freedom Theatre in Jenin Refugee Camp. He’s a vivid storyteller, conjuring a protective mother, his adoring best friend Ahmed, and a coy first crush among a cycle of different characters. Sometimes he wears masks to become them, though his characterisations alone are strong enough for us to sense the outstretched arms of a whole gaggle of aunts and uncles excited to cuddle him for the first time, or Ahmed’s timid footsteps, or his mother’s brief fury at discovering her son has been rehearsing for a Harold Pinter play rather than studying at the local university.
Shehada now lives in Amsterdam and this staging, directed by his Dutch collaborators Katrien van Beurden and Thomas van Ouwerkerk, is visually simple. But celebratory music, danced to by Shehada, fills the auditorium with a defiant passion so strong it’s momentarily possible to forget the persecution of his people.
But it’s impossible to tell a story about Palestinian life without addressing the looming presence of the Israeli occupation. Shehada paints a picture of IDF tanks rolling menacingly through the city looking to cause trouble, and of needless checkpoint cruelty. In one attempt to travel from Jenin to Ramallah, his bus is held up for so long he misses what would have been his first date, following a romance kindled through secret meetings, with kisses blown and notes shared between the legs of the sculpted horse.
The tone travels too: the opening scene is pure stand-up comedy, and there’s plenty of humour in the bulk of the narrative, but it’s abruptly halted when Ahmed becomes a target in a raid. It’s one of several points in the story where we, the audience, are given an active role. We become Shehada’s audience at The Freedom Theatre, and he has us use our phone lights to illuminate him when the IDF cut power supplies. In the performance I see, we all turn our phone lights off when Shehada announces Ahmed’s fate, plunging the room into a mourning darkness. We’re not told to do this, and I’d say it’s testament to Shehada’s ability to create such synergy within the room that we’re collectively present in this moment and know how best to mark it.
The Horse of Jenin is at Pleasance Dome to 25 August
Philosophy of the World – Summerhall
By Holly Williams
“This might be brilliant or might be shit”. So decreed one review of Tricky Second Album, the 2019 show by the experimental trio Nora, Dora and Kat aka In Bed With my Brother, they tell us at the start of their new show. It’s also the sort of statement that’s applied to Dot, Betty and Helen aka The Shaggs, a 1960s band of three sisters who couldn’t really play their instruments in time or in key, but whose wonky, off-kilter 1969 album Philosophy of the World was rediscovered and celebrated as accidentally brilliant outsider art by the likes of Frank Zappa and Kurt Cobain.
The story of The Shaggs is fascinating, and also fucked up: they never wanted to be a band, but were forced to rehearse and play live every week in their town hall in New Hampshire by their father, Austin Wiggin. A psychic told Austin that his daughters would form a world-famous rock band: a prophecy that of course came true, although not in his lifetime. The prophecy also motors the start of IBWMB’s show – which, they promise, will be narrative this time (knowing laugh from audience). It’ll have a three-act structure! They’ve even hired an actor, Nigel Barrett, to play their stage manager.
It’s easy to see why IBWMB were drawn to The Shaggs’ story. It’s gold mine of potential, for both fun and for capital-t Themes; the trio dig deep in it and also dick about in it making a riotously enjoyable show that’s rigorous in its mess. It’s also pretty critic proof, raising a collective eyebrow at the very act bestowing approval or disapproval, the inherent bullshit of what art gets deified and what gets dismissed. But oh well, whatever, nevermind…
Act 1: FATE
IBWMB are The Shaggs! They’s wearing Shaggs T-shirts and big ratty wigs and standing in front of a curtain like the one on the album. Projections announce that Act 1 is called FATE. Then projections tell The Shaggs what to do, controlling them, Austin Wiggin style. Practise. Perform. Do calisthenics – to pounding, relentless techno. The stage manager throws drums at them. The audience is given cans of cola, and – following projected instructions – throw them, recreating what actually went down at The Shaggs’ terrible gigs. Dot, Betty and Helen look wounded, baffled, and increasingly exhausted. (Nora, Dora, and Kat wear helmets to protect them).
