Edinburgh 2013: The Events

Are there limits to human compassion? Are some acts so awful that they can never be fully understood, never mind, forgiven? These questions sit at the heart of David Greig’s new play for ATC and the Traverse.

The piece, which grew out of conversations which took place after Anders Breivik’s island massacre in Norway in 2011, was created in close collaboration with director Ramin Gray.

Claire – the only named character – is a vicar who has survived a mass shooting incident which has left many people in her community choir dead, only narrowly escaping being shot herself.  Claire is consumed by the need to know how such a thing could happen; she’s desperate to figure out why someone would commit such an act, why someone would take up a gun and kill and kill and kill again. This need to find an answer, to turn the events of that day into something she can process and rationalise, consumes her. Her behaviour becomes increasingly erratic, she’s not sleeping, and she’s taken to imposing unwelcome spiritual healing rituals on the surviving choir members.

The perpetrator, she discovers, had a fairly troubled childhood, but it wasn’t any more troubled than many people’s – is there a line, a level of damage, which would make his violence more understandable? Would it have made a difference of he were insane? If his rampage was the result of aberrant brain chemistry? Or are there some things which are beyond comprehension, monstrous, evil? Rudi Dharmalingum plays the unnamed perpetrator – as well as several other characters, including Claire’s councillor and her girlfriend – as a flat voiced, detached figure, neither a rage machine nor a frothing monster, but a man who barely seems to understand his own motivations. He talks about tribalism, Vikings, the need to protect his kind, the failure of multiculturalism, but he’s no zealot. At one point he goes on a berserker vision quest and ends up retching like a cat with a hair ball – Grieg doesn’t shy away from humour, in blurring the line between the appalling and the absurd.

The most striking aspect of the production – which plays out on a stage near-naked except for a few benches at the back, a tea urn on a table, a piano and a pile of blue plastic stacking chairs – is the presence of a local choir. In every city to which the production will tour, a different choir will participate. Their voices join together with Claire’s, forming a chorus, but their non-actor status – they read their lines from folders – means that they are somehow both physically present and absent at the same time. It’s an effective device, a potent reminder of those that have been silenced – who are no longer there with Claire – and of those that continue to sing, to live.

What’s most interesting about the production is the way that, with its fragmentary structure and slightly detached quality enhanced by the presence of the choir, it manages to explore a situation which is incredibly horrific and upsetting without being overtly horrific and upsetting itself, maintaining a sense of space around the subject which allows its audience to think, to breathe, without putting them through an emotional wringer. Greig and Gray could rip you apart if they chose to, of that I’m fairly sure, but they pull back, build in barriers, and it’s a stronger piece for this.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Edinburgh 2012: Mess

Anorexia is as much about comfort as it is about control - it can envelop like an eiderdown. This new show by Caroline Horton - winner of The Stage award for Best Solo Show in 2010 - doesn't tiptoe around the subject of eating disorders, nor is it overly worthy in tone. Drawing on her own personal experiences, Horton has created something that is moving and insightful but also full of humour and warmth.

The production tells the story of Josephine's illness through a meta-theatrical lens; a knowing awkwardness pervades, there are a lot of sidelong glances and. sometimes the wrong things are said, the line overstepped. The production can perhaps be justifiably accused of an excess of whimsy but this is part of the chosen language of the piece and it works in context.

Josephine's anorexia is represented by a cloud-like duvet and a pink parasol, a soothing place to which one can retreat. Hannah Boyde's Boris is in some ways the emotional core of the play, pleading with her friend to eat, to seek help, sharing in Josephine's small victories, her face beaming while Horton sits above the stage, a remote presence, her chin held aloft in quiet pride and defiance.

Reviewed for The Stage

Edinburgh 2012: Blink at the Traverse Theatre

Phil Porter’s Blink belongs to a niche but recognisable sub-genre: that of the bitter-sweet, self-consciously quirky, not-quite love story. Which means that while the play includes some ‘rom’ and a fair bit of ‘com’, there’s also consensual stalking, bereavement, a girl in a coma and a fox with the mange.

Both Jonah and Sophie have had sheltered childhoods – he grew up as part of a rural religious community, she grew up on the Isle of Man – both lost a parent to cancer and are still dealing with the impact of that loss, both are now living alone in London, specks in a swarming city.

