Recent Articles
Showing posts with label Edinburgh Fringe. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Edinburgh Fringe. Show all posts
Thursday, August 10, 2017
Thursday, August 10, 2017
- 0 Comments
A Girl and a Gun takes its name from the famous Godard quote: "All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun". It remains an accurate summation of much of a mainstream movie industry that's stuck telling the same two or three stories in slightly different permutations. Images of men with gritted teeth and distressed vests, a big gun in one hand and a simpering babe in the other, are so common that it's easy to take them for granted.
Louise Orwin is battling against that with this show, which deconstructs the language, visuals and themes of action cinema. It's as if a big box of DVDs has been poured into a cauldron and boiled down until only their whitened bones of the form are left: a collection of disconnected plot beats, snatches of macho dialogue and a big box of prop guns.
Orwin has used this detritus as the DNA of A Girl and a Gun, which has a fascinating gimmick. Each show stars Orwin and a different male performer who has absolutely no idea what the show will consist of. He simply has to follow directions on a video monitor that tells him what to say, how to behave and what to wear. It puts a juicy power imbalance dead centre, while Orwin's constructed narrative is all about steel-jawed gunslingers treating a submissive woman badly, what we actually see is a nervous man struggling to keep up with the script contrasted with a confident performer who knows exactly what's going to happen.
It leads to some funny moments: the male performer trying desperately to put on some cowboy chaps, or attempting to stylishly twirl his gun and accidentally snapping a piece off it. It also leads to some fantastic tension, both when the guy is told to verbally abuse and demean Orwin, and when he's ordered to slap her and spit in her face. The show excels in making these moments skin-crawlingly awkward, but with the twist that it's the man press-ganged into the role and the woman in charge.
The show also has an excellent grasp on the aesthetic of cinema. Filmed through two cameras, we always have something to mentally cut away to, or just to deliver a smouldering close up. The soundtrack is also on point, crammed fulla "familiar songs" very much in the mould of a Tarantino film.
But while A Girl and a Gun is a successful, clear and forceful intellectual experiment, it's not amazing theatre. By dint of its construction it's very stop start, with a decent chunk of the run time spent watching the actors sit around silently waiting for their orders to appear. There are moments where the enforced artificiality creates a weird, almost Lynchian, disconnect between performers and audience, but occasionally it just strays into the realms of 'a bit boring'.
This wasn't exactly helped, in the show I saw, by a technical glitch that meant that the actor's commands began looping, and the performance appeared to start again. I initially thought it was some experimental alienation-y Brechty kinda deal, but actually, it seemed to be a screw up that necessitated pausing and restarting the show.
I enjoyed A Girl and a Gun, but with some reservations. I can't reasonably dislike any show that paraphrases Alien's "Look at all my shit!" monologue from Spring Breakers (a film which, incidentally, deconstructs a lot of the same stuff this show does), but the intentional artificiality gets a bit tiring. If you're going, just bear in mind that Orwin's priorities lie with making a point much more than entertaining an audience.
A Girl and a Gun is at Summerhall, Edinburgh Aug 10-13, 15-20, 22-27. Tickets here.
This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.
Wednesday, August 9, 2017
Wednesday, August 9, 2017
- 0 Comments
Victim is a neat little one woman show about the uneasy relationship between prisoner and prison guard. Written by Martin Murphy and performed by Louise Beresford, the piece switches between two people that occupy the same environment but from very different perspectives.
We first meet Tracey, a confident and likeable woman who's been working as a prison guard for a couple of years. She's built up enough experience to be aware that prisoners can manipulate guards, but not quite enough to fully develop the mental plate mail that prevents them getting under her skin. Right now she's fascinated by new arrival Marcia, whose conviction for assisting in the murder of her baby has dominated headlines.
All too soon we meet a character on the other side of the bars. Prisoner A23174 Siobhan has murdered her ex-boyfriend and has set herself up as a 'fixer' to the other prisoners, able to provide drugs, mobile phones and favours... for a price. She's also the new cellmate of Marcia, recognising that she can use Tracey's interest in her for her own ends.
Whichever character is being portrayed is shown by a red and blue light behind the performer, though this is arguably unnecessary as Beresford does such a great job defining each character's body language and behaviour. She's an easy performer to like, drawing the audience into the story with liberal amounts of eye contact and occasionally physically interacting with them. I had a pleasure of her in Siobhan mode draping her arm around me as she explained that women are more natural predators than men.
Murphy's writing is also packed full of entertaining and well-observed incidental details. Tracey relates the tale of a man whose arse was as full of treasure as Aladdin's cave, the gormlessness of a prison art therapist or the illicit thrill of having a breakfast of canned gin and Quavers on a train.