Then Austin dies.
Act 2: FREE WILL
The Shaggs don’t know what to do with themselves, with all this freedom. The play splinters. Any pretence at ‘doing the story of The Shaggs’ – a story Tom Cruise allegedly owns the rights to – in a traditional biopic way is abandoned.
Although. Traditionally the second part of the three-act structure is Confrontation. And they certainly deliver that.
The stage manager becomes a stand-in for Austin Wiggin, or for controlling male power, or for the fucking patriarchy in general. Austin/the SM/Barrett keeps trying to make The Shaggs/IBWMB perform again and they keep resisting, by murdering him. They impale him on drum stands, pummel him, smack him with cymbals. He just keeps re-animating.
Will The Shaggs never be free?
Act 3: PHILOSOPHY
It’s act three, but IBWMB don’t offer your typical Resolution – I mean of course they don’t. Instead, they crack Philosophy of the World open even more with…. philosophy! A big dump of thoughts and connections. Nora finally assembles a drum kit and bangs the shit out of it, Kat scrawls on blackboards, and Dora delivers a furiously questioning monologue into a mic, about The Shaggs being rediscovered by “intellectual tastemaker” muso blokes. And how while making it, the show kept getting more out of control with all the other things that could have been in it, from Valerie Solanas shooting Andy Warhol to AI to that sunk submarine of millionaires. And how they couldn’t even think about the ethics of making a show about The Shaggs because then they couldn’t have made the show at all.
Except those ethical questions are unignorably embodied all through it. Is it right to reanimate The Shaggs – to tell their story, to control their narrative? To once more force The Shaggs to play on stage? “Are we just Tom Cruise?”
This final section, like the middle section, can test patience – the violence has a madcap gleeful horror to it but does goes on a bit, as does the ranting. IBWMB sometimes feel more interested in their own process than their offer to the audience – if I’m being honest, I’d probably rather see them really wrangle a few of the ideas nodded to in the third part, rather than just yelling about all of them. (I’m seeing quite a lot of shows that tell me what they have done or might have done or why they have done what they’ve done in their final moments.)
But I also really didn’t mind any of that, while actually watching Philosophy of the World. It’s a fun 10.45pm fringe show! It pulses with knowing humour, vibrates with interesting ideas, and IBWMB are just hugely entertaining performers. And so, to roundly declare my intellectual tastemaker wanker verdict: it’s definitely brilliant, not shit.
Philosophy of the World is at Summerhall to 25 August
Tom at the Farm – Pleasance at EICC
By Holly Williams
I feel like the rhythm of the fringe is a recognisable phenomenon – the mild restlessness after 60 minutes, the relentless consumption, all that snacky fun shortform work. For many years, it felt like only the International Festival asked for several hours from you, but increasingly the fringe is also platforming substantial international hits that take up space, and take their time.
Tom at the Farm is certainly one. Its dusty, muddy floor spreads wide across the huge EICC stage: this is Tom in widescreen, a cinematic production that paints beautiful pictures, while its story – dark as congealed blood – slowly spreads over two hours.
A Brazilian adaptation of Canadian playwright Michel Marc Bouchard’s Tom à la Ferme, which was made into a film in 2013, it arrives in Edinburgh with substantial acclaim having been performed all over the world. Translated and adapted by Armando Babaioff, who plays Tom, it weaves an enigmatic narrative about a slick city ad exec who, after his boyfriend dies in a traffic accident, travels to his boyfriend’s family’s remote dairy farm to attend his funeral. Tom is violently warned by Francis, the hulking, terrifying, homophobic brother who remained at the farm, that he should not let their blissfully ignorant mother know that her son was gay. If Tom tells her the truth, Francis will hang him up over a ditch of dead cows and leave him for the coyotes to tear apart.
