2023

John Robins: Howl

27/08/23

Just the Tonic Nucleus (Atomic Room), Edinburgh

I’m not usually drawn to introspection. My preference is for comedy that looks outwards to what’s happening in the big wide world – but there are exceptions to every rule. I don’t like sci-fi but I love Woman on the Edge of Time. I don’t enjoy watching sport unless it’s tennis. I only like chocolate ice cream if it comes from Mary’s Milk Bar.

And I can get on board with introspection when it’s as well-crafted as Howl.

In this raw and achingly honest show, John Robins talks about a mental health crisis that precipitates a life-changing realisation: he’s an alcoholic. Having spent years in denial about his problematic relationship with booze, things finally come to a head when he… tries to buy a slotted spoon.

It’s hard to convey how funny Howl is because there’s nothing intrinsically amusing about a man falling apart. But Robins is a gifted comedian; he knows just how far to push his tragic narrative before undercutting the misery with a well-aimed quip. He’s emotionally intelligent, connecting with the audience by making observations we can all recognise – and then demonstrating how, for him, these relatable foibles can grow into something monstrous and uncontrollable. It’s the extremes that make us laugh – but it’s also the extremes that have driven him to the edge. Robins walks the tightrope well.

As a committed PCD, I thought I knew Johnny JR’s skillset but I hadn’t realised he could act (DI Robbyns notwithstanding). Here, he expertly physicalises the awkwardness of an encounter with his ex’s mum, where he’s desperately trying to make his obsessive thoughts sound rational. It evokes a weird sort of protectiveness: I want to look after him even as I erupt into laughter, and I suspect I’m not alone. It’s rare for someone to expose their vulnerability quite so openly and with so little self-pity.

I’m glad Robins is sober – and long may it last. To have made it through an entire Edinburgh run without a drink is a big achievement. This show is an aptly titled howl of pain, but it’s also strangely inspirational -and thus we end the Fringe on a high and hopeful note.

5 stars

Susan Singfield

Bacon

27/08/23

Summerhall (Cairns Lecture Theatre), Edinburgh

Mark (Corey Montague-Sholay) wants to tell us his story…

When we first meet him, he’s standing behind the counter of the coffee shop where he works and he’s transfixed, frozen in terror, because Darren (William Robinson) has just walked in and he’s staring at Mark. It’s been four years since the two of them last laid eyes on each other.

And with that we go back to their very first meeting when they’re just fifteen years old. Mark is the new kid at school: reserved, studious, endearing – yet somehow entirely friendless. And Darren, he’s the quintessential troubled teen: rebellious, irreverent, dangerous in that indefinable way. He’s troubled by his own burgeoning sexuality, and the toxic relationship he endures with his father.

It’s clear from the boys’ very first meeting that something has sparked between Mark and Darren, something that begins to smoulder and which will eventually ignite with tragic consequences.

Written by Sophie Swithenbank and directed by Matthew Illiffe, Bacon is a whip-smart, tightly-constructed duologue that pulls me into its tenacious grip and holds me spellbound as the story unfolds, cutting back and forth between the two boys’ home lives, their developing relationship, their triumphs and disasters. The lines of dialogue run together, the two characters starting and ending each other’s sentences.

Natalie Johnson’s simple but effective set is a huge see-saw, rising and falling as the power dynamic fluctuates. The two performances are extraordinarily powerful and the play’s conclusion is quite simply shattering.

It would be hard to imagine a play more perfectly suited to the Fringe. Once again, I find myself wishing I had seen this earlier so I could trumpet its brilliance.

5 stars

Philip Caveney

Pilot

26/08/23

Summerhall (Tech Cube), Edinburgh

Some time in the near future, an ex-detective attempts to piece together the fragments of an old manuscript, left behind by someone called Al.

The play, by Lekan Lawal, award-winning Artistic Director of Eclipse Theatre Company, is as fragmented as the manuscript at its centre. It’s ambitious, questioning the accepted way in which we structure our narratives and calling for a new method of storytelling. The title suggests that Lawal is aware that this piece does not provide the answer, only a suggestion for where we might start.