But while Victim is engaging I don't think the two women's stories dovetail together as neatly as they should. There's some meaty drama late in the production after Tracey slips up and gives Siobhan some leverage over her, but the consequences don't quite live up to their ominous promise. Perhaps a more steady and thorough corruption of Tracey and more extreme consequences for the two women would have made the title Victim that much more ambiguous.
It leaves Victim is an entertaining but not crucial watch. It's in competition with a hell of a lot of one woman/man shows across the Fringe, the best of which almost literally knocked my socks off. This has above-average writing and Louise Beresford can rightly be proud of her performance, but it doesn't quite do enough to distinguish it from the competition.
Victim is at the Pleasance Attic Aug 10-15, 17-28. Tickets here.
On the night of 9th July 1988, the North Sea oil production platform Piper Alpha exploded. Owned and operated by Occidental Petroleum, Piper Alpha was the largest oil and gas platform in the area and provided employment for 228 workers. The explosion, a result of lax safety procedures, set off a chain reaction, engulfing the platform in flame and quickly tearing it to pieces. 167 men died as a result of the explosion with many of the 61 survivors having braved a 100ft drop from the helicopter platform into a burning sea.
But up until this morning, I didn't know any of that. I had some hazy knowledge that there was a really bad disaster on an oil rig sometime in the 1980s, but had no idea of the specifics. So, if nothing else, Tom Cooper's Part of the Picture has provided a useful education to me about a disaster that seems all the more relevant in the light of the Grenfell disaster.
Part of the Picture is docu-theatre, but broadly follows the story of Sue Jane Taylor (Charlaye Blair), a Scottish artist with a focus on workers and industry. She considers the sudden eruption of activity in the North Sea oilfields an important part of cultural history that must be chronicled. And so, after finally convincing a PR man, she ends up on Piper Alpha, sketchbook in hand.
Here she meets roustabout Jim (Ross McKinnon) and crane operator Robbie (Brian James O'Sullivan) and, after some initial scepticism from the all-male crew, she sets to work sketching them. A year later she's preparing for an art exhibition on industrial workers when she hears the awful news and realises that many of her subjects have perished in the disaster.
This is a precisely told and extremely touching story, the product of careful research and interviews with all manner of offshore oil and gas workers. Cooper approaches the men of the Piper Alpha with respect and sensitivity, communicating everything from the difficulty they have being separated from their families, the problems that arise in a testosterone-saturated working environment, their precarious employment status (shackled to global oil prices) and the simple day-to-day experience of what it's like to work on an isolated platform in the middle of the ocean.
Helping achieve this is a cleverly designed set that does a lot with very little. The backdrop is an extremely evocative combination of corrugated iron as the sea and a plastic sheet as the overcast sky, the horizon dotted with the silhouettes of the distant rigs. Showing a sea that's become metallic and processed is a neat visual shorthand for how the industry regards its environment. The minimal scenery first buttressed by evocative language: the rig described as a "huge metal sea monster" and that "big men are made tiny by the scale" and secondly by O'Sullivan's atmosphere folk music soundtrack
Within this environment, the three performers excel. Blair is great as the inquisitive, passionate artist who understands the necessity of understanding the industrial world and technology through art - visibly toughening up as she emulates the sturdiness of her subjects. But it's McKinnon and O'Sullivan who provide the heart and soul of the piece. O'Sullivan's Robbie is a lively presence, keeping his travelling disco on the road when he's not at sea. For my money it was McKinnon who most embodies the stoicism of the offshore worker, recounting his own death with a weary, tragic pragmatism.
My one criticism is that we never get to see any of Sue Jane Taylor's work in the piece. I'm guessing there was a rights issue preventing this, which is understandable enough. Still, when we spend so long watching her create her portraits it's a bit of an anticlimax to see them represented by blank picture frames in the finale.
The play concludes with the pointed message that while this industry takes place hundreds of miles from land where nobody is watching, we're all a part of it. From petrol to contact lenses, our cossetted lives are made possible by lonely men in dangerous jobs. Part of the Picture movingly memorialises those that lost their lives in Piper Alpha, as well as reminding us to be thankful for the danger their contemporary counterparts face every day.
Part of the Picture is at the Pleasance Dome, Edinburgh Aug 10-13, 15-28. Tickets here.
Luna is the woman you see illuminated for a microsecond in the strobe. It's 4am, you're in an amphetamine haze and there she is. Compared to the sweaty crowd around her she seems to move in slow motion, as at home on the dancefloor as a fish in the sea. Where the hell is she going when the party stops?