The violent extremes we discover Francis has already gone to to keep his brother’s secret from coming out within their rural community proves gut-churning stuff, and Iano Salomão brings a coarse and truly menacing heaviness to Francis. By contrast, Babaioff plays Tom with an almost impish charisma. Opposites attract, or maybe it’s more apt to say that dark can draw and swallow light. Grief and desire, loathing and love, are not always easy to keep apart – and nor are Tom and Francis.
Soon, they tangle: working together, delivering cows together, leaving Tom overwhelmingly moved by this tangible, visceral miracle of nature. They wrestle together, dance together, always in a push-pull of attraction and repulsion, of dominance and submission. “You tell me when to stop,” Francis promises and it sounds like a threat. Their scenes are staged with electric tension and mesmerising beauty and danger, Tom apparently encouraging Francis to push him to extremes of pain: choked, beaten, strung up over that cow pit. Francis asks him to stay; somehow, Tom does.
The dust all over the floor turns to red-mud puddles as pails of water slosh and splash, the men cleaning themselves momentarily only to once more be drenched once more in filth. The Brazilian director Rodrigo Portella’s intensely moody, gloomy aesthetic (calling to mind the work of Yaël Farber) is gorgeously lit with ominous falls of sultry orange light by Tomás Ribas. This is a harsh work, but all its craft is finely chiselled.
But it can also be a hard watch. The first hour is treacly slow, elusive and ponderous in a way I found trying. Sometimes Tom narrates the story, but still addresses it at the characters he is, in fact, telling us about; an interesting technique but one that, with the already distancing layer of it being performed in Portuguese with surtitles, can be tricky to key into. Everything ratchets up in a second half, which goes to some darkly, comically manic places in the attempt to keep up the pretence that the dead son had a girlfriend – and to some heartbreaking places with his mother, as we see how needless all the secrecy and shame has been. I got more and more on side with the sustained brutality of the show… and then the very ending soured it.
(Spoiler herewith!)
For me, Tom’s final act of horrific vengeance against Francis undermined all the strange but potent tenderness, the desperately confused reaching, of the rest of the show. Suddenly, all that came before suddenly seemed re-cast as hollow, nihilistic – just a masculine power struggle, rather a fucked-up search for a way through the pain, no matter the cost.
Tom at the Farm is at Pleasance at EICC to 24 August
Brainsluts – Pleasance Dome
By Holly O’Mahony
Four strangers. Five Sundays. A bland hospital room. A mystery drug. The potential for friendship – more even, if they can just put down their phones. Charlie Hartill Finalist Dan Bishop’s new comedy could be the love child of Lucy Prebble’s The Effect and John Hughes’ beloved 80s teen film The Breakfast Club. Its characters have been forced together for a clinical drug trial. They’re initially standoffish – insisting they’re only in it for the money. But as they get talking guards are dropped, layers revealed, and beneath cool, stylised exteriors are a group of young adults in search of connection, purpose and value in a society where job titles and salaries are the main benchmarks of worth.
Bishop has assembled a fine cast to bring these personalities to life. Kathy Maniura’s Bathsheba is an otherworldly presence who sits threading beads or leading the group in a guided meditation. Bishop’s vainly self-conscious Mitch and Bethan Pugh’s lost Yaz initially avoid eye contact at all cost, but between them something unspoken builds. Rob Preston’s Duggan bumbles in late and is keen to shake up the rigidity of the whole experience – at one point suggesting they form a human pyramid. There to chivvy them along is Emmeline Downie’s gawkily upbeat Dr Eavis – a comedic highlight, who just like her guinea pigs, has inner longings.
They’re in a non-descript NHS office on a row of plastic chairs. Behind them is a poster with the familiar slogan ‘Catch it, Bin it, Kill it’, while in front of them are paper cups containing water and the pill they each must take at the beginning of each session. None of them have read the literature, so have effectively gone into the experiment blind.
The play takes its title from the nickname given by medical staff to the people who take part in trials for psychoactive drugs. While the story certainly captures the tense foreboding of waiting for a substance to kick in, and offers just the right amount of suspense when a trial member fails to show up one week, it’s really about what attracts people to lend their bodies to a medical trial, given the risks involved. With no WiFi to distract them, this motley crew offer up stories with similar themes of loneliness and the pressure to constantly be making enough money to keep a roof over their heads.
