Edinburgh 2014: Circa - Beyond, Underbelly

There’s been a lot of talk recently about the lack of female-led super hero movies. Joss Whedon’s attempts to bring Wonder Woman to the big screen came to nothing and while there’s apparently a female-led Marvel project on the cards for 2017, there’s a general sense of timidity about the whole thing

Well, fuck that, because Rowan Heydon White, of Australian contemporary circus company Circa, is Wonder Woman. She’s amazing. She can throws her male co-performers through the air, she can balance them on her back, she can catch their bodies in mid-flight with the same ease as one might catch a ball; at one point she takes a Rubik’s Cube and proceeds to solve it, while her company members clamber all over her, distracting her, standing on her, clinging to her. Like I said, she’s super.

There’s an edge of the uncanny to this show. An uneasy, dreamlike quality where giant rabbits frolic in the mist, bodies bend in unwise ways and people cluck and caw like birds. Theirs is a subverted world and while the performance celebrates the astonishing things of which the human body is capable – its strengths, its flexibility – it does so in a playful, intelligent way. “There’s a line between human and animal, between madness and sanity, between logic and dream,” the opening voice over intones. There’s no narrative as such, but this idea of the animalistic runs through the whole piece. We are all of us flesh.

The production has been around for a while – I first saw it in a Spiegeltent in Norwich last year – but it feels more developed now, the weirder elements, the air of oddness, better integrated into the piece. Several sequences have been dropped – the burlesque tennis racket contortion dance is no more and its loss is not felt. There are very few props, a trapeze, a couple of climbing bars, a stretch of black silk. Costumes are similarly minimal, apart from bear suits and bunny heads which lend the piece a darkly cartoonish aesthetic. Each performer gets a solo spot in which to showcase their particular skill set, self-destructive tumbling, some dizzying silk-work, a beautiful, nimble fingered paper waltz to the music of Bonnie Tyler. The group sequences, in which they hurl chairs through the air and fling themselves about the space, are if anything even more dazzling.

Along with the incongruous Frank Sinatra soundtrack, the applause of the audience is continually punctuated by little gasps and winces and squeals of excitement. There’s laughter too, because it’s hard not to laugh when a man in an oversized bear suit shimmies up a pole while Bach’s Goldberg Variations plays in the background. It’s a brilliant, beautiful, ridiculous moment of which this show contains many.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Edinburgh 2013: Fleabag

Phoebe Waller-Bridge is an arresting looking woman: tall, slim, long of limb, with a kiss curl of dark hair – and a filthy mouth. From those pretty lips spills a stained tale of anal sex, menstrual threesomes, pornography of every stripe and shade and lashings of masturbation. Some of what she says draws gasps – the kind of gasps that begin as half-laughs. There’s still, it seems, a little electric tickle when a good-looking woman with a crystalline voice talks dirty – and Fleabag, which Waller-Bridge also wrote, revels in this, probing and stroking the line between empowerment and degradation.

She plays a confident, aggressively sexual young woman who takes pleasure in the power she has over men. The worst thing she can imagine is someone not finding her attractive. But her strutting fuck-me-or-fuck-off attitude is tempered by an absence, a need, a ghosting behind the eyes.

The solo show initially takes the shape of a job interview with Waller-Bridge perched on a stool under the cruel corrugated ceiling of the Underbelly, responding to a man’s disembodied recorded voice. It then segues into a confessional, with her addressing the audience directly. At first the character is played for laughs. She’s good at pushing buttons with her well lubricated fingers, taking delight in our disquiet at her more outrageous tales (“does this mean I have a huge arsehole?” she muses after an impromptu backdoor festival fuck), but gradually cracks start to appear as we find out that her boyfriend has left her (she claims not to be too fussed by this, is adamant that he’ll come crawling back), she’s estranged from both her father and sister, her closest friend recently died and the business she runs is failing.

All this rampant wanking and sexual questing begins to feel like desperation, hole-filling of a more psychological kind. There’s a beautiful extended sequence in which she mimes undressing and taking photos with her phone of her breasts and vagina in a disabled toilet, click-clicking away with her finger, while her head is tilted to one side, her gaze vacant, the antithesis of eroticism.