He is a genial host, introducing himself and his subject matter in a friendly, inclusive way. The room feels like a welcoming space, and I find myself warming to him, wanting to like his performance. We start off with a few audience volunteers engaging in a game of musical chairs (Philip comes third), the victor invited to share his experience of another time he felt like a winner.

And then we’re off, into a heady mix of music, live video projection, dance and spoken word. Lawal reads from Al’s manuscript, and from Chekhov; we touch on Icarus and Superman, Knight Rider and Dalston market, family weddings, race and feelings of failure. I enjoy all of it: it’s engaging and entertaining and each snippet makes sense while it’s in front of me. But I’m not sure what it all adds up to and can’t help feeling that, in the end, all the trappings serve to obfuscate rather than illuminate Al’s story.

Nonetheless, if you can’t experiment with something new at the Edinburgh Fringe, then I don’t know where you can, and I’m pretty sure that within Pilot there’s an idea that really does have wings.

3 stars

Susan Singfield

One Way Out

24/08/23

Underbelly Cowgate (Belly Button), Edinburgh

One Way Out by Theatre Peckham’s NO TABLE productions is a deserving winner of Underbelly’s Untapped award, “a game-changing investment in early and mid-career theatre companies wanting to bring their work to the world’s biggest arts festival”. Hats off to Underbelly: if we want the Fringe to be an inclusive event, one that celebrates vibrancy and creativity, then financial support like this is a must. And One Way Out is certainly worth backing.

Written and directed by Montel Douglas, this is the tale of four friends, poised on the brink of adulthood, awaiting their A level results and planning their futures. The performances are high-octane; the direction bold and energetic. The boys are nervous about leaving school, but excited too. Tunde (Marcus Omoro) is focused on getting to university, the first step towards his dream of “a job with a suit”. Salim (Adam Seridji) plans on expanding his family’s business; his Uncle has one shop, but Salim will have many. Meanwhile, Paul (Sam Pote) is struggling academically. He does like performing magic tricks though. Maybe he could do something with that? Of the four, Devonte (Shem Hamilton) is the least certain of what he wants. He’s too busy worrying about his mum, who is on dialysis. Tunde is concerned about him. “You’re clever,” he tells his friend. “You’ve got to think about yourself as well as your mum. You should at least apply to university.”

But Jamaican-born Devonte’s UCAS application is his undoing. He doesn’t have the relevant documentation, can’t prove his leave to remain in the UK. He’s been here since he was nine years old, but now he’s being sent away…

Inspired by Douglas’s own memories of a cousin who was given a deportation notice at nineteen, One Way Out is a deceptively clever piece. Beneath all the fun and banter, all four young men are preoccupied with the question of what will happen to them, what their futures will look like. They’re dizzy with possibility. Devonte’s misfortune sends shockwaves through the group – and through the audience. It seems impossible that he should be uprooted against his will, torn from everything he knows – his friends, his sick mother – punished, as if he is a criminal. It should be impossible. Tragically, it is not. The Windrush scandal shames Britain, and Devonte’s plight highlights the atrocity. “It’s seventy-five years since the Windrush arrived,” Devonte says. “And seventy-five years since the NHS was founded. That’s not a coincidence.”

I like that the piece is brave enough not to offer a solution. There isn’t one. Three of the boys move on, for better or worse, into their adult lives, but we don’t find out what happens to Devonte because he’s gone. His friends’ efforts to save him fail. The system is brutal and its consequences dire. The audience just has to hope that Devonte will find happiness, and that Jamaica treats him better than the UK ever did.

4.3 stars

Susan Singfield

Nassim

24/08/23

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh

Nassim (the play) is six years old, and has been performed by hundreds of acclaimed actors, including Whoopi Goldberg, David Greig and Cush Jumbo. The conceit is simple: each actor only performs the show once – without any rehearsal and having never seen the script. Nassim (Soleimanpour – the playwright) directs via a backstage camera and a loose-leaf script. Soleimanpour is Iranian but his plays have never been performed in Iran; Nassim is about his attempts to express himself creatively without being able to use his mother tongue. One by one, the actors speak for him, acting as a conduit for Soleimanpour’s words. It’s powerful and affecting.