Sophie in particular worries that she may actually be disappearing, that this growing fir-cone feeling inside of her may be spreading and that people will soon no longer be able to see her. So by means of a camera and video monitor she invites Jonah – who lives in the flat below – to watch her, and in doing so she makes herself visible once more. Jonah meanwhile is the type of young man who takes this unusual offering in his stride: in fact it fills a need in him; he’s content to observe her from a distance, to share small everyday moments at a degree of remove. But as he their ‘relationship’ grows more intense and he starts to shadow her in public, to encroach on her space, he is in danger of breaching their unspoken pact.

The strength of Porter’s writing lies in its use of detail, its attention to specifics and its use of tonal juxtaposition. Joe Murphy’s immensely likeable yet shaded production benefits from two highly complementary performances from Harry McEntire and Rosie Wyatt in roles that seem tailored to their individual strengths as performers. With his neatly parted, Ken doll hair and his ever-hopeful, eager expression, McEntire conveys an aching sense of being slightly out of step with other people. His obsessive tendencies are made to seem very much part of the fabric of his character and he manages to make the kind of behaviour that might be alarming in others feel, if not exactly endearing, than an understandable response to complex emotional terrain. Wyatt in many ways has the slightly harder job: her character’s idiosyncrasies are much subtler, but her considerable charm as a performer – as witnessed in Jack Thorne’s Bunny, another nabokov production – means that she is never outshone.

In the beginning they each occupy their separate space on the moss-green, autumnal stage, seated at orderly metal desks, looking out at the audience as they relate their twin stories rather than at each other. The opening passages of the play are in part reminiscent of Daniel Kitson’s It’s Only Right Now Until It’s Later, but Porter’s writing veers off in a slightly different direction as the piece develops and they edge closer together.

There are times when the kookiness of the whole thing feels a little too engineered, the characters’ collage of quirks a little too contrived, but this is redeemed by a downbeat, melancholy ending. These two people probably can’t fix one another – perhaps no one can – but in their own way they can offer each other solace, which in this messy, all too often hostile, world might just be enough.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Edinburgh 2012: Bullet Catch at the Traverse

The mythology of the bullet catch is considerable. It is said that twelve people have died while performing it. Though this is most often said by magicians who are about to perform the trick in order to increase the tension in the room.

The illusion involves a loaded gun being fired towards the magician’s mouth by a volunteer; the magician usually appears to stumble from the sheer force of it, before standing up to reveal the pre-marked bullet clenched between his teeth. (Penn and Teller do a double version complete with Kevlar vests and laser gun sights, two little red dots dancing over their open mouths).

The most famous victim of the bullet catch ‘curse’ was Chung Ling Soo, in actual fact an American called William Ellsworth Robins, who caught a bullet in the more conventional way – a fatal wound in the chest – after his gun malfunctioned and a live round was fired. One of the most famous proponents of the bullet catch on the other hand was Scottish magician, John Henry Anderson, and both these men have perhaps in part been an influence on playwright and performer Rob Drummond’s new show, a fusion of stage magic and storytelling.

With his mustard waistcoat and neat, clipped beard, looking not unlike a Hibernian Derren Brown, Drummond makes an amiable stage presence. He narrates the story of William Henderson, a Victorian magician who died while performing the catch, expiring on stage in front of a crowd of two thousand. The narrative hinges on whether Henderson was a victim of the curse or whether, despite a happy marriage and considerable professional success, he had he simply decided his life had no meaning and so engineered his own very public demise.

Drummond intersperses Henderson’s story with a magic act of his own, performing acts of mentalism and a spot of table levitation with the help of a volunteer before finishing the show with the illusion from which the show takes its title. The volunteer is cast in the role of the man who would eventually, inadvertently kill Henderson and Drummond takes care to put them at ease, building a relationship over the course of the hour in much the same way Brown did in his Russian roulette stunt: there is even some hugging.

Drummond makes some intriguing points about the illusion of free will in the world, but this, like the story of Henderson, remains rather frustratingly underdeveloped. Similarly the magic strand of the show is hampered by the need to incorporate the storytelling. Backstory and myth-building is all part of the illusionist’s art but here the balance is always a little off and with the exception of a stunt involving a shattered beer bottle there’s a curious and crucial lack of suspense throughout – and is there really anyone still flummoxed by the workings of the table levitation trick?

