Edinburgh theatre reviews: from Frogman to Lula del Ray, the best shows to see at the Fringe
The Telegraph's critics pick the best theatre to see at this year's Fringe – and flag up a few shows to avoid.
Lula del Ray by Manual Cinema
★★★★★
Where Underbelly Med Quad
When 4.30pm
Until Aug 28
A girl is perched on an enormous satellite dish, swinging her legs as she watches the sunset. She's only a silhouette, a paper cut-out, but a range of emotions seem to play across her face.
She turns to climb down a ladder and is transformed into a living actor. But the ladder she's climbing is no more real than the painted sky. Shadow-puppetry wizards Manual Cinema had a complete sell-out hit last year with their Fringe debut ADA/AVA, and the marvellous Lula del Ray deserves the same reception. The Chicago company shows its workings as we watch the cast move scraps of card and cloth across three overhead projectors, the kind you might recall from school science lessons. Together, these create the heart-wrenchingly beautiful backdrops that appear on a screen upstage. When an actor steps between light and screen, they add their own shadow to the mise en scène, allowing a human to swap places seamlessly with their tiny paper counterpart.
The story is slight, but moving – a wordless, dreamlike fable set against the backdrop of the Fifties space-race. A girl and her radio-operator mother share a caravan in the desert. She runs away to the city to meet her favourite band (the fictional Baden Brothers), discovers her idols have feet of clay, and returns home older and wiser. The emotional impact comes partly from the enchanting live soundtrack, scored for guitar and cello, which includes snippets of a recurring melody: the Baden Brothers' Roy Orbison-esque ballad Lord, Blow the Moon Out Please.
At the end of the show, the audience are invited onstage to handle the props, and admire the work that went into each transition. Learning how it's done only adds to the magic. TFS
Michael Brandon – Off-Ramps
★★★★☆
Where Assembly Rooms
When 5.55pm
Until Aug 27
In a nutshell...
Not everyone can remember Michael Brandon's roles in Jerry Springer: The Opera or as Dempsey in ITV cop-show Dempsey and Makepeace, but don’t let that put you off attending his confessional one-man-show. This is actually a far more gossipy, self-deprecating and insightful hour than one might expect – not only because Brandon’s career has seen him work alongside some Hollywood legends (Al Pacino, Robert De Niro and Kim Novak among them, the latter a serious flame) but also because his success as an actor was against the odds. So deprived was his start in Queens, NYC – with tough parents to boot – that up to the age of nine he had no idea what a school locker was, let alone the concept of having your own school books. His is a rattling, often romance-steeped yarn, and his story of a drama-school audition nightmare is probably one of the funniest in the business. If you didn’t know or much care for this Anglophile American (who married his Makepeace, Glynis Barber, in 1989) at the start, by the end of his charm offensive you sure will. DC
The Whip Hand
★★☆☆☆
Where Traverse Theatre
When times vary
Until Aug 27
In a nutshell...
“We like to blame England for the Empire… but Glasgow, you know. Built on tobacco, sugar… all these mansions, man… where do you think they came from?” There are some potentially searing and shaming home-truths lurking at the heart of Douglas Maxwell’s new play. It's built on the premise that a 50-year-old Scottish divorcee has decided to make reparations for the modest amount of inherited wealth he has just come into, which owes its provenance to the slave trade. He’s a small man determined on a big gesture that will also rob his daughter of the money set aside for university fees.
Cue an almighty birthday party-ruining ding-dong between this give-it-all-away do-gooder and his having-none-of-it ex-wife, with a handful of underwritten supporting characters looking on in dismay. The cast under director Tessa Walker – an associate at Birmingham Rep, to which this will briefly tour afterwards – do what they can with Maxwell’s fitfully entertaining but muddled-feeling comedy, which remains a few drafts away from whipping its subject-matter into a plausible frenzy. DC
Seagulls
★★★☆☆
Where The Leith Volcano, 119 Constitution Street, EH6
When 6pm
Until Aug 26
One thing you get when you stage a radical "deconstructed" version of Chekhov’s The Seagull in a derelict church down in Leith, is the sound of real-life seagulls overhead. What you can also get, if you’re not too careful, is a splattering of gooey mess.
The most obvious talking-point of this site-specific version, by long-standing Welsh internationalists Volcano, is that the chancel has been flooded with 45 tons of water. But the company of five – originally seen dangling on harnesses above a customised wooden stage in the nave – only splash about in it towards the end. Which perhaps defeats the purpose of the exercise – given it’s supposed to represent the lake against which Konstantin’s bizarre play is performed – but even establishing what the purpose is might be for old-timers.