The Unmarried is a poetic monologue, interspersed with live renditions of 90s dance hits, that takes us through seven years of Luna's life. We meet her at fresher's week, she's ditched her hometown boyfriend is revelling in her newfound independence. It's like she's drawn a very short to do list: dance and fuck. But just as she embarks on the life she's dreamed of, enter Pete. Originally 'Fun Fuck Pete' after a night of amazing sex, he convinces her to go out for coffee. Unbeknownst to her, the handcuffs have just clicked shut.
And so the years spiral by. Wanting to preserve their independence they start trying to work out an open relationship but it doesn't work (it never does). Before Luna knows it the relationship has become long term: evolving from stranger to fuckbuddy to girlfriend to plain old partner. Luna and Pete even get on the property ladder, nurturing their flat like they would a child. Domesticity is quicksand and she's suddenly up to her neck.
Written and performed by Lauren Gauge, The Unmarried's Luna is electrifying company. She's forthright, honest and unapologetic, demanding happiness, sexual fulfilment and excitement like it's her birthright. Her eyes flash with intelligence, her body language is coiled and predatory, her joy infectious and exhilarating. She embodies freedom so fully that, as the play opens, you find it difficult to imagine anyone tying her down. But, like the proverbial frog not realising it's being slowly boiled to death, it's the slow trap that gets her.
Gauge displays a dab hand in conveying the slow burn tedium of routine sex, box sets and bourgeois non-conversation. As she puts it: "Love without lust is all bread, no crust", despairing as boring men drape themselves in stuff from the "Gap summer season sale". There's a palpable misery to scenes in which she watches Pete fixing the fence in the garden, wondering him when they turned into 80-year-olds. Her bondage is realised in the show's best visual moment - when she's cocooned in microphone cord like a fly in a spiderweb.
It takes a certain amount of skill to properly convey Luna's existential blues. After all, on paper, she's got a pretty great life - even I had to suppress a small pang of annoyance when she was complaining about the miseries of owning your own London flat.
The Unmarried would work perfectly well as a monologue, but it's elevated by the presence of Georgia Bliss and Haydn-Sky Bauzon. She sings and he beatboxes, the pair providing a crucial rhythmic backbone to the show. Together they manage to infuse songs that repetition has beaten the emotion from genuine with poignancy - even making Nelly's Hot in Herre bristle with weird wistful longing.
This is a show about liberation from drudgery, boredom, conformity and predictability. 'Settling' for a peaceful, untaxing life is giving up - if you're not willing to push yourself forward then what's the point in getting up in the morning? A lot of Fringe shows stray into the realm of the self-obsessed: gloopy confessionals that exist more to wank off the performer's ego than convey anything useful. The Unmarried blows past all of this, instructing its audience to recognise their desires and not settle for anything less.
The Unmarried is at the Underbelly Med Quad Aug 9-13, 15-20, 22-28. Tickets here.
What in god's holy name is this shit? Penthouse is a true theatrical rarity: awful in every conceivable way. It's the kind of play that's watched under a furrowed brow by an audience less concerned with enjoying the plot, appreciating the writing or working out the meaning behind it, and more with trying to work out how something this objectively terrible has gotten a plum spot in the middle of the Edinburgh Fringe.
Penthouse follows sadsack trader Ewen (Ed Brody). He's a bona fide mathematical genius, but has managed to lose £1.9 billion in investor capital through a series of bad trades. Unwilling to face the music, he's sequestered himself in the titular penthouse with a load of booze (well, four bottles of spirits..) a big bag of coke, prescription drugs, and an escort (Catherine Lamb). His plan is to have a cataclysmically debauched blowout and then end it all. He's soon joined by coke dealer Drew (Ryan Hutton) and fellow city trader Danny (Dario Coates), none of whom suspect that this is to be Ewen's last hurrah.
It's not a bad set up and I figured at worst we'd get some kind of plot in which the escort and Ewen form a bond and realise that they have more in common than they thought. Throw in a smattering of political commentary about the failures of capitalism, show some rich twats behaving badly for a leftie audience to disapprove of and bing bang boom you've got yourself a play!
What Penthouse actually consists of is collection of characters so thinly written its an exaggeration to call them 'sketches', a script that doesn't even try to say anything, crap performances (which range from a stoned looking lead to supporting characters desperately hamming it up) and a narrative has a beginning, but no middle or end. Something has obviously gone seriously wrong during production and they're desperately trying to cover it up, but it's the theatrical equivalent of delicately dabbing concealer on a oozing and bulbous zit. Nobody is fooled.