More interesting is the way Drummond engages with his volunteer and the improvisational element that this brings to the production. At the performance I saw the volunteer was an engaging presence herself and committed to the process, but a different pick could result in a very different show. An early bit of interaction goes slightly awry, through miscommunication rather than sabotage, and while it is affably handled by Drummond it illustrates just how easily a show such as this could capsize. Perhaps, for both audience and performer, it is here that the real suspense lies.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Edinburgh: My Romantic History at the Traverse

Romantic comedy is not the simplest of genres to pull off. The twin pits of cliché and sentimentality are all too easy to tumble into. D.C Jackson’s new play avoids both of these traps; his is a romantic comedy minus most of the romance, a self-styled 'non-rom-com.'

Tom and Amy work in the same anonymous office as one another. One night, following one too many after work drinks, they fall into bed together. There was no real attraction, no real spark - just too much wine. Their resulting relationship is awkward, unplanned and destined to end messily.

Neither of them likes the other much but for various reasons they end up stuck together, maintaining a façade of a relationship. Tom desperately tries to wriggle his way out of it, but she doesn’t seem to get the hint, even when she catches him having a sly wank in her bed.

Jackson’s protagonists are ordinary, flawed individuals whose motivations are questionable at best; their relationship is about as far away from star-crossed as you can get. Both are hung up on the ghosts of partners past, clinging to playground crushes and the intensity of that first, failed love even as they hurtle into their thirties.

The first half of the play is presented from Tom’s point of view but Jackson switches things at the midway point, depicting the same events from Amy’s perspective. This is a canny way of demonstrating the different ways men and women read certain situations and behaviour; it also eventually allows for a degree of emotional depth that had been previously lacking. Iain Robertson and Alison O’Donnell do a good job of making their characters rounded and sympathetic, despite some fairly objectionable behaviour on Tom’s part and the fact that, initially at least, Amy is only using him to prove a point to her colleague.

Lyndsey Turner’s production, created by Sheffield Theatres in collaboration with the Bush Theatre, never reaches the same heights of wit and invention as David Greig’s Midsummer, which played in the same space last year; it's occasionally crass in tone (one too many references to pink sick and wanking) and it does get repetitious well before the end, but it contains much to enjoy and manages to reflect a little on disappointment and loneliness before reaching its touching and downbeat conclusion.

Reviewed for musicOMH

Edinburgh: Teenage Riot at the Traverse

A teenage boy is explaining, in some detail and with illustrative finger gestures, his technique for getting a girl aroused. He speaks with an air of confidence and experience, cocky and self-assured, imparting his expertise. Yet as soon as he is finished, his assembled adolescent audience surround him, niggling, pinching and pummelling him, like pack animals turning on one of their own.

This scene forms part of the latest work from the experimental Flemish theatre company Ontroerend Goed. Their previous productions include the astonishing Smile Off Your Face and Internal, two pieces that interrogated ideas of intimacy and confession, that invited the audience to open themselves up and then toyed with what they found there.

The company, together with Kopergietery Youth Theatre, were also responsible for Once and for All We’re Going to Tell You Who We Are So Shut Up and Listen, a show with an all-teenage cast that was boisterous and chaotic, raucous playground stuff, but beneath the anarchic veneer, there was a strict sense of order, of repetition and control.

Director Alexander Devriendt intended Teenage Riot, the second collaboration with Kopergietery, to focus on the elements of adolescence that Once and for All was less concerned with, the anger, focused and unfocused, the cruelty, the burden of expectation, the frustration implicit in being not quite an adult, yet no longer a child.

A cube sits centre stage and it is within this cube that most of the action takes place. For much of time, the teenage performers stay inside the box while images are projected on the front. Sometimes these are live, at other times pre-recorded. Only occasionally do the performers emerge, tumbling out of side doors or clambering up on to the roof. Meanwhile, the video verges on the endoscopic, probing folds of skin, zooming in on eyes and groins, examining zits, but it’s also a barrier between the audience and performers. Intentionally perhaps, it makes it difficult to connect and engage with what the cast are saying, widening the gap between 'us' – parents, adults, audience members – and 'them.'