Tonight’s actor is Greg McHugh, best known to us as the terrifying Teddy in BBC Scotland’s Guilt. I’m happy to report that he seems a lot cuddlier in person, approaching Soleimanpour’s script with warmth, respect and humour. He gamely follows all of the instructions, including the more out-there ones, such as holding a sugar lump in his teeth (it makes sense soon after) and accepting cherry tomatoes as punishment for errors in a language game.

But Nassim isn’t just a play: it’s a lesson in Farsi and a reaching out across divides. The tone is gentle and benevolent, provoking smiles rather than laughs – and then, finally, tears. It’s a way for Soleimanpour, a conscientious objector, to reclaim his voice, to subvert the Iranian government’s attempts to silence him. For years, he was unable to leave Iran, and so he sent his scripts out into the world without him; now, he lives in Germany, and travels with them, joining the paper-doll chain of performers onstage, forging those connections in person. He’s freer than he used to be, but it comes at a price. He’s left behind his home, his family. His mother. Mumun. He teaches us a phrase: Delam tang shod barat. I miss you.

Only the hardest of hearts could fail to melt.

4.5 stars

Susan Singfield

Lie Low

22/08/23

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh

Lie Low is a disquieting play, where nightmares are funny but the waking hours are bleak. It’s a year since Faye (Charlotte McCurry) was attacked, a year since a masked man broke into her house, hid inside her wardrobe and attacked her. She’s fine, she insists; she’s been coping. It’s just that she hasn’t been able to sleep for the last three weeks. If she could just sleep, then she’d be okay…

The disembodied, recorded voice of her doctor emphasises how little help Faye is getting. He suggests pills, meditation, no screens before bed, etc., but Faye has heard it all before. The doctor’s response might not align exactly to what a real doctor would say, but it’s an excellent representation of how it must feel when you’re not being heard, a cry for help met with distance and reserve.

But maybe the point is that nobody can help Faye. We talk glibly of wellness – “reach out, talk to someone, be kind to yourself” – but we can’t live laugh love our way to mental health. Faye is traumatised and she can’t do anything except paper over the cracks.

When Faye’s brother Naoise (Thomas Finnegan) phones her out of the blue, she seizes on the opportunity to try something out. He hasn’t spoken to her since the attack – he hasn’t known what to say, he tells her – but he can make amends now.

By donning a mask, getting into the wardrobe and re-enacting the attack…

Ciara Elizabeth Smyth’s script veers from humorous to horrific in the blink of an eye. The shift in tone is awkward, but that’s what makes it work, disorientating the audience, so that our laughter dies on our lips and makes us uncomfortable, as we recognise the deep-seated anguish behind Faye’s preposterous requests. Occasionally there is perhaps a little too much exposition: the piece works best when we are left to fill in the gaps for ourselves.

But when Naoise reveals the real reason for his call, things become even darker, and we find ourselves reeling, just like Faye, unsure of whose narrative to trust, uncertain what is real and what is not.

Directed by Oisín Kearney, Lie Low is a masterclass in precision and exactitude, every move carefully choreographed. The dancing is wonderfully jarring, at odds with Faye’s state of mind but reinforcing the metaphor of the duck mask: Faye’s brave face.

“I’m fine.”

4 stars

Susan Singfield

Where is Love

21/08/23

theSpace @ Surgeon’s Hall (Theatre 3), Edinburgh

Bloomin’ Buds is a Bradford-based theatre company, founded by Katie Mahon (who also produces this play), with the aim of offering “drama-based support for working class communities who are struggling to access opportunities and the arts due to facing class inequalities.”