Perhaps behind the scenes problems also explain why the show just randomly... ends. Billed as an hour long, Penthouse actually concludes just over 30 minutes after it begins and pretty much in the middle of a scene. It's a deeply surreal moment, as if the remaining pages of the script were accidentally lost and no-one could be bothered to find them. When the lights went down I genuinely thought they were marking the transition to another act. It was only when the cast bowed (and proceeded to make a suspiciously swift exit) that I realised to my astonishment: this is the play. I even heard a bemused audience member ask their friend "Is that it?".
I've always thought 'the show must go on' is a noble sentiment. Anything and everything can go wrong during a production, but real pros grit their teeth and walk the boards even when they know they're in a stinker. But Penthouse is the exception to this rule - it really shouldn't go on. There comes a time when you've got to cut your losses and admit that you've fucked up. Ideally that would have been before you opened, because continuing to take people's money for a play as objectively bad as this (not to mention the flagrant false advertising regarding its length) is a plain and simple rip off.
Penthouse is at theSpace on Niddry Street, Edinburgh Aug 9-12, 14-26.
Penthouse is at theSpace on Niddry Street, Edinburgh Aug 9-12, 14-26.
There's an outside chance I'll be incinerated in nuclear fire by the time you read this. Who knows what'll happen if Trump manages to light the North Korean touchpaper and spark off World War III? And as a capital and dock, Edinburgh is a sure target. By tomorrow my life might be just another statistic in the Trump/Kim ForeverWar.
But at least I got to see Trumpageddon first, which gives audiences a weirdly accurate simulation of sharing oxygen with President of the United States, Donald J. Trump, less played and more spiritually inhabiting the body of Simon Jay. Over the space of an hour, we gawp at the most dangerously tumescent ego on the planet running rampant.
But at least I got to see Trumpageddon first, which gives audiences a weirdly accurate simulation of sharing oxygen with President of the United States, Donald J. Trump, less played and more spiritually inhabiting the body of Simon Jay. Over the space of an hour, we gawp at the most dangerously tumescent ego on the planet running rampant.
The show largely consists of one long improv session, Jay's Trump answering whatever question the audience wants to throw at him. At the performance I saw, he took a lot of personal abuse, along with weirder questions about whether he likes Harry Potter, or whether he has the right to continue living. He reacts to these extremely Trumpily, casually insulting the audience's accents, hometown, name and whether they hesitate when asking the question.
Interspersed with this are a couple of skits. Jay briefly plays Melania, gropes his Secret Service protection and, in an extremely memorable image, cavorts around the stage clutching an inflatable globe singing He's Got The Whole World Is In His Hands. Jay is a quick-witted improviser, never for a moment letting the tangerine mask slip (the closest he comes is deciding that picking on a 13-year-old girl isn't a good look).
But though the event is generally lighthearted and gently scatological, with Trump basically akin to a dirty old man (albeit a peculiarly orange one), the event is leavened with a layer of horror that this monster is actually leading the free world. In an interview with The Guardian last year Jay said he didn't think he would be able to play Trump if he won the 2016 election as it would be “too depressing to satirise”.
It's not too depressing, but boy does it come close. Over the last two years we've gone from laughing at the inherent ridiculousness of this bonehead, secretly enjoying watching him ran rampant over the not-so-crypto-fascists and Randian gargoyles of the Republican Party, to laughing at the absurd long shot a pussy-grabbin', obviously corrupt lunatic had over a woman who seemed eminently qualified for the job to laughing... well... because what else can you do but laugh when we're in straits as dire as these?
Simon Jay gives us one hell of a target to mock. He's clearly pored over Trump's rallies with a fine toothcomb, identifying every gesticulatory flourish, squint of the eyes, tightening of the lips and alpha-male looming over the microphone stand. Jay allows the spirit of Trump to inhabit his body and personality so fully I'm a little scared for the guy's sanity (he remains in character after the show, mingling with the crowd outside). It can't be good for anyone's mental health to spend this much time intertwined with Trump - the performative equivalent of staring directly into the sun for a couple of hours.
So much of Trumpageddon is audience participation that mileage may vary depending on who's in the audience. I can't be sure, but I suspect mine wasn't the most fertile of terms of improvisation: a lot of questioners seizing their moment in the spotlight to do their own generally unfunny 'bit'. Jay's Trump treats these people with the contempt they deserve, though this puts you in the awkward position of siding with him.
These are dark days. As I type this the real Trump is threatening that North Korean aggression “will be met with fire, fury and frankly power, the likes of which this world has never seen before." I can find gallows humour in much of the Trump presidency - who wouldn't giggle at 'Covfefe', the rise and fall of Anthony Scaramucci or the fabled piss tape (I want to believe...). But it is difficult to maintain a grin at the prospect of Trump incompetently bungling the world into nuclear war.