The box acts as a stand-in for the fortress that is the adolescent bedroom – it allows them greater freedom to be aggressive, explicit, silly, intimate. It is also, more symbolically, a blank, white space onto which images are projected, entirely fitting in the broader context of the production.

Teenage Riot is a more shapeless piece than its predecessor, or at least gives the appearance of being so – more episodic, fluctuating. Some of what it presents is surprisingly predictable – the pounding music and graffiti expletives, the teenagers explaining their body image worries, their frustrations expressed physically as well as verbally.

And while it may have been devised with considerable input from its young cast and entirely of their ideas, it is also narrower in its vision than Once and for All. For one thing, the use of adolescents who are confident enough to join a theatre group and comfortable with the idea of performance has an inevitable self-limiting effect. This is one group of voices, a lone fluttering flag, and the introverted, unpopular and socially awkward are notable by their absence.

While the repeated use of video is understandable, providing as it does a safe space for expression, a protective fence, it becomes gratingly anti-theatrical after a while, threatening to obliterate the few genuine moments of connection, moments in which the cast appear with shoulders slumping under adult expectation and disappointment, their faces turned briefly towards the future. But this only happens towards the end of the production and can’t quite combat the show’s overriding air of bleakness.

The final (filmed) moments are both hopeful and defiant, but they come too late in a piece that is likely to divide its audience – and not just by age, but also in terms of those who are wowed by its anti-theatre, mid-finger aloft stance and those who find it a bit forced and ridiculous.

Slightly modified version of a review for The Stage

Edinburgh: It's Always Right Now, Until It's Later at the Traverse

Daniel Kitson’s storytelling shows have become something of an Edinburgh fixture, a part of the fabric of the fringe. This year he’s taken on the 10am slot at the Traverse, but while his audience may begin bleary they are soon rapt – and stay that way.

It’s Always Right Now, Until It’s Later is a beautifully constructed piece, an exercise in connection. Kitson, thickly bearded and a bit out of breath, stands on a gleaming stage amid a constellation of light bulbs and begins to tell a story; no, strike that, two stories. Two lives.

Kitson introduces his audience to William Rivington and Caroline Carpenter, two people who’s lives will intersect briefly though they never really meet, for while this is a show that deals in matters of love, it is not a love story. It is a show about moments. The moments that make up a life, the moments of joy, the moments of tragedy, but just as importantly, all the moments on the spectrum in between, all the moments that tumble by unremarked upon.

It’s a lovingly detailed piece of writing. Skipping backwards and forwards in time, covering all points between birth and death, Kitson brings Caroline and William to life. The everyday moments are given as much attention as the pivotal – a new hair cut, a shared breakfast, a staring child on a bus. As each moment passes one light bulb fades and another comes to life and Kitson weaves his way through the field of stars.

Resisting the urge to act things out, to supply voices, actions, instead he contents himself with just telling the stories and this is more than enough to hold the audience’s attention. For ninety minutes he never fumbles, he shapes and sculpts these two people until they are near enough on stage with him. Within their stories are moments of love and loss; Caroline marries but William, after one failed relationship (and one spectacularly botched date) resigns himself to a life of fairly contented solitude. Some moments are piercing in their simplicity: Caroline, struggling in the rain with her new baby, scared and sodden, is reassured by a kind, elderly woman: “it’s normal.”

Within this rich narrative tapestry there are repetitions, phrases and situations that are returned to with added resonance. And while it’s often bittersweet, often deeply touching, it is also very funny in places, punctuated by some lovely comic moments. The writing is often gently poetic and Kitson’s calm, measured delivery is, in its way, compelling. A truly wonderful show.

Reviewed for musicOMH

Edinburgh: While You Lie at the Traverse

Sam Holcroft’s new play, the Traverse’s flagship production at this year’s Fringe, is a many-armed thing, stretching in every direction. During its 90 minute running time, it shifts between satire, romance, absurdism, and body horror, but it never stays in one place for long. Its reluctance to sit still is a drawback and the play never develops a clear voice, rather it stumbles forwards from scene to scene, unsteady, restless.

The plot has several threads that intersect. Ana is an attractive young woman from Eastern Europe who has a very poor image of her own body. She sees herself as ugly and overweight, and has become increasingly obsessed with her physical appearance, to the extent where she even finds sex with her boyfriend distressing.