Here the name of the game is desecration. The outlines of the principal characters (Trigorin, Dorn, Nina, Arkadina) remain, but that familiar Russian eccentricity has been parlayed by director Paul Davies into full-on theatrical outlandishness; there are dance-offs, fragmented exchanges, bursts of pop and what you might call ‘prancing around’. Never boring, often baffling, certainly bold, it will leave some enchanted. Others may schlep, gawp and then shrug. DC
Brexit: The Musical
★★☆☆☆
Where C Venues
When 6.55pm
Until Aug 28
In a nutshell...
A bit like Brexit, this has the potential to be great but at the moment it’s a frightful muddle. By rights, legal expert in EU/Brexit matters Chris Bryant should have called his have-a-go musical The Tory Leadership Campaign of 2016 – because the bulk of the hour is taken up with reprising, via sixth-form revue-style song, all the post-Referendum in-fighting, BoJo, Gove, May and Leadsom hogging the limelight with caricatured vim.
It’s all good empty fun as far as it goes. Dismayingly, though, the Edinburgh edit lacks not only a role for Nigel Farage but any sense (satirical or otherwise) of what is going on at the heart of the EU, how negotiations are playing out, or even what ordinary people make of it all.
The concentration on the Westminster bubble – with a flimsy central storyline about the "hunt" for George Osborne’s missing presumed non-existent "plan" – replicates the exclusionary, narrow outlook that Brexit itself exploded. There’s still time to go back to the drawing-board, soup up the levels of sophistication and score a triumph, but the clock is ticking. DC
The Duke
★★☆☆☆
Where Pleasance Courtyard
When 2pm
Until Aug 27 (not 22)
In a nutshell...
Shon Dale-Jones is the storytelling talent behind 2007 Fringe hit Story of a Rabbit, as well as Floating, a brilliant slice of magical realism that won Best Scripted Comedy at 2012’s BBC Audio Drama Awards.
Radio is his home ground, as becomes clear in The Duke, a tonally muddled one-man show that won a Fringe First Award last year but feels static and rickety onstage. He remains seated throughout, playing musical cues from his laptop as he tells a shaggy dog story about his mother’s broken statue of the Duke of Wellington. From this, he draws parallels about the cost of human life which never quite cohere or ring true.
It feels cruel to put the boot into a play that’s raising funds for charity (Save the Children), but The Duke’s moralising about the plight of refugees – prompted by a news bulletin Dale-Jones once heard – suffers from weak writing. “I’ve struggled to watch our world watching another world as if we’re not all part of the same world,” he intones over heartstring-tugging music. His description of an encounter with a cleaning lady from a war-torn country carries more emotional heft, because it’s not treated so sententiously.
Between all this, Dale-Jones recounts the writing process behind Floating, which involved at least 67 drafts. That charming play took a decade to write. This one, he reveals, was knocked out in a single day. You can tell. The Duke is a mediocre show about the making of a great one. TFS
Jamie Wood: I Am a Tree
★★★★☆
Where Assembly George Square Theatre
When 6.25pm
Until Aug 27 (not 21)
In a nutshell...
Soft-spoken clown Jamie Wood brings the audience together before this show has even started, hugging them in turn, and delivering off-kilter compliments to their bodies (“Well done, feet. You are doing a good job.”). The bearded storyteller’s last Fringe show was a tribute to Yoko Ono, and I Am a Tree has a distinctly Ono-ish blend of the silly and the profound.
Dressed in a homemade phoenix costume, he tells the story of a “pilgrimage” he took from Coventry to Treherbert, South Wales, scattering the ashes of his grandparents along the way. Beautiful sound-recordings from that trek capture the richness of the landscape, blending the trickle of streams and crunch of bracken with a few snippets of Welsh folksong.
It’s a trippy experience, made more so when Wood starts handing out samples of “the Welsh hallucinogen, bara brith” (a kind of fruit loaf). He guides his supposedly drugged-up volunteers onstage for a psychedelic journey to their inner “animal kingdom”. Half shaman, half buffoon, Wood creates a charming world that’s quite unlike anything else you’ll see this Fringe. TFS
tickets.edfringe.com
Frogman
★★★☆☆
Where Traverse Theatre (CodeBase)
When Times vary
Until Aug 27
In a nutshell...
Acclaimed Norwich-based theatre pioneers Curious Directive are mad-keen on science; areas of interest in past work have included astro-biology, myrmecology (the study of ants) and bio-politics. In Frogman, director and founder Jack Lowe utilises virtual reality technology to tell an Australian-set tale of a police diver, a missing, presumed murdered girl and what happened out on a boat in the Great Barrier Reef in 1995.