Trumpageddon is great fun. It's full of laughs and is a fine achievement in mimicry for Jay. But it's difficult to shake that shiver from your spine.
Trumpageddon is at the Gilded Balloon Teviot, Edinburgh Aug 10-15, 17-22, 24-28. Tickets here.
Tuesday, August 8, 2017
Tuesday, August 8, 2017
- 0 Comments
Jax is fast approaching her 21st birthday and going nowhere fast. Her Mum is off in Spain 'finding herself', she's failed to get a job after 16 interviews (admittedly she didn't turn up for 7 of them), her antidepressants are just giving her a bad stomach, her boyfriend has cheated on her, she's self-harming with a cigarette lighter and, to put a (shitty) cherry on top, her toaster is given up the ghost.
We meet her by degrees, first a shaky hand snaking out from under a duvet to silence a mobile phone, then a puff of joint smoke ominously emerging from under a duvet. Eventually she crawls out to greet an unhappy world, gazing out into the audience and delivering a blistering monologue about the hell of modern life.
Snowflake is the go-to right-wing put down to young people. Originating in Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club ("you are not special, you are not a beautiful and unique snowflake") it's been now used to describe 'Generation Snowflake' - young people with a combination of entitlement, mental fragility and a passion for social justice.
And so, Snowflake serves up a gallery of fucked up millennials. They're agoraphobic, riddled with anxiety, depressed beyond pills, naturally pessimistic, poverty-stricken, furious with baby-boomers and driven to extremes of vanity by social media. They're also pretty much alright people: kind, friendly, supportive of one another and empathetic to a fault.
Frankly it's a wonder that they're so nice. Unmoored in a chaotic world, buffeted by promises of climate apocalypse, getting into crazy debt to pay for a useless education, told they're too sensitive in the same breath as they're told they'll have to work into their seventies (that's if they can even find a job in an increasingly automated world). No wonder they're taking out their frustrations on their forearms.
Written and directed by Mark Thomson and produced by the Scottish Drama Training Network, Snowflake shows us a world caught in a paradox - loneliness shoulder to shoulder with unprecedented interconnectivity. Maintaining a frenetic pace throughout, Snowflake spins Jax through a whirlwind of scenes that rapidly cycle between locations and see her assaulted by personifications of procrastination, her broken toaster, her anti-depressants, the seductive cuddle of her cigarette lighter and the epitome of baby boomer greed and entitlement, President Donald Trump.
Peppered throughout the script are a tonne of well-observed moments. One of my favourites is when the characters take a selfie and upload it to Facebook, saying "That's the truth now". It's almost an incidental line, but it speaks volumes as to what 'truth' is in a world of constant online validation. If there's relationship and there's no-one LIKE it can it really be said to have happened? Similarly, there's a great exchange of dialogue where Jax and her friend Debs are watching a depressing nature documentary on Netflix - Debs runs down all the things she has to be concerned about in the world and cries out in despair "and now there's whales!"
It's an excellent piece of writing, and fortunately the performance quality is more than a match for it. Heather Horsman and Mirren Wilson are particularly wonderful as Jax's friends, and Harvey Reid achieves a lot with the smallish role of nervy Tesco employee Peter.
But the undisputed star of the show is Shyvonne Ahmmad's Jax. That opening monologue instantly proves she's an extraordinarily talented actor, spending the play hurling herself into the role to killer effect. She's the lynchpin at the core of all this: compelling, touching, charismatic and palpably 'realistic', even within the generally stylised tone.
She's so good that the play only really suffers when the focus shifts away from her. About midway through we get an extended Tinder sequence involving Mirren Wilsons' Debs and Michael Johnson's Tom. There's nothing wrong with the writing or performances, but it feels like an unnecessary digression from the central story.
But hey, it's a very small fly in the middle of a lot of very nice ointment. The only reason I saw Snowflake was that one of my comp reservations had gotten screwed up and I was left with two hours to kill. So I decided to go and see the first show that someone handed me a flyer for. I'm glad I did, Snowflake is one hell of an impressive show.
Snowflake is at Pleasance Above Aug 8-14, 16-21, 23-28. Tickets here.
Andrew Bovell's Speaking In Tongues is a strange bit of theatre. Performed in an inflatable dome at the rear of the Pleasance Courtyard, the audience sits in the centre on swivel chairs while the performance takes place around them. It's inverse in-the-round, or to give it a catchier name, doughnut staging (which is why I imagine the company is called Doughnut Productions). In a further twist, Speaking In Tongues is split into two parts that share chronology, characters and themes: The Lies and The Truths.
