Edinburgh 2014: The Duck Pond, Bedlam

Some of my favourite shows of this year’s Fringe have involved people screaming. Men bellowing and raging in pain, woman shrieking in atonal, primal synchrony. But while screaming is sometimes a necessary response to the world, it’s not unwelcome to see a show whose defining characteristic is loveliness, which sets out to leave you beaming and – literally – feeds its audience cake.

withWings’ The Duck Pond is a candyfloss-flecked reworking of Tchaivosky‘s Swan Lake sans swans. Prince Siegfried has just turned 21 and is under pressure to marry. In truth he’s not much interested in girls but nonetheless his mother presses ahead with finding him a bride. As part of his birthday celebrations he visits a travelling fair, and as the moon rises he hooks himself a lucky duck – and ends up falling in love.

Odin, as is the way of such things, has been placed under a spell by the owner of the fair, a malevolent magician called Rothbart. By day he is a yellow plastic duck bobbing among his brethren but under the light of a balloon moon, he becomes human.

The production is all feathers and honey and loveliness. It is sweet and charming and packed full of little inventive touches designed to make you smile. There is music and dancing and the inevitable cascade of glitter, a dinky carousel, a coke bottle orchestra, and, as it’s a birthday, there are presents for everyone. The high point is a wonderfully playful and charming musical montage sequence in which the young Prince falls head over pointe for his enchanted duckling.

James Bennet and Tom Coxon both giving appealing performances as the Prince and his paramour, the musical number are skilfully performed and emotionally charged, sweeping over the audience, carrying you along on a wave of sugar water. Some of the ballet is a little wibbly and the shift towards the play’s tragic conclusion is a bit abrupt, but the ending is proper lump-in-the-throat stuff and there’s something hugely endearing and loveable about the whole exercise.

It’s a very youthful production, but in an energising way. You can clearly see the ripples of influences at work here, you can tell which companies these guys admire, it’s a little bit Kneehigh, a little bit Antler, a little bit Little Bulb, but there’s also plenty of invention and their attention to detail is admirable, even the programmes have been designed to look like party invites, a lovely touch. The whole thing has charm in abundance (though if you’re allergic to bobble-hatted whimsy this might not be one for you) but what’s lacking is a clear sense of identity as a company and they’re clearly more at ease with the visual than the verbal. They just need to pin that down, to find a voice that’s theirs alone.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Edinburgh 2012: Grit

Cardboard citizens wave cardboard placards of protest on the streets of a cardboard city. A series of ominous cardboard tanks appear and a rebellion is turned to dust. This is one of several memorable images in Tortoise in a Nutshell’s potent puppet theatre show, a series of vignettes about children and armed conflict.

A framing device shows a young woman – a flame-haired puppet in a flannel shirt – sorting through the possessions of her war photographer father. This leads in to a series of snapshots of conflict zones, from Sarajevo to Syria: black and white sketches, like cells from a graphic novel, twisting across the stage, captured and fixed into place. There’s more than a touch of Ari Folman’s animated documentary Waltz with Bashir to this imagery, the interplay between the stark black lines and the things they depict.

A sequence in which a tiny puppet child plays games in a sandpit, laughing as he makes sand castles with a miniature bucket while all the time the sound of gunfire rings out in the background, is the closest it gets to overt sentiment. Elsewhere the piece is more intricate and original in the stories it tells. A one-time child soldier for the Khmer Rouge is shown making amends for his past by digging up land-mines that he once laid and founding an orphanage. This is all depicted through shadow puppetry, the images appearing on a series of screens: a hand, a boot, a mine concealed in the long grass.

For the most part the three performers are silent and what dialogue we hear is pre-recorded. The combination of these voices and the score is incredibly effective, adding to the evocative nature of the piece. The war photographer speaks to his daughter from various far off places, wishing he could be home with her but feeling the need to stay put and to record the things he sees.

Not everything works: a sequence in which two of the performers play child-like war games, wielding invisible weapons and spurting invisible blood, is perhaps too obvious a response to the subject matter, especially given the subtlety of some of the other material. As with many devised pieces of this kind, there are issues with structural clarity, but in terms of technical accomplishment and imaginative power, it’s an impressive achievement

Reviewed for Exeunt

Edinburgh: Another Someone at the Bedlam

My first inclination, when I discover that a show claims to be “about happiness”, is to bolt, to flee. But I’m ever so glad I didn’t give into the urge because, tangled and messy as it is, this is one of the more uplifting and exciting productions on this year’s Fringe.