Waller-Bridge’s performance is riveting: candid, split open, fruit-fleshed. She expertly manages the release of information, the timing, the tonal shifts and slips. But I do wonder whether, from a dramatic perspective, the trajectory of the piece was a bit too obvious – whether it would have been more exciting and interesting to do away with the damage and make the character even harder and more unrepentant, to really push things. As it is, there were times where the piece made me wince, made me uncomfortable – and then made me consider exactly why it made me feel uncomfortable (would me response have been the same if a man was saying the same things, telling the same stories? I doubt it, though I’m not sure).

Fleabag is a confrontational piece of comic writing, a funny, nasty, sharp-edged account of sexual self-sabotage and debasement that leaves its sticky fingerprints all over your skin.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Edinburgh 2012: Chapel Street

Luke Barnes' punchy, pacey two-hander - part of the Old Vic, New Voices new writing programme - is drenched in booze. It's beer-breathed and sweaty with it, slurring and fuzzy-tongued, as it explores a night of binge-drinking from two separate points of view.

Joe is an amiable twenty-something lad who still lives with his mum and seems accepting of a life of odd jobs and nights on the lash. Kirsty is a teenager, not without ambition, who goes on a bender to celebrate a friend's birthday, scoring some alcohol and hitting the town. The two stories are told as independent, cross-cutting monologues, which only collide towards the end. Both performers give convincing, driven performances, becoming increasingly more inebriated as the play progresses, no easy thing to convey.

Cary Crankson's Joe turns up the chat and Ria Zmitrowicz's Kirsty, motor-mouthed from the start, becomes even more voluble. The growing on-stage chaos of Cheryl Gallagher's production captures the trajectory of their epically messy night -“ microphone stands tumble to the ground, shaving foam spatters the floor and the actors end up skidding in their own spillings. But beneath the excess of their binge, the play has something to say about what it is to be stuck socially and economically, to see your ambitions slowly eroded, to see what hope you had slip slowly away.

Reviewed for The Stage.

Edinburgh: Crush

Paul Charlton’s Crush tells a fairly familiar story. Anna and Sam are a young-ish married couple, both in their late twenties. Sam’s dreams after university didn’t quite pan out and the publishing business he hoped to set up never materialised. The sheen of the early days of their marriage is fading; they haven’t had much sex recently; their small habits are starting to irritate each other.

What makes Charlton’s play sit up in a meerkat fashion above the pack of basic relationship dramas is the way he astutely pins down the role the internet can play in people’s emotional crises, the outlet it provides for anonymous and supposedly consequence-free behaviour – the acting out of fantasies from the safety of one’s own home.


Except, of course, there are consequences. Real consequences: these actions reach through and beyond the world of the flickering screen of a laptop, touching and infecting people; the bet placed online is as real as one placed at a bookies, the Facebook fantasy can still hurt the woman you love.

Sam becomes obsessed with a young newly qualified teacher who he met briefly in his job as a book salesman. She fills his mind, this young pretty thing, in part because she looks not unlike his wife did a few years ago, or so he tells himself. Later at home, still thinking of her, he befriends her via Facebook and finds this allows him ample opportunity to sit staring at photos of her on the internet.

Anna, already subtly aware that in Sam’s eyes she has let herself go, discovers what he is up to and that damages her self-confidence and self-image further. She starts hitting the gym, taking dieting pills, obsessing over her body and the few extra inches she has gained since her wedding day. Sam is certain that he loves his wife, that he is happy with her, but he can’t shake a nagging sense of dissatisfaction with his lot and the internet provides a window an outlet for his frustrations, a kind of safe half-way space.

The play takes the form of several connected monologues with Sam and Anna taking turns to speak, him at the desk in his study, her at the gym. Both actors really seem to connect with the material. Neil Grainger’s performance as Sam is, for the most part, one of laddish amiability but a wave of utter despair and desperation floods out of him as the play nears its finish. Claire Dargo’s Anna is perky and sweat-sheened, peddling on her exercise bike, but an undercurrent of self-loathing soon becomes evident, a swamping sadness that her life and her marriage have ended up as they have.

Charlton’s writing is incredibly measured; both characters, for all their flaws, are very human and the way that they flit from worry to worry, talking themselves in and out of corners, is totally convincing and real. The final double revelation is slightly contrived and yet it still manages to end things on a suitably emotional note that echoes on as the performers take their bows.

Reviewed for musicOMH