It's debatable whether one works without the other. I saw The Truths first, only realising as I entered that it was technically the second part of a bigger work. Afterwards, convinced that I needed to see the whole picture in order to properly review it, I got a ticket for The Lies.
Both plays are performed by Phil Aizlewood, Kate Austen, Ben Elder and Georgine Periam, who all play a series of married couples in strained relationships. The Lies opens with a synchronised four-way flirt, each on a mission to find a quick shag for the night. The consequences of those indiscretions fuel the rest of the show, their relationships disintegrating, reforming and collapsing in a series of emotional arguments.
The Truths has a slightly different tack. A woman has gone missing on a darkened country road. Prior to her disappearance, she left increasingly worried sounding answer phone messages asking her husband to pick them up. He missed them, having been spending the evening with his mistress. The Truths orbits her absence, flashing back to the missing woman's life as a therapist and showing us the roots of her anxiety and misery.
Speaking In Tongues is often a quite difficult to follow. Part of this is down to it being a story told over two halves and part is that each actor plays multiple roles that look and sound quite similar to each other. It's generally pretty fun when a play trusts its audience enough to play detective and assemble the narrative themselves - and you do get a pleasant buzz of achievement here when you connect the dots and realise you've already heard about some event via another character. But there are moments within this jumble of deceit, misunderstanding and coincidence where I simply couldn't keep a grip of the narrative thread.
The unusual staging doesn't exactly help. Doughnut Productions website states: "The infinite stage provides the actors with an unlimited performance area, being able to walk, run or even ride a bike through the audience." While I'm sure this is the case elsewhere, it definitely isn't inside the tent at Pleasance. Here the show felt seriously cramped, the actors pressed up against the walls and forced to awkwardly work around the audience as best they can. The swivel chair concept doesn't work either - the place is simply too small to rotate freely without awkwardly knocking knees with other audience members. You end up craning your neck to keep track of what's happening, which defeats the point of the whole concept.
It's a shame, as the show can boast some neat writing and performance moments. There's a great line in The Lies "it's good to be the one who leaves a marriage, having your friends and family hate you is really good for moving on" and, in the midst of some of the pitched arguments there's some nicely acidic ripostes. Performance-wise I seriously enjoyed Ben Elder's buttoned-down rich man in The Truths, both out of love with his wife and genuinely concerned that she's missing. There's a nice balance in the character that makes his interrogation by Phil Aizlewood's policeman appropriately tense.
Despite these speckles of interest, Speaking In Tongues doesn't quite work, at least in this staging. A lot of that is down to squeezing a few too many seats into a small venue, which restricts the performance space and makes us feel squeezed in together. But part of it is down a script whose components never quite gel into a satisfying whole. It's an interesting experiment, but not a successful one.
Speaking In Tongues: The Lies / The Truths is at the Green, The Pleasance Courtyard Aug 8-16, 19-28. Tickets for The Lies here and The Truths here.
Brutal Cessation has one absolutely amazing scene. In it an unnamed woman (Lydia Larson) describes her deepest fantasy to her partner (Alan Mahon). In graphic detail she explains how she wants to sit him at a table, smash his teeth out, sever his jaw, crack open his skull and mash his brain out of his nose with a hammer. Larson delivers this with a barely concealed psychotic glee, her eyes rolling around in her head like snooker balls as she loses herself in the sadistic fantasy.
Meanwhile, her bewildered boyfriend stares on, only pausing to ask why she thinks he would consent to this without protesting or even screaming in pain. When your girlfriend tells you she wants to make an omelette with your brains, you should probably hear big red alarm bells ringing in your ears. But he doesn't, passively sitting there, looking strangely blasé about the whole thing. Regardless, their spaghetti dinner is ruined.
It had me on the edge of my seat, not sure whether to laugh, puke, or some lumpy combination of the two. And, surely, when you have a character expound at great length on her bloodthirsty impulses, a dramatic end can't be far away, right?
Well apparently it can, because the rest of Brutal Cessation is a load of bollocks. The play proceeds to degenerate into a looping abstract mishmash in which the characters exchange roles in scenes we've previously seen and repeat in on themselves in fractal loops until the play ends with nothing resolved. It's not like I don't have the stomach for screwing with the mechanics of theatre and playwriting, but Brutal Cessation feels less like a productive narrative experiment and more like the deadline for turning in the script was up and the playwright had other projects to be getting on with.