This seems especially important at the moment, as the cost-of-living crisis means that people have even less money than usual to spend on ‘non-essentials’, and arts subjects continue to be squeezed in state schools (though still highly valued in private ones… go figure). But, as Dana Gioia says, “The purpose of arts education is not to produce more artists… It is to create complete human beings capable of leading successful and productive lives in a free society.”

Where is Love‘s protagonist, Shelly (Maeve Brannen), is certainly a complete human being, although she’s not convinced she’ll have a successful and productive life. She’s a fighter; she’s had to be. Abused by her dad and taken into care, Shelly has learned to look after herself. She’s sixteen when she first meets Will and he seems exciting. But several kids and a lot of bruises down the line, Shelly is at breaking point…

This play, written by Jennifer Johnson, is based on a real life story and, if you think you’ve heard it all before, therein lies the tragedy. Shelly’s experiences are anything but unusual: one in three women in the UK experiences domestic violence. Perhaps some elements of the piece could be expanded on – it’s not quite clear, for example, how long a time period is covered, nor how many children Shelly has – but it all adds up to a compelling and surprisingly uplifting tale. The cycle can be broken: Shelly can give her kids the stability she never had and, through her work, help others who’ve been let down by the system.

Brannen performs the monologue with absolute conviction, imbuing Shelly with an impish appeal, and I like the addition of the real Shelly’s recorded voice, her words used to provide extra background information or to move the story along.

Grace Wilkinson’s direction is assured and imaginative: rarely has a washing line been put to such a variety of uses. This one serves not only as a symbol of Shelly’s domestic load, but also as the hanging strap on a bus, a shower screen and lots more. The music (by Claire O’Connor) is noteworthy too, particularly Shelly’s plaintive refrain, “I’ll be your landmark…”

Bloomin’ Buds are doing an important job in opening up access to the arts and ensuring that working class voices are not excluded from the mix. In fact, the theatre company’s own backstory would make an interesting play in itself. Next time, maybe?

3.5 stars

Susan Singfield

Dom: the Play

17/08/23

Assembly Rooms (Ballroom), Edinburgh

The first thing to say about Dom: The Play is that it’s not what I’m expecting. Unsurprisingly, at the world’s largest arts festival, the vibe is mostly liberal and self-aware. Like its namesake, Dom: The Play is neither of these things.

This isn’t necessarily a problem – I’m all for challenging my own preconceptions – but the play just doesn’t really work for me. It’s not incisive or satirical; instead, it’s a seventy-five minute defence of Cummings, devoid of any critical analysis of his time in government. It’s easy to understand how people believed the rumours, cunningly circulated by playwright Lloyd Evans, that Cummings actually wrote the script. The closest the play comes to any kind of criticism is the acknowledgement that he didn’t actually manage to achieve what he set out to do.

Although the publicity material promises to reveal the truth about what really happened at Barnard Castle, it doesn’t: he’s never brought to task. In reality, Dom simply dismisses it in one line: “I didn’t break the law.” Surely, even if Cummings the character can’t see his own flaws, the play ought to expose them? Here he’s presented exactly as he seems to see himself: as a visionary hampered only by other people’s mediocrity.

Dom: The Play is an oddity in other ways too. It’s tonally uneven: the bad-wig pantomime buffoonery of Tim Hudson’s Boris sits uneasily alongside the long TED talk-style sections, where Cummings (a very convincing Chris Porter) is given space to expound on his ideas, while the sketches depicting Nicola Sturgeon, Michael Gove, civil servants and Guardian readers are very broad and rarely succeed in skewering their targets.

It’s all a bit icky. There’s something very misogynistic in the way an offstage Carrie Johnson is portrayed, as if she’s Eve or Lady Macbeth, responsible for her husband’s downfall, and there are some revoltingly classist jibes too, e.g. a line about Angela Rayner, which might well be a verbatim quote, but is presented here not as something awful that should never have been said, but as a funny joke, and one we’re invited to laugh at.

