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: The Adventures of Wound Man and Shirley at the Pleasance Courtyard

Chris Goode’s solo show takes a familiar shape. It’s a comforting, coming-of-age narrative in which a young boy meets an outsider who helps him find his way in the world; it’s Stig of the Dump with jokes about Radiohead; it’s just lovely on very many levels.

Fourteen year old Shirley carries around a lot of baggage. For one thing, his parents’ have seen fit to give him a girl’s name – that doesn’t help; he’s besotted with the captain of his school’s cross-country running team, the stick-on plastic stars on his bedroom ceiling have never deigned to glow in the dark, and then there’s the case he keeps under his bed: a boxed promise, dwindling despite his best efforts to look after it, to keep it safe.

Things begin to look up for Shirley when he meets Wound Man, a ‘freelance social interventionist’ or, to put it more succinctly, a super hero. Wound Man is a walking version of one of those medical illustrations from the Middle Ages showing the various damages a body can receive in battle. Weaponry of all forms sprouts from his limbs: spears, maces, arrowheads, clubs; one hand dangles by a sinewy thread and he has a tendency to clank when he walks. He’s a human Swiss army knife in snazzy silver pants. His pain is external, overt, and people find they start to feel better merely by being in his presence.

Wound Man shows Shirley how to be brave, to grow, to cope with his grief and his sexuality but also to be open to the possibility of happiness and love in his life. It is an incredibly warm piece of storytelling, gentle in delivery, and surprisingly funny in places.

This is a smaller scale version of a show originally commissioned for the 2009 Queer Up North festival. The animation sequences described in previous outings are absent but the simple set still evokes the world of an adolescent boy via an apt fanning of X-Men comics, a Rubik’s cube, a handful of Asimov novels and some discarded socks.

Goode delivers the piece in true Jackanory fashion. He deepens his voice slightly when delivering Wound Man’s lines, but otherwise he tells his audience who said what rather than acting out the narrative. He’s an affable and engaging performer who manages to convey the story’s emotional shifts in an elegant, economical way, so that when he does let loose, when his delivery quickens, the audience are picked up and swept along with him. A central fantasy sequence which tells of a vast menagerie spilling through suburban streets is a prime an example of this. Goode becomes more excitable as the music picks up and the descriptions of the animals become sillier and surreal.

The piece, as a whole, is incredibly disarming and the manner of delivery is at times deceptive. Goode doesn’t appear to be doing all that much and yet the story exerts a considerable emotional hold: as a piece of writing it’s full of subtlety and unforced pathos, never straying into overt sentiment; as a piece of theatre, it’s also very effective, the kind of thing that makes people who don’t know each other exchange little smiles of wet-eyed delight as they collect their bags and jackets at the end.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Edinburgh: Skittles at the Pleasance Courtyard

Richard Marsh’s solo show is a very funny falling-in-and-out-of-love-story that’s more sweet than it is bitter, though it’s a fair bit of both. Marsh tells the story of ‘Richard’, a man who looks a lot like him, and who falls hopelessly in love and want and need with a girl called Siobhan, who has the two vital attributes he looks for in a woman, being someone who is both beautiful and who also finds him funny.

The piece charts the path of their relationship; they begin by sharing first Silk Cuts then Skittles on the chilly steps outside the office where they both work. Eventually he builds up the confidence to make a move and very soon they are moving in together, camping out on the floor of a cramped unfurnished flat. They dash towards marriage with almost unseemly haste and all too quickly find themselves in the midst of a cinematic American honeymoon, facing the open road together with a second-hand car rainbow-armoured with the titular sweet. But as they light out for the Grand Canyon, Thelma-and-Louising across vast American plains, reality intrudes on their Hollywood moment.

It turns out the US is a pretty big place and that long hours in a hot car will test any relationship, especially one where the couple have yet to fully discover each other’s faults and kinks and tickles. No vibrating roadside motel bed can halt the fall. The way Marsh evokes the gradual erosion of their bliss is deftly handled, the subtle shifts, the slow hardening. The piece becomes a break up story, a verbal essay in the unfolding of hope. Love does not find a way, it ebbs away, evaporates into the hot desert night.

Marsh’s story is told in a poetic stream, his rhymes are rapid and punchy though often economical; he doesn’t luxuriate in lexical possibility, rather the rhythm is the thing, the zing of the delivery, the ding-ding-ding that drives the piece along. The writing is witty – you find yourself laughing both at and with ‘Richard’ – but it’s also often touching and raw, increasingly so as the piece progresses and the Skittles start to moulder and rot.

The ending is an exercise in understated poignancy, a gentle act of looking forward and an acknowledgement that most hurt fades with time. Marsh is a genial performer, comfortable with an audience and confident in his delivery, but the writing is at times lacking in textural variety, the quick, snippy rhythm could stand to be broken up. But his grasp of narrative compensates for this, the story holds tightly onto its audience at the end. And there are free sweets. Free sweets salve all.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Edinburgh: 2401 Objects at the Pleasance Courtyard

Analogue’s latest production invites its audience to think about memory, about how and what we remember, the complex process of sifting and retrieval that takes places, and what happens when the brain fails to function as it should. 2401 Objects tells the story of Patient HM, one of the most famous case studies in neurology. HM’s brain has been sliced ad preserved for research purposes; it survives as a series of slices and has furthered the understanding of the relationship between the physical structure of the brain and the way we store memories.