Backstories – including Mitch’s anti-work activism, Bathsheba’s nighttime wanderings while renting out her flat, and Duggan’s pursuit of friendship in unlikely places – all make sense, but could be further fleshed out. Similarly, spending more time exploring these characters’ struggles to scrape by in the gig economy could add a weighty sense of urgency without undermining the comedy.
Admittedly, that would be a lot to fit into its current 70-minute runtime. But were Bishop to write these kooky characters a second act, I’d gladly take my seat again to find out what became of them.
Brainsluts is at Pleasance Dome to 25 August
Red Like Fruit – Traverse Theatre
By Holly Williams
I spent much of Red Like Fruit clenched. The writing is taut – and so is Michelle Monteith’s body, on stage. And so was my body, watching.
Canadian writer Hannah Moscovitch’s play tells the story of Lauren, a journalist gripped by a sense of unease. She’s working on a he-says-she-says story about domestic violence, with a drunk “chaos agent” woman on one side and a seemingly reasonable, respectable politician on the other. Lauren also increasingly finds herself reliving memories of unpleasant sexual encounters of her own from when she was a teenager. Being groped by a tour guide in Prague. Her much older cousin coming into her bedroom.
Monteith, as Lauren, sits spot-lit on simple box stage and gazes out at the audience, but she does not tell the story – a man, Luke, narrates it for her (Lauren does this, Lauren feels that). Occasionally, when Lauren appears to get upset listening to her own story, Luke (David Patrick Flemming) stops ‘performing’ to check she’s ok. Occasionally, she interjects, questioning if the things she’s written were really that bad – or just a normal shitty part of being a teenager. Is this really trauma – or is it all just “experience”, she asks?
Red Like Fruit is very much a post-MeToo play. It seems to be set in 2017: when a male friend monologues over lunch about all his colleagues getting called out for sending dick pics etc, Lauren’s mouth widens. At first, the audience laughs, thinking it’s exaggerated boredom – big yawn – but it keeps widening into a silent scream. Red, and horrible.
In many ways, we already feel post the post-MeToo era, and although we’re less than a decade on this play does kind of feel Of A Time. But it also really got to me: I don’t think I’ve seen any play that digs so well into the soft, muddy soil of desperately wanting things to have not been that bad. The way victims don’t want to call themselves ‘victims’, or don’t feel justified in doing so. The clinging to the justification narrative, that this stuff is just normal, happens to everyone, being a teenager sucks, that’s life. And the internal shame chorus of but you were drunk but you didn’t say no but maybe you encouraged him.
It is Luke who offers a clear-sighted assurance that what happened to Lauren was wrong (he’s one of the good ones I guess!), and it is her that says but was it? Was it that bad? Am I even allowed to complain – to write this?
I’m glad Moscovitch wrote it. Because it turns out that of course OF COURSE we’re not really post-post-MeToo, of course everything that came up for women in that era is still swirling, still hasn’t settled. And it’s really valuable to hear stories that so compassionately investigate the grey areas MeToo seemed to shine a harsh spotlight on, but that we maybe still feel pretty uncertain and shadowy about.
All that said… the form didn’t always sit right for me. The supposedly ‘real’, break-out interactions between Lauren and Luke never do feel real – it’s not charged or live enough to act as an actual pulling apart of the play or unpacking of how the story is being told; if anything, it more draws attention to the artifice. And while it is an interesting choice having a man telling this story – especially as Flemming perfectly embodies exactly the kind of charming, always-believed male voice of reason that Lauren is both taken with and sceptical of in her reporting – I think Moscovitch could trust the audience to think for themselves about why she made that choice. The ending, where they explicitly explain that she thought she might finally believe her own story more if it came from the mouth of a man, is too spoon-fed a conclusion for this otherwise impressively nuanced story.