Her self-loathing is such that she allows herself to become engaged in a degrading sexual relationship with her boss Chris. Meanwhile Chris’ heavily pregnant wife, Helen, is terrified that she is becoming physically unattractive to her husband and that she will lose him as a result.

Into this already tangled up scenario, Holcroft introduces an increasingly sinister surgeon figure who is apparently raising funds to help treat children with facial injuries in conflict zones. Eventually all the characters end up consulting him and he offers one universal solution: the knife, or the Botox needle at the very least.

The play is concerned with honesty, in relationships and in life in general, and what happens when people stop telling the little lies they use to reassure one another and start going after the things they really want. Holcroft is not short of ideas, the play has an abundance of them, but it’s muddled in its execution and contains several awkward lurches in tone. What begins fairly naturalistically, with Ana splitting up with her boyfriend, becomes increasingly surreal and heightened as the play progresses. This cumulates in a bizarre scene in which Helen’s baby is extracted from her belly in a rather violent manner.

Zinnie Harris’s production is provocative in places and clearly designed to trigger a reaction, be it shock, repulsion, or nervous laughter, from the audience. But, as with the writing, there’s a lack of clarity of intention. The exploration of what happens when people are totally honest with one another is soon left behind in favour of a similarly brief dalliance with evolutionary psychology and the complexities of body image but neither of these subjects is satisfyingly explored. The whole thing has an ADHD quality and there’s a frustrating lack of cohesiveness, frustrating particularly because Holcroft is clearly an imaginative and ambitious writer.

The cast do well with the jolts and tilts of the script, particularly Claire Lams as Ana, who manages to ground the piece whenever she’s on stage and Steven McNicoll is also engaging as the lecherous boss who so quickly gives in to his primal appetites.

Reviewed for musicOMH

Edinburgh: The Girl in the Yellow Dress at the Traverse

Craig Higginson’s previous play, the acclaimed Dream of the Dog, dealt elegantly and intelligently with the complex past and present of his native South Africa. His latest play, The Girl in the Yellow Dress, a co-production between Glasgow’ Citizens Theatre, Newcastle’s Live Theatre and South Africa’s Market Theatre, is narrower in focus, concentrating on the increasingly intense and co-dependent relationship between an attractive young English teacher and her student.

Celia, the teacher, is in her late twenties and is clearly more than comfortably off, living on her own in a stylish, minimalist Parisian apartment. Her student, Pierre, is an affable, young French Congolese man who is keen to improve his English.

From the start it is apparent that Pierre has not sought her out solely for tuition. His interest in her runs deeper, to the point where he admits to having shadowed her in the streets and once followed her all the way to the Sacre Coeur. This both unnerves and excites her. Celia’s world is a measured one; she is cautious and accustomed to being in control, but she is also curious and is attracted to the idea of who she wants Pierre to be, something exotic, something other.

Director Malcolm Purkey is successful in creating a tense, somewhat heightened atmosphere that helps coast over some of the play’s more implausible lurches in tone. Celia is both attracted to and wary of her student. Pierre is charming and charismatic but also single-minded in his desire. Both appear to have deep reservoirs of secrets. Celia has a difficult and damaging relationship with her brother and Pierre tells stories about his refugee past.

Higginson’s play uses this relationship to explore the potency of language: how it gives people the means to communicate and connect, to express themselves but also to expose themselves, to tell stories about who they are and who they might be. It also uses the couple’s interactions to reflect on how class and race can still create walls between people, though it does this less deftly.

Played out in five acts, the writing is, at least in the initial encounters between student and teacher, tight and charged but it goes off the boil considerably once their relationship becomes more overtly sexual. The whole set up feels somewhat forced from the start and in the end it’s down to the cast that keep things on track. Both performances are strong with Marianne Oldham, in particular, really shining as the beautifully brittle Celia. She moves seamlessly from a state of composure and control to one of utter exposure, crouching before him, raw and trembling on the floor. As Pierre Nat Ramabulana is engaging and charming yet there is something appealingly ambiguous about him; both convey a strong sense of inner contradiction, the potential that something within them might at any time snap.