It's a crushing waste of potential, egregiously so in the case of Lydia Larson. She was the bees knees in Skin A Cat at The Bunker last October and for at least part of Brutal Cessation looks set to equal or even surpass that role. Her unnamed character is positively magnetic, a performance covered in a thousand hairline cracks that conceals something... not right. When she's in full head-crackin' flow I couldn't take my eyes off her - silently thinking that this is the kind of acting they give awards to. But then *poof* whatever she had going on is squandered in the wanky deconstruction.
I know Milly Thomas is a talented playwright: I enjoyed Clickbait and I'm looking forward to seeing Dust on Wednesday. But Brutal Cessation is one outstanding ten minute scene surrounded by an awful lot of chaff. It proves that it's more painful to see a play flirt with excellence and piss it away than one that's completely beyond redemption.
Brutal Cessation is at the Assembly George Square Theatre Aug 8-13, 15-28. Tickets here.
Monday, August 7, 2017
Monday, August 7, 2017
- 0 Comments
Usually when I say a show has got its head shoved up its arse that's a bad thing. Not so with the excellent one woman show Gutted, which chronicles performer Liz Richardson's battle with ulcerative colitis - a condition that seems to involve randomly shitting blood all over the place. I say it's a battle, but it sounds like more of a drawn out war - Liz having spent her life bouncing in and out of hospital wards as her condition flares up, gets better, flares up again and so on.
Eventually she's exhausted all her options for treatment and things are only getting worse. Her doctor proposes radical surgery - removing her bowel and forming a 'pouch' from her small intestine. While this heals she'll have a stoma: her small intestine poking out of her belly and leaking her waste into an ileostomy bag. Theoretically, it's a temporary measure, but a proportion of these 'pouches' fail and there's a chance she could be ileostomy'd for life.
This condition, which apparently affects one in 420 people in the UK, isn't really in the public eye. This primarily because a) it's considered embarrassing and b) it involves a lot of poop. It also tends to affect young people, who are understandably a little squeamish about standing up and being the public face for an undignified bowel condition.
But, quite rightly, Liz Richardson wants to create a forum to publically discuss conditions like this. And so, Gutted presents her story in the most matter-of-fact way possible - explaining candidly what it's like to suffer from this disease, the hurdles she's cleared during treatment and the way people around her have reacted to it. Her delivery is cool, crisp and concise, taking on various personae who've assisted her along the way: leaky pensioners, paranoid teenage girls, bossy nurses and the impeccably named gastroenterologist Doctor Goodhands (and you'd hope so too, given where they're going).
You realise early on that Liz is incredibly difficult to embarrass. After all, she's spent countless hours with doctors probing around in her anus, her family and friends helping with her ileostomy bag, dealing with the anal seepage, and having to be catherised and cleaned by nurses. I imagine that after you've been through all that, standing in front of strangers and giving them a guided tour of your colonoscopy is easy street.
This all makes Gutted is a fantastically educational show. The explanation of how a colectomy and ileal pouch work was particularly fascinating. Liz using herself as anatomical mode, to demonstrate, drawing her colon and small intestine onto her belly and then erasing and redrawing it to show the results of the operation.
Her crystal clear explanation of the stoma and ileostomy bag was similarly neat, conveying the weird body horror of suddenly having a pulsing, oozing extra orifice on your body that kind of looks like a biological USB port. One of my favourite incidental details of the show was that the NHS literature strongly recommending that patients with stomas do not use them for sexual escapades - I would love to know the story behind that.
But behind all this is a genuinely heartwarming tale of how Liz' family and partner came together to support her through all this. Throughout the show audience members read dialogue from her partner Luke and her mother, each of them proving how important it is to have people you can rely on no matter what, and how love can shine through even in the most unpleasant or embarrassing of moments.
The cherry on top is Liz saying "I will never hear a bad word said about the NHS". It left me wondering what it might have cost her if she'd been born in the US, so I googled a bit and learned that she'd be on the hook for $40,000 just for the pouch surgery. Once you add in drug treatments, incidental incurred in hospital visits someone like Liz would be looking at a bill the hundreds of thousands of dollars - and as a further kick in the teeth "people living with inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD) commonly have problems obtaining affordable insurance". The NHS really is something to treasure and fight for.
Liz Richardson has metaphorically and literally seen a lot of shit in her life, but in a Jodorowskyian twist, she's turned that shit into gold. Gutted is a fantastic and important Fringe experience: bold, confident and entirely genuine.
Gutted is at the Pleasance Dome, Edinburgh Aug 8-13. Tickets here.
Hyperion has got the deck stacked against it. It's got an early timeslot, it's in a venue described as a hidden gem (i.e. no-one knows where it is) and its description doesn't exactly compel you to rush out and grab tickets. Would you get up early on a Monday morning to see a play that: "re-visits Hölderlin’s work written in an age of revolutions" and promises "a performance looking for its language"?
