Andrew Cowie was not in Edinburgh as a reviewer for BTG, but here he reflects on a week's Festival theatre-going as an audience member.
Monday
I arrived in time to catch The Outrun, part of the Edinburgh International Festival at Church Hill Theatre. It’s a respectful adaptation by Stef Smith of Amy Liptrot’s memoir about her recovery from addiction on the Orkneys, tastefully staged by Vicky Featherstone. It’s all beautifully done, and Isis Hainsworth is terrific in the lead role, but it still comes over as a monologue rather than a play, and the acoustics in the Church Hill Theatre are not good.
Tuesday
L'Addition (Summerhall), produced by Forced Entertainment and directed by Tim Etchells, is a clever and inventive two-man clown show performed by regular performance partners Bertrand Lesca and Nasi Voutsas (Bert and Nasi). It is based on a short commedia waiter and customer lazzi routine with endless repetitions and variations, a bit like a comedy version of Steve Reich's music.
Drum (Underbelly) by Jacob Roberts-Mensah is a two-hander about national identity and patriotism explored through a real-life event in 1967 when the Ghanaian photographer James Barnor (Josh Roberts-Mensah) photographed another Ghanaian ex-pat, Mike Eghan (King Boateng), a BBC World Service broadcaster, in London for Drum magazine. It’s an interesting topic—Bamor accuses Eghan of betraying his heritage by moving to England and toning down his accent, while Eghan says he is promoting Ghana to the rest of the world—and the two actors are terrific in it.
FAMEHUNGRY (Summerhall): what does a performance artist do when TikTok has turned three billion people into online performance artists? If you are Louise Orwin, you make a performance art show and livestream it on TikTok (4:15PM every day at @louiseorwin (lololiii)). Apocalyptic and brilliant.
Ugly Sisters (Underbelly) is a furious, polemical piece by the transfeminine performance company, piss/CARNATION. It is a response to Germaine Greer's 1989 article in The Independent “On Why Sex-Change Is A Lie” and Greer is represented in the show and quoted directly from the article. Trans women initially welcomed the publication of The Female Eunuch in 1970, they assumed they had an ally in Greer and were horrified when the leading feminist thinker of the day came out as vehemently anti-trans, a position which she still maintains.
A Little Inquest Into What We Are All Doing Here (Zoo Southside): in 2022, Josie Dale-Jones made a sex education show for young people called The Family Sex Show. It was cancelled before it could be seen by anyone, and in this piece, she talks about the experience. I’m sure it’s good for her to talk through what was clearly a distressing time in her life, but I wasn’t convinced she managed to open it up sufficiently to the wider debate about art, education and censorship which the title hints at.
Wednesday
I'm a big fan of Sam Ward and his latest show, Nation (Summerhall), is a very Tim Crouch / Andy Smith, storytelling piece about migration and intolerance in which we, the audience, take the role of people in a small town who witness a crime.
In Instructions (Summerhall), an actor who has not rehearsed the show or seen a script stands on stage and follows instructions they are given on a screen or via headphones. On the day I saw it, the actor was Connor and he played the role of an actor who is auditioning for a film, Love In Paris. He is asked to play a variety of reactions into a camera, as he might at a real audition, and he is told he’s got the job but he is never sent a script and never called to set. The film opens and Connor is in it, but his performance has been generated by AI from the data captured at his ‘audition’ so the question is, to what extent is the final performance his?
The Mosinee Project (Underbelly) is a documentary drama about a real Communist invasion war game played out in 1950 in Mosinee, Wisconsin. This is smart, politically engaged work from a talented young company.
Megan Prescott's solo show Really Good Exposure (Underbelly) draws on her own experience to examine the sexualisation of young female actors. It's not directly autobiographical, but it is informed by her experience playing Katie Fitch in Skins and starting an OnlyFans account during the COVID pandemic. A provocative piece of theatre that has you rooting for her as she faces a life of abuse and exploitation with undimmed hope and optimism.
WEER (Traverse) is a solo clown show version of a 1990s romcom in which Natalie Palamides plays both romantic partners simultaneously. There are silly props and sound effects and audience participation; it starts at full speed and accelerates from there. Well worth seeing, if only to be astonished by the sheer stamina required to perform it.