Reviewed for musicOMH

The Stefan Golaszewski Plays at the Bush

The Stefan Golaszewski Plays, two bittersweet monologues about lost love, were first seen in Edinburgh. Stefan Golaszewski Speaks About a Girl He Once Loved premiered at the Pleasance in 2008 while Stefan Golaszewski is a Widower was performed at the Traverse earlier this summer. This is the first time they’ve been staged together, but they share similar themes and preoccupations and work well as a double bill.

Speaks About a Girl is a lovingly detailed account of a teenage brief encounter with a girl called Betty. The couple first meets over a packet of pork scratching in a pub, exchange texts, and go on one long, strange date over the course of which it becomes clear that this is the only night they will ever spend together.

Golaszewski really captures the tone of someone who is in theory an adult, a man, able to drive a car and buy a pint in a pub, but in reality anything but - his ideas about women and life culled mainly from Home and Away. The words fizz from him – his shock that a girl like Betty would even consider going out with him his palpable and his pain on discovering that his imagined future with her is not to be is comparably raw. The language is vivid and joyous and energetic, and the monologue is cleverly grounded in a particular time through the use of the comedy catchphrases of the day (mainly Fast Show derived).

The second play is far more ambitious in intention. The year is 2056 and a white-suited Golaszewski speaks from the perspective of an elderly man who has recently lost his wife. He talks about his marriage and the awe and excitement and oddness he felt on his wedding day. He describes the joy of fatherhood and the awful event that would tear an unmendable hole in his marriage. He speaks with bitterness about the indignity of aging, the diminishing, the growing frailty, the pain. But while the first play had vibrancy this one feels weighted by its own striving to be something more than it is.

The language - the verbal bursts and lexical dexterity - that were so appealing in the first play, feel jarring in this new context. Golaszewski over-salts the text; the words lead him rather than the other way round. His writing, which proved so effective when describing a young man, poised on the cusp of adulthood and fizzing with life, is less successful when conveying someone older, someone broken down. There are some wonderful lines, some lovely descriptive phrases, but the play feels as if it needs to be simpler, cleaner – instead it has to fight against its own verbal clutter. It’s not without poignancy and a degree of bitterness, a black thread of a disappointment and despair, but they emerge despite rather than because of the writing.

Golaszewski is an affable, energetic performer, who pitches his material well, drawing out the emotional notes, but only in the first play do all the elements come together in a truly satisfying way.

Reviewed for musicOMH

Edinburgh: Internal

Of all the shows under the Traverse banner, it was Ontroerend Goed’s Internal that provided the most brain-fuel. It’s been discussed at length elsewhere but I shall throw my coins into the hat anyway (so if you plan on seeing it but haven't yet, you may not want to read on).

Internal is a show for five audience members at a time that takes place round the corner from the Traverse at the Mecure Point Hotel. At the start the audience members enter a small room and stand in front of curtain. This is then lifted to reveal five performers who appear to assess the people in front of them and then shuffle around accordingly, selecting a particular member of the audience as their partner and taking their chosen ‘date’ to a little booth where drinks are offered and a conversation is had. Often this conversation is flirtatious in nature, occasionally it is confrontational, and sometimes the performer doesn’t speak at all. I have heard talk of underwear being removed at other performances, and of breasts being flashed, but the closest I got to anything like that was when my date laid a selection of naked photos of himself on the table and asked me which one I preferred. Oddly I found myself considering this, assessing the images and giving an honest answer. I found this a little jarring I’ll admit though not shocking; I then asked if my date was tired since this was the 9.30 performance and the last of the day, and it was interesting that he was happy to acknowledge the level of repetition involved in what he was doing and that there was no attempt to pretend this was something other than what it was - we even ended up briefly discussing the BAC.

In the end the questions I was left with were not ones of intimacy or boundaries or of emotional connection but questions about the production itself. How much of what went on was scripted? How much freedom do the performers give themselves within the scenarios? Is the performers’ selection of partner at the start based on anything particular or is the selection process itself illusory? How does the exchange work with dates of the same sex? Is there a pre-arranged cut-off point, a line that they won’t cross? Have they ever had any reactions from audience members they haven’t felt comfortable with?