Red Like Fruit is at the Traverse to 24 August
Ohio – Assembly Roxy
By Holly Williams
“This is a death concert,” claim The Bengsons, an American folk duo, at the top of their show. Ohio begins with Abigail and Shaun Bengson panicking about how to explain death to their little son (becoming food for worms makes him cry; so does reincarnation – “a logistical nightmare”), and it ends with the death of Shaun’s father. But this play with songs has also got to be one of the most life-affirming shows on the fringe – an eclectic, moving, and often joyful meditation on faith, doubt, music, inheritance, and the wonder of our brief lives.
Shaun grew up shy and awkward and in love with god, in an intensely Christian community in Ohio, his father a pastor. Singing in the choir and then playing in bands was his way to find himself, his voice – and as he found himself, he also lost his faith. But all that music also damaged him, his inner ears: Shaun has inherited degenerative hearing loss from his father. Ohio is also a deaf concert: a segment helps the audience experience what speech now sounds like to Shuan – muddied and muffled by severe tinnitus. There’s also a quirky ode to the stereocilia inside the cochlear that enable us to hear sound. Which feels typical of the way Ohio, less a play and more a freely associative live essay, skips and trips between the light and the heavy, around its different themes and topics.
But it all weaves together beautifully, and the Bengsons themselves are irresistible performers. They’re extremely funny storytellers, Shaun a master of a deadpan self-deprecating quip, while you could probably power half of Scotland if you could hook Abigail up to the grid up, she’s so overflowing with energetic life force – dancing and cajoling us to join in and just beaming all over the stage. His instrument is an acoustic guitar; hers is her voice – their harmonies are rich and satisfying, but she also keens and yelps and whispers, looping the sounds to create the sonic world of the play.
So: they’re good company. They’re entirely winning. And you probably could have guessed that: the show arrives with much buzz, produced by hit-maker Francesca Moody, with a Young Vic transfer locked it. But Ohio gets its special shimmer by going further, by trying to connect with us on a deeper soul level. Throughout, I felt raised up by the uplifting sense that both are truly open and interested in the cosmic big shit of life – that they are reaching, after meaning and mystery, in this show and in their music, and sharing their findings with us. Whether they be about tiny hairs in the inner ear or about what the heck happens when we die.
Ohio is at Assembly Roxy to 24 August
Fuselage – Pleasance Courtyard
By Holly O’Mahony
Artists packaging up their personal trauma into a gruelling hour of ‘entertainment’ has become an archetype for Edinburgh Fringe solo shows. But for all the plays that seem like an unnecessary commodification of life’s wounds, there are terrible stories deserving of a stage, and among them is actor-writer Annie Lareau’s play Fuselage.
In 1988, Lareau was a drama student at Syracuse University, studying abroad in London. On 21 December, the flight she very nearly took home exploded over the Scottish town of Lockerbie, killing 35 of her classmates, including her best friend Theo. Fuselage is her reckoning with this. It’s a tale of survivor’s guilt as well as a homage to the lives lost and a mental picking through the wreckage of a politically-motivated terrorist attack that turned a group of young people with big dreams into collateral damage.
With the victims of mass terrorist attacks so often reduced to numbers or a single, still-image photo in media coverage, Lareau sets out to colour her friends back in. And from a mop of curly hair to a treasured earring, the shared meals to the friendship-solidifying adventures, she brings their vivacity into sharp focus. She’s joined on stage is Brenda Joyner, who plays Theo as well as other female classmates, and Peter Dylan O’Connor, playing all the male roles. And the three conjure the exuberance of this pack of performing arts students with ambitions to play Broadway and enough charisma to suggest they truly could have.
Of course, the friends and family of those on board Flight Pan Am 103 are not the only ones left scarred by the attack. The crash devastated the quiet town of Lockerbie itself, with residents taking on voluntary roles in the aftermath, helping turn the local ice rink into a makeshift morgue and recovering the strewn belongings and body parts of the victims. Voicing their experiences is Lockerbie volunteer Colin (O’Connor). Lareau met Colin on a trip to the crash site in 2019, and weaves his story with that of her classmates, and a third tangent acknowledging the escalating political tensions between the US and Libya that preceded the crash.