Well, you wouldn't be alone if you stayed away, as on Monday morning the audience for the show consisted solely of myself and another critic. And this is a damn shame, because there is a hell of a lot to like about Hyperion.
A solo performance by George Siena, the show autopsies Greece, working from the quotation that "being called a Greek feels like being bound with a dog collar". It consists of several interwoven narrative strands exploring different facets of what it means to be Greek. At the core is the story of a young conscript, 16744, ordered to observe on maritime activity from an isolated bunker. There's nothing going on and when the ship assigned to pick him up - the Hyperion - fails to arrive, he begins to go a little bit loopy.
Hyperion's scope ranges from the Socratic dialogues and Plato's Republic right the way to the debt and refugee crises that ensure that Greece is never far from the front pages. But it's less concerned with lecturing its audience and more on divining a kind of poetry from this vast scope of history. Lords Byron and Elgin show up on a faux talk show and, late in the piece, Siena portrays an ethereal 'Mamma Patria', observing the Greek people from an expanded viewpoint in time, observing them 'grow and then shrink until their light goes out'. The show goes on to credit Greece with giving humanity the tools with which to know our own minds, language and science, concluding "you've done enough for your kind."
Patriotism isn't especially fashionable - especially not at a generally anti-authoritarian Fringe festival - which makes it a rather novel bit of theatre. It's not a wholly uncritical perspective - you only have to look at the Greek flags trampled underfoot by the end - but there's a palpable sense of indignation at modern Greece status as a global pariah. For example, Hyperion throws its arms open to refugees fleeing torment and bloodshed, only to find them using Greece as a mere launch pad for a trip further into Europe. The conclusion to all this is (what I think was) an image of a dead rat, with its live young still frantically suckling at the teat. Relate that to modern Greece as you see fit.
There's a lot to communicate here, but Siena is one hell of an engaging performer, possessed of a laser beam gaze and an enjoyably elastic body language. As he cavorts around the stage, stuffing himself into bags, interacting with the audience and doing very fun mimes to looped audio, you find yourself wondering if Hyperion might be some criminally overlooked gem unjustly tucked away at an audience unfriendly time.
But there are a couple of flies in the ointment. Prime among them is that the scattershot approach: one minute a military slapstick, the next a talk show, the next surreal poetry and so on, gets a little wearying. There's a lot to process here, and you don't have a basic knowledge of Greek history and current events you're liable to be left in the cold. Perhaps if the show was streamlined a bit it'd be a more effective weapon.
As it stands it's a fine example of a talented physical artist with a point to make. Hyperion is entertaining, funny and dynamic and deserves an audience of some kind. If you're Greek and at the Fringe it's a no-brainer, but most should find a lot to enjoy in Siena's energetic and committed performance.
Hyperion is at the Greenside, Edinburgh Aug 7-12, 14-19, 21-26. Tickets here.
Patriotism isn't especially fashionable - especially not at a generally anti-authoritarian Fringe festival - which makes it a rather novel bit of theatre. It's not a wholly uncritical perspective - you only have to look at the Greek flags trampled underfoot by the end - but there's a palpable sense of indignation at modern Greece status as a global pariah. For example, Hyperion throws its arms open to refugees fleeing torment and bloodshed, only to find them using Greece as a mere launch pad for a trip further into Europe. The conclusion to all this is (what I think was) an image of a dead rat, with its live young still frantically suckling at the teat. Relate that to modern Greece as you see fit.
There's a lot to communicate here, but Siena is one hell of an engaging performer, possessed of a laser beam gaze and an enjoyably elastic body language. As he cavorts around the stage, stuffing himself into bags, interacting with the audience and doing very fun mimes to looped audio, you find yourself wondering if Hyperion might be some criminally overlooked gem unjustly tucked away at an audience unfriendly time.
But there are a couple of flies in the ointment. Prime among them is that the scattershot approach: one minute a military slapstick, the next a talk show, the next surreal poetry and so on, gets a little wearying. There's a lot to process here, and you don't have a basic knowledge of Greek history and current events you're liable to be left in the cold. Perhaps if the show was streamlined a bit it'd be a more effective weapon.
As it stands it's a fine example of a talented physical artist with a point to make. Hyperion is entertaining, funny and dynamic and deserves an audience of some kind. If you're Greek and at the Fringe it's a no-brainer, but most should find a lot to enjoy in Siena's energetic and committed performance.
Hyperion is at the Greenside, Edinburgh Aug 7-12, 14-19, 21-26. Tickets here.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