Just as Rebecca Skloot’s recent book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, told the human story behind the HeLa cell line, Analogue tell the story of Henry Molaison, a young American man whose epilepsy led him to undergo experimental brain surgery. The production begins with the recorded voice of Dr Jacopo Annese, a neuroscientist at the Brain Observatory. Following this brief introduction, we are introduced to two Molaisons. Firstly we see him as an old man, institutionalised, capable of completing crosswords, but completely unable to recall a conversation he had five minutes earlier; later we see him as a younger man, shyly engaging in conversation with his neighbour’s daughter.

The young Molaison suffered from several severe seizures a day and his debilitating epilepsy prevented him from holding down a job or moving out of the family home. In 1953 he underwent radical brain surgery, with an ambitious surgeon removing his hippocampi (which are strikingly described as resembling two sea horses). While the surgery did succeed in ridding him of his epilepsy, it also prevented him from forming new memories – and though it didn’t affect his procedural memory, it meant he was essentially trapped in the past. The reality of his situation is poignantly evoked through scenes in which the elderly Molaison, engagingly played by Pieter Lawman, interacts with his patient young nurse. He repeatedly recalls an event from his youth and she listens, each time responding as if hearing it afresh. Molaison does not think of himself as old, and is baffled by his reflection; he also has no recollection of his mother’s death and each time he realises his loss, he is distressed.

Analogue’s use of multimedia techniques, merging video and live performance, is more successful here than in their previous show, Beachy Head. Images are projected on a raised transparent screen and the cast are able to stand both behind and in front of these projections; there is also a fabric strip at the bottom of this screen, under which the performers frequently duck and tumble, vanishing into the black. The piece is nicely played, particularly by Lawman but also by Sebastien Lawson as both Dr Annese and the young Henry, and Melody Grove as both Molaison’s nurse and mother. While it ends a little abruptly, the production succeeds in making its audience pause to consider their internal workings, the mechanics of memory, and to appreciate Molaison’s unique contribution to medical research.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Edinburgh, in short

There are 2543 shows in the 2011 Edinburgh Fringe programme, each with their own potted synopsis. Study them for long enough and the words start to swim...

A wide-eyed orphan on the run. A woman’s husband disappears. An ageing militant with a dark secret. A drunken barber. A vengeful psychotic doll. A foreign country on the brink of civil war. An affair under the influence. A thought provoking vulgar pantomime. An unforgettable filmic journey for one. A darkly seductive aesthetic. A haunting memory play. A brilliant cocktail of songs. An adult fairy tale. A vibrant young cast. A witty and radical reworking. A dance of glances. A 21st century Coen-esque farce. An overnight experience with live DJ. A visionary devised performance. An immersive love story set in the belly of a whale. A night of secrets and seduction in NYC. A lovingly disrespectful homage. A pressure pot of a piece. A genuine Swedish classic. A pudding of prostitution. A dark, dirty chuckle.

What if hell were a reality show? How many times would you dismiss being cursed? Having survived the explosion can they survive each other? Will they give in to the overwhelming deluge? Between the dusk and the dark, what terrors lie? What would you do for a million dollars? Can monkeys give evidence? Ever wanted to howl like a wolf? Ever lost an argument you felt you could have won? Does your curtain flutter on a still night? Why would a mother become a suicide bomber? What happens when she starts tracing a history that isn’t hers? Where does love cross the line?

The shadow of my porn star dad. The global wanderer collides. The world ended two years ago. Interactive zombie entertainment. Bursts of pumping adrenaline. Spectacular puppets that glow in the dark. Rumbustious sari-wearing eunuchs. Gorging pity like a leech. Invisible cabbages. In love with a bear. The wreckage of the financial crisis. The art of the clown. The monstrous course of defeat. The hotel of the future. The wrong sized elephant. Ten years of close encounters. Tainted by a dark secret. Obsession reaches beyond the grave. Where saying sorry is just the start.

Oblivious to her impending fall. Giving in to her schizophrenia. She prefers to be called Venus. Meanwhile society, haunted by inflation, reels towards fascism.

Direct from San Francisco. Based on the popular video game. Inspired by true events. Created intoxicated. Made up on the spot. Show includes partial nudity. Show includes live guitar music. For grown-ups only. Free coffee and croissants.

Innovative object manipulation. Solo live action. Pedal-powered anarchic theatre. Mesmerizingly dark animation. Airborne physicality. Explosive choreography. Amazing street dance. Side-splitting wit. Iranian history. Celtic lyricism. Teenage effervescence. Trouserless bankers. Dangerous closeness. The most pressing issues of our age. True life sex stories from real women. Told entirely through a Facebook wall-to-wall.

Fine art and codpieces. Karaoke and bad science. Alienation and filicide. Homespun contraptions and cabaret songs. Richly blended with percussion. Viewed through a veil of lace.

Descend with us.

Originally posted on Exeunt