I’ve heard people talk of the experience as extremely liberating while others have described finding it intrusive; there has even been talk of feeling “used.” Perhaps I didn’t give myself to it as much as I might, but the production, to me, was simply a thing I experienced, neither revelatory nor exploitative. I was honest but guarded in my answers as I suspect, though I can’t know for sure, were most of the people in my group. The post-date discussion (when performers and audience gather in a circle and talk about each other) was amiable and lacking in fireworks. Much more satisfying and informative was the pavement-based huddle between myself and my four co-Internalees after we had left the building. Thirty minutes earlier we had been smiling pleasantly but mutely at one another in the hotel reception/audience holding area and yet after a less than half an hour we were stood together on the street, laughing and chatting about what had just taken place, so clearly a transition of sorts had occurred, a few fences had fallen.

What did bother me however was that nearly everyone I spoke to who had also experienced Internal were somehow connected with the theatre industry, so while there was a definite buzz surrounding the show, I do wonder how long its real reach was and how many regular Fringe-goers actually got to be part of it.

Thinking about it in the days since what I have been reminded of most is the forced intimacy of retail. That might sound like a flippant comparison but it’s not, I’ve worked in plenty of shops over the years and the level of connection generated between performer and audience member was on par with that of customer and sales assistant. Some people really are very needy and the expectation to over-share, the inappropriate flirtations and the numerous subtle emotional negotiations involved in selling someone a necklace or a pair of shoes aren’t that dissimilar from what Internal required from and gave to its audience.

Edinburgh: Orphans

Helen and Danny live in a bubble of middle class comfort. They have stylish furniture, attractive clothes and a bottle of something crisp and white sits on the dining table as they embark on a celebratory dinner. But there are thick bars on their windows and the outside world they have struggled to keep at bay is about to seep in.

Their dinner is interrupted by the arrival of Helen’s brother, Liam, his T-shirt covered in another man’s blood.It’s the most satisfyingly startling way to open a play and grabs its audience from the outset.

Liam is understandably agitated and it takes a while for the couple to draw out his story. A lad has been attacked and left bleeding on the street, that’s what he tells them. He tended to him, hugged him – tried to help. Danny wants to call the police but Liam has a criminal record and Helen fears the consequences of getting involved. After all the boy was not someone they knew, not family, and he might even have been involved with a past assault on Danny, so why take the risk?

Dennis Kelly’s tense three-hander paints a bleak picture of a world where fear is the dominant force: fear of the law and the unknown, fear of a poorly defined ‘them’ who given the opportunity will damage and destroy everything the couple have so carefully built for themselves.

Kelly is also an expert at the drip-dripping of information to his audience. He constantly resets Liam’s story, revealing some shocking new piece of information, some new twist in the truth. He seems to enjoy writing himself into corners and then finding plausible ways to escape: Helen’s reasoning for not calling the police or the two men’s decision not to go outside and look for the injured boy are prime examples of this. Kelly slowly brings the audience round to seeing and understanding why the characters react as they do. It’s an incredibly controlled piece of writing in this respect. Perhaps too controlled as some of the vital elements in the telling of the story – like Liam and Helen’s past life of foster homes and the difference in class between Helen and Danny – feel like structural components, necessary to justify certain characters’ actions, rather than natural aspects of the narrative.

His dialogue is also an exercise in control and precision. Each stutter and hesitation matters and carries weight. The characters converse in a broken, halting yet rhythmic manner; sentences go unfinished, questions remain half-formed. Of the three cast members it is Joe Armstrong’s superficially genial yet utterly menacing Liam who best grasps and runs with the play’s particular patterns of speech. He seems perfectly at ease with this stop-start way of speaking whereas the language feels rather more stylised in the mouths of Claire-Louise Cordwell and Jonathan McGuinness. There is sometimes a degree of stiffness to their performance that is absent in Armstrong.

The plot can’t quite shoulder the load of the points Kelly wants to make about fear and the erosion of communities, the setting up of fences between ‘us’ and ‘them’ in a way that absolves people of responsibility to one another, but it is a gripping tale that keeps its single thread taut from start to finish. The use of Helen’s unborn child to give some extra emotional resonance to an already tense situation does feel rather excessively manipulative and strikes something of a sour note.

Reviewed for musicOMH

Edinburgh: If That's All There Is

A red stain blooms like a rose on Daniel’s shirtfront. He has just been shot. His wailing wife stands beside him, dressed in bridal white. It is their wedding day – and this, his shooting, is – probably - just a dream, the product of an anxious mind.