There’s a lot of jumping between timelines, not to mention characters, and it’s often thanks to designer Ahren Buhmann’s projections that we’re able to keep up. Sketches or photos of locations including London streets, a plane cabin and a gymnasium are overlain with photos of the real faces behind Lareau’s stories, including her classmates, their parents, and Lareau’s teenage daughter — with whom she made the trip to Scotland.
There’s a slight drop in momentum following her account of the explosion, though descriptions of her grief, anxiety, and attempts to punish herself through a string of abusive relationships still amount to painful twists of the knife. Lareau’s experiences of dismissive therapists – sceptical of her claims of having had recurring nightmares involving plane crashes leading up to the incident (a chilling, vaguely supernatural layer convincingly interlaced here) – and predatory press are fittingly infuriating.
Lareau has had almost 40 years to process what happened, yet there’s a rawness to her performance which suggests it’s an ongoing journey. Her memory play is a moving tribute.
Fuselage is at Pleasance Courtyard to 25 August
Consumed – Traverse Theatre
By Holly O’Mahony
This new play from previous Women’s Prize for Playwriting-winner Karis Kelly – one of two Paines Plough offerings at this year’s Fringe – is set in a house so crammed full of stuff it’s suffocating. On Lily Arnold’s naturalistic set, one cupboard houses a war-time’s supply of canned foods, while another is stuffed to bursting point with packaging boxes – just in case. It’s in need of a declutter. Similarly, Kelly’s play is creaking under the weight of different ideas. Its form is slippery, and while this is clearly intentional, it loses focus. Yet buried beneath some wacky diversions is a compelling story of complex Northern Irish identity and shifting approaches to mothering within one family.
Katie Posner’s production unfolds almost entirely at the kitchen table. Foul-mouthed matriarch Eileen (a hard-edged Julia Dearden) is poised to celebrate her 90th birthday. Her daughter Gilly (a disconcertingly apathetic Andrea Irvine) is preparing the lunch and ducking verbal blows from her scathing mother. Gilly’s daughter Jenny (convivial Caoimhe Farren) arrives from London with her own teenage daughter Muireann (a quintessentially Gen Z Muireann Ní Fhaogáin) in tow.
It takes a while to warm up, and initially treads overly familiar territory. Muireann is a gluten-free, vegan environmentalist, berating her elders for their use of plastic bags. But it finds its rhythm as resentments surface, roles regress and the four dissect their treatment of one another as well as their differing relationships with being Northern Irish. From Eileen’s staunch loyalism and anti-Catholic slurs, through to Muireann’s English accent but affinity with, or at least sympathy for, the Irish experience, their views speak for their generation’s opposing attitudes. And similarly within the home, Jenny is determined to be a listening ear, understanding of her daughter’s disordered eating and banishing of the body-shaming she grew up with.
It covers serious ground, exploring transgenerational trauma and epigenetics briefly but interestingly through the idea of one generation’s psychological wounds passing through the womb to the next. And there’s a biting humour to it, most of which is bestowed to Eileen, whose quips like “I could eat the arse off a baby through the bars of a cot” sit devilishly at odds with her papery appearance.
But the play grows restless in its family drama mould, and its efforts to break free and be more are where it loses balance. There’s a mysterious, low-stakes layer of intrigue to the fact the men are missing, and both Gilly and Jenny are reluctant to say where their husbands are. The reveal could have been more movingly delivered. Instead, it spirals into melodrama: first, through an awful discovery in a cupboard, then a surreal scene where Eileen and Muireann seem to depart entirely from their characters as they explore the land’s uncomfortable history. The latter is a worthy idea, that with some shaping could wrap up the story nicely. But I felt both moments undermined an otherwise decent family drama, whose well-shaped female characters come through strongest when fighting for their place at the table.
Consumed is at the Traverse to 24 August