The central story is not unfamiliar. Holly is a recent law graduate with ambitions to be a barrister. When she moves into a new flat she is initially finds her neighbours, Alicia and Jim, somewhat off-putting but becomes friends - of sorts - with them anyway.


Alicia convinces Jim and Holly to go on a date and they click, soon becoming a couple. But while Holly equates happiness with ambition and success, Jim is content where he is, working as a waiter, seeing where life takes him. This is too big a hurdle for Holly and they split.

Music and dance ripple through the entire production. It’s an intensely physical piece. The performers tumble and roll and wrestle, wrapped in one another, supporting each other’s weight and then springing apart. The music is supplied live by musician Becky Wilkie, who also acts as an occasional narrator and supplier of wry asides about the characters. As Holly’s emotional life is opened up to the audience the piece becomes more dreamlike and opaque, with her caught in a forest of coloured silk dressed in a faded pink princess dress. It’s an evocative sequence that captures the wonder of childhood without being heavy-handed.

Another Someone is the work of Leeds-based dance theatre company RashDash. They made their Edinburgh debut at last year’s Fringe with a piece called The Honeymoon, a show that while full of energy was unable to sustain itself; this new work, whilst maintaining a clear sense of their identity as a company, shows a marked improvement in terms of structure and story-telling.

It’s still a flawed work. They never quite succeed in making all the elements knit together seamlessly – it’s still possible to see the joins – and the more conventional scenes between Holly, Jim and Alicia suffer from a lack of originality when placed besides the lively dance sequences. Yet this scene-setting is necessary and they grasp that. This piece connects with the audience in a way The Honeymoon never quite managed.

The trio of actors, Abbi Greenland, Helen Goalen and Marc Graham, are convincing as their characters yet also adept at the more physical scenes, and though it sometimes stumbles, the whole piece ends on a percussive high. It also shows clear evidence of a company evolving in skill and confidence in a way that is immensely pleasing to see.

Reviewed for musicOMH

Edinburgh: Precious Little Talent

Ella Hickson’s first play, Eight, consisted - as the name suggests - of eight monologues, only four of which were performed on any given night, with the audience selecting the pieces they wanted to see.

The monologues were loosely themed around the shifting economic situation and how young people, accustomed to a world rich in choice and possibility, were being forced to adjust. It contained moments of inspired writing but the format, the lack of interaction between the pieces, ended up a limiting one.


In her second play, Precious Little Talent, Hickson has adopted a more conventional dramatic structure, yet it is one that really pays off. The three-hander begins with Sam, a bright-eyed nineteen year old American, recounting his first encounter with Joey, a rooftop union that led to them both charging through the midnight streets of New York and ending up at Grand Central Station in each other’s arms.

Having recently lost her job, Joey has come to America to visit her father, George, a former academic with a sharp, dismissive manner. He lives alone and it is clear that there has been some drift between father and daughter since the end of his marriage. What Joey does not yet know is that the young man she shared her impulsive evening with, her cinematic swoop through the city, is also her father’s carer – that her dad is diminishing, unravelling, losing his capacity to care for himself.

Precious Little Talent cements what Eight merely hinted at: that Hickson is a writer of some skill. The emotional tone of the play is admirably nuanced. The relationship between father and daughter – affectionate yet volatile, needy yet abrupt – is a complex but recognisable one, and while the play contains moments of acute sadness, there is also much wit in evidence. The cultural gulf between the English and Americans proves a particularly rich source of humour.

Not everything stands up to scrutiny. There are some questions Hickson, intentionally or otherwise, leaves unanswered. Sam’s actual role remains ill-defined: is he a nurse? Is caring for George his main job or something he does while he studies? The sudden budding relationship between Sam and Joey also feels a little too convenient. Yet George’s monologues, his moments alone, are incredibly moving and John McColl is superb as a man coming to grips with a lessening of self he is powerless to halt.

The two younger cast members both do an excellent job with their roles. There’s clearly more depth to Sam then his beaming exterior would initially suggest; he is sensitive to George’s needs and perceptive about Joey’s fears and anxieties. Emma Hiddleston, as the slightly stiff English girl, comes across as proud and self-sufficient yet at the same time she is clearly looking for something solid and secure to cling on to.

As in Eight, Hickson is interested in what it means to arrive at adulthood just as the rules seem to be shifting, as the old roads are swamped in snow and new paths need to be dug. The shadow of a past generation’s aspirations still looms large but this is a new world and Hickson is one of its most astute voices.

Reviewed for musicOMH