Thursday
Part-drama, part-circus skills show, Show Pony (Summerhall) was devised with and directed by the performance artist Bryony Kimmings. In it, three forty-something, female circus performers explain the rules of circus (be young, look weightless and never get out of breath, unless you're a man in which case it's cool) and tell their life stories and hopes and fears for the future. A lovely, life-affirming show and a great start to the day in its 10:35AM slot.
Bellringers (Summerhall) is the first play to be written by Daisy Hall, in which two bellringers, Clement (Luke Rollason) and Aspinall (Paul Adeyefa), meet in a church bell tower and wait for a storm to arrive. There used to be a superstition that ringing church bells could dispel storms, but holding onto a wet rope in the tallest building for miles around in the middle of a thunderstorm is a high-risk strategy, so should they ring their bells or not? It’s well written and well acted but that 'two men waiting', absurdist drama set-up has been done a lot (see Waiting For Godot, Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead, The Dumb Waiter, etc.) and I’m not sure Hall does anything with it that hasn’t been done before.
This Is Not Romeo And Juliet (Zoo Southside) is a dance piece for four dancers and two musicians (violin and cello) choreographed by Palle Granhøj on the theme of love in times of war. A beautiful, meditative show.
Cyrano (Traverse) is a very buzzy hit at this year's fringe and with good reason: it's really good. Written by and starring the Australian actor Virginia Gay, it's a gender-swapped version of Edmond Rostand’s 1897 play Cyrano de Bergerac, so Cyrano is female and it has a happy ending because Gay thought a queer love story which ends in tragedy is the last thing we need right now. It's funny and touching and self-aware, and the cast of six are terrific. Catch it in Edinburgh if you can or hope it tours.
Friday
In Sawdust Symphony (Zoo Southside), three circus-trained performers dressed as workmen make things with wood. One uses power tools and he makes a chair and a spinning top, one uses a hammer and spends most of the show trying to hammer nails into the floor and one has a bucket of slime which doesn't stick anything to anything. It might be a metaphor for the human condition—we are born, we make things and then we die—but whatever it was, it was fantastic and I loved it.
A History Of Paper (Traverse) is a two-singers-and-a-piano romantic play with music which tells a love story based around the role paper plays in our lives, or used to play before the Internet and smartphones: love letters, postcards, plane tickets, that sort of thing. The two actors, Christopher Jordan-Marshall and Emma Mullen, are terrific, it is beautifully sung and they have a great chemistry between them, which makes the love story believable.
That's Not My Name (Zoo Southside) is a one-woman performance art piece by Sammy Trotman about her own experience of diagnosis and treatment for a mental disorder. The form of the show reflects its content, so at times it’s chaotic and at other times it is delivered with precision and accuracy. Sometimes, she abandons the show and leaves it to the director, Jake Rix, or she blames the technician for whatever has just gone wrong. It's deceptively clever in its construction and Trotman is a compelling and watchable performer.
Saturday
Monkeys Everywhere (Pleasance) is a clown show by Garry Starr (real name Damien Warren-Smith) for young people and their grown-ups in which monkeys are a metaphor for the distractions that stop you getting things done. The intricate set conceals a steady stream of sight gags, all superbly executed, but Starr's real gift as a performer is interacting with the audience when he is free to go off-piste and respond to that audience on that day. A very smart, very inventive and very entertaining show.
In Stuffed (Pleasance), Ugly Bucket Theatre makes political, socially engaged work and Stuffed is a full-on agitprop show about food banks. Three actors and an onstage sound engineer, all dressed in red emergency hazard suits, mix techno music with verbatim interviews to create a furious, in yer face call to arms. There is a trolley for food donations outside the theatre, and the cast hand out fliers on how you can help your local food bank when you get home. This is political activism, not entertainment, and it's very good indeed.
Son Of A Bitch (Summerhall), written and performed by Anna Morris, is a first-person monologue about an exasperated mother, Marnie, caught on camera swearing at her four-year-old son, Charlie, on a plane and the video goes viral. As the show progresses, we learn the context to Marnie’s outburst which, of course, the viral video clip doesn't give. It’s well written and well performed with the bare minimum of staging and well worth seeing.
Trygve (pronounced Trig-vee) Wakenshaw is an Australian mime artist and in Trygve Wakenshaw: Silly Little Things (Assembly Roxy), he performs a magic show, complete with card tricks, a rabbit in a hat, hypnotism and the swords through the box illusion, all done, brilliantly, in mime.