I leave disappointed. It feels as though this play is meant to rehabilitate Dom in the eyes of the public, but in truth it feels as smug and tone-deaf as the man himself. I’m angry all over again – about his boorishness and self-importance, and about the damage he wrought.

2.6 stars

Susan Singfield

Tituba

16/08/23

C Venues Aurora (Main House), Lauriston Street, Edinburgh

Written as a correction to Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, which relegates Tituba to the sidelines, Winsome Pinnock’s 2016 monologue reinstates her as a central figure, a key player in the Salem Witch Trials. Whereas Miller shows her practising witchcraft with the town’s white children, encouraging them to dance naked and sacrifice chickens, and then ignores her, Pinnock returns to the transcripts of the court cases, where Tituba was the first to confess, the first to name others and thus take her revenge on those who had enslaved her. Of course The Crucible is a wonderful play, but it’s a shame Miller silences Tituba as he does, because her story is really interesting, as well as important.

In this lyrical monologue, Pinnock explores Tituba’s backstory, as well as her motivation for denouncing the townspeople in Salem. I learn for the first time that she’s Caribbean, not African, and see how she has more reason than anyone else in the play to grasp this opportunity to seize power. Almost everyone in Salem is oppressed to some extent: the church exerts a strong grip, demanding adherence to its punitive codes. But there’s a clear hierarchy within this: first the white men, then the white women and then the white children. At the bottom of the pile are the Black women and children, the latter sold and sent away, the former worked to the bone and whipped on a whim. No wonder Tituba speaks out.

In this Africanus World production for C Venues, Faith Martin Abongo delivers an intense, compelling performance, accentuating the poetic rhythm of Pinnock’s words. This Tituba is riveting, illuminating; I learn a lot about her world. The section where she is beaten is hard to watch – as it should be – and it’s to Abongo’s credit that I can almost feel Samuel Parris’s cruel presence.

If there’s a criticism here, it’s to do with the staging. This is an intimate play, but the Main Hall is vast and cavernous and some of the words are hard to hear. I think the piece would work better if it were brought forward, closer to the audience, and if – instead of exiting between each scene, only to return moments later having made a simple costume change – Abongo were to remain onstage throughout.

All in all, this is a beautifully-crafted piece of writing, and Abongo does it justice.

3 stars

Susan Singfield

The Umbilical Brothers: The Distraction

15/08/23

Assembly Roxy, Edinburgh

Although this is (almost) our first experience of The Umbilical Brothers, they’ve been around for a long time, successfully plying their madcap blend of mime and soundscapes to appreciative audiences since the mid-90s.

We caught a glimpse of the sort of show they’re best known for at the Assembly Gala Launch, where David Collins performed a series of ever-more complex and surreal actions, accompanied by Shane Dundas’s weird and wonderful sound effects.

The Distraction is something else entirely though, a departure from their established style – although still just as silly and inventive. This show is all about the tech, specifically green screens and multiple cameras, and I’ve never seen anything quite like it.

You can almost hear them saying, “That’d be fun!” and then adding a series of ‘what-ifs’ until a show’s worth of shenanigans has been established.

Even while we’re waiting for the sell-out audience to file in, we get a sense of how cheery it’s going to be, as a series of groan-worthy jokes is displayed on the big screen that dominates the stage. It’s a canny move, setting the tone for the next hour.

There are some tech glitches in the first ten minutes, and it’s hard to tell if they’re real or part of the act. If the former, no matter – the delay is entertaining in itself. If, as I suspect, the latter is true, it’s a neat move, instilling a sense of jeopardy, and reminding the audience to be impressed by how much computer wizardry is being used.

Over the next sixty minutes, the duo mine the possibilities of live green-screen action, taking us from outer space to the depths of the ocean, via TV sports (played with babies – don’t ask), a guest appearance from Steve Jobs and more than one exploding head. There is audience participation – but not as you know it. And there are lots of dolls. If this all sounds like an amorphous mass of nonsense, then that’s exactly what it is – but brilliantly so.

I defy anyone to watch The Distraction without laughing all the way through.

4.5 stars

Susan Singfield