Reality and the imagined world walk hand in hand in this new piece by Inspector Sands, the company behind Hysteria. Inspired by the Peggy Lee song from which it takes its title, If That’s All There Is concerns an engaged couple, Daniel and Frances, who are full of fear and anxiety about their impending wedding day and, presumably, their lives together after they emerge from the church in a shower of confetti.

Worried about his fiancee’s behaviour, Daniel – who is the kind of man who makes graphs of his guests’ ages and romantic status in order to decide where to seat them at the reception – consults a psychiatrist on her behalf. To be fair Frances’ behaviour is a little odd. She has taken to sniffing just-chopped onions and forcing herself to cry; at work she devours hunks of white-iced wedding cake, cramming it into her mouth like a starved woman. She has momentary urges to fling small children into rivers or to rub her face into a passing man’s quivering belly fat. Both Daniel and Frances seem like they could use a little help, they are forever teetering on the edge and the smallest knock could send them over. Even the psychiatrist offers them no rock to cling to, for she seems as unsteady as them.

Consistently physically inventive and frequently very funny, the piece offers a neat commentary on the drive for perfection that characterises so many different aspects of society, one’s wedding day being the pinnacle of this: the sense that life will be somehow less satisfying, less fulfilling, just less if you don’t match the bridesmaids’ flowers to the table linen or have the right kind of cake or own some tasteful suede cushions from Heals on your sofa.

Lucinka Eisler and Ben Lewis are well matched as the increasingly flaky and fragile couple, seemingly feeding from one another’s neuroses, while Giulia Innocenti’s comic timing is excellent. Simply by the shedding of her shirt, she switches from a dismissive middle aged shrink to a taciturn work experience girl at the market research company where Frances works. As the latter she reads from an unending ‘lifestyle’ questionnaire, slicing up the human condition into quantifiable chunks ("on a scale of one to ten how do you feel about...")

While there’s a lot to enjoy and appreciate here there’s also the sense that, if you were to strip away the creative presentation and the visual energy of the piece, what’s left would struggle to stand on its own; there's a whole lot of layers of wrapping and ribbon for a gift you already have.

Reviewed for musicOMH.

Nocturne at the Almeida

On Friday evening I ran through a mist of fresh summer rain to the Almeida, currently in the midst of an eclectic summer festival, to see Adam Rapp’s Nocturne, an emotionally charged and beautifully written monologue about how one awful incident can devastate a family. The play begins with a blunt, enticing statement: “fifteen years ago I killed my sister” and goes on to describe a horrific accident and its repercussions. Following his sister’s death, as his parents crumble, both physically and mentally, the narrator retreats into himself, fleeing to New York to eke out a living in a book store, to lead a quiet non-life lost in words.

Adam Rapp’s play trusts language, it too puts its faith in the power of words and barely a sentence passes that doesn’t contain diverting image or a striking descriptive phrase. It’s at times a bit self-conscious in this respect, but for the most part it maintains a balance between linguistic richness and narrative momentum.

When Nocturne was first staged in the US, it featured not just the narrator but a cast of supporting characters, his mother and father and so forth, and it sounds as if it was more theatrical in that incarnation, more visually interesting than what we get in this stripped down restaging: essentially just one man and a chair (and a small thermos flask from which he occasionally drinks). There are brief breaks in the flow of words, where rough sketched images – road markings and birds in flight – flit across a black disc that hangs at the back of the stage, but these appear to have been inserted to give both performer and audience respite: the play remains just one man talking.

There were moments where I wondered if this needed to be in a theatre at all, if it wouldn’t play just as well on radio, and I occasionally shut my eyes and let it all wash over me. However to do this too often was to do the actor, Peter MacDonald, a disservice as he seemed totally at home with the material. His gestures, his pauses and expressions all felt organic. Though it ran for over an hour and a half without a break I was never bored, never restless, I sat rapt, attentive throughout. On the way home I dipped into the playtext as my bus curved through the streets, the brake lights ahead glowing red through the rain-streaked windows, and got so caught up in it that I almost missed my stop. It’s Edinburgh-bound, this production, heading for the Traverse and is well worth seeing.