The audience – a select gathering of 30 – sit on swivel chairs around a spongy, coral-effect pit, paced by Tessa Parr’s Meera, answering officialdom’s questions in the present-day related to her hazy childhood memories. As the spectators don VR headsets for repeated bursts, they’re allowed to dive back into the past, entering 11-year-old Meera’s bedroom, eavesdropping on the conversations between her and her mates, scanning the environment in 360 degrees on a quasi quest for clues.
The overall care lavished on the experience is impressive, and some of the visuals – air bubbles rising towards you as divers scour the reef anew for evidence – will be worth the admission price alone for VR novices. But the show could usefully pick up the pace; there’s only so much to learn about that fateful year and only so much goggles-based activity the eye can take. DC
Tickets: 0131 228 1404; traverse.co.uk
Party Game
★★★☆☆
Where Traverse at the Wee Red Bar
When Times vary
Until Aug 20
In a nutshell...
Canadian company bluemouth inc achieved an unlikely Edinburgh hit in 2011 with Dance Marathon, which required audiences to participate in a four-hour dance contest inspired by those Depression-era bouts where desperate couples tried to walk, waltz or stagger away with much-needed prize money. “Beg, borrow or steal a ticket” we wrote.
Hopes were high, then, for this audience-participatory follow-up (produced with fellow Toronto company Necessary Angel) in the Edinburgh College of Art’s Wee Red Bar. Drinks and notepads are handed out, bunting is hastily arranged and all is set for a surprise birthday party for the ever-unreliable Stephen.
It’d be a shame to be a party-pooper here: there’s a supernatural twist that emerges through clouds of narrative confusion. But despite the homespun bonhomie, assisted by a resident band, the evening’s half-cooked mixture of self-involved expressionistic dance, fragmentary anecdotes and gamey diversions drains off much of the initial excitement. Good in places, and a poignant pay-off, but only die-hard "immersives" need apply. DC
Tickets: 0131 228 1404; traverse.co.uk
Nassim
★★★★☆
Where Traverse Theatre
When Times vary
Until Aug 27
In a nutshell...
“No rehearsals. No preparation. Just a sealed envelope and an actor reading a script for the first time.” Actually that makes Iranian playwright Nassim Soleimanpour’s contribution to this year’s festival sound more straightforward than it is. That willing volunteer not only has to read projected pages, turned in real-time on a screen by the author – sitting elsewhere in the building, as if in another country – he also has to pick up a smattering of Farsi (and audience-members get a crash-course too).
The object of this technically fiendish exercise? To create an understanding of how difficult it can be for a playwright whose work cannot be performed in his home-land, how remote he feels from his dearly beloved family too, and how, potentially, through the collaborative exercises of theatre, something can be salvaged, a common humanity expressed. It sounds worthy; in fact, it’s sweetly entertaining, ingeniously thought-provoking and fully heart-warming. DC
Tickets: 0131 228 1404; traverse.co.uk
Meet Me At Dawn
★★★☆☆
Where Traverse Theatre
When 7.15pm
Until Aug 27
In a nutshell...
Born in England and raised in Scotland, Zinnie Harris has three major works at the International Festival this year. Fingers crossed it will be a case of third time lucky when the Citizens Theatre, Glasgow re-stages her acclaimed contemporary retelling of the Oresteia at the Lyceum later this month.
Her opening show for the EIF at the Lyceum, a new version of Rhinceros (1959), Ionesco’s absurdist classic about individuals succumbing to the contagion of brute consensus, presented in conjunction with DOT theatre of Istanbul, is not to be stampeded towards: laboured, barely funny, and lacking the strong Turkish textures that would give it an original, topical, anti-authoritarian edge.
Opus No2, Meet Me At Dawn, staged by Orla O’Loughlin, artistic director of the Traverse, at least showcases the considerable talents of its two actresses. Sharon Duncan-Brewster and Neve McIntosh play lovers Helen and Robyn who appear, initially, to be marooned on an island after a cap-sizing but whose separation proves to be more chillingly final than that.
There’s the ghost of a good idea about the mind’s refusal to let go of the dearly departed in the head-traumatising depths of grief but despite committed performances, a core emotional propulsion is lacking and at 85 minutes, the piece gets water-logged with colourless conversational iterations and a sinking feeling takes hold. DC
Tickets: 0131 228 1404; eif.co.uk
Doglife
★★★★☆
Where Cairns Lecture Theatre
When 7.25pm
Until Aug 27
In a nutshell...
If you wanted to be harsh, you could say that – ranked against numerous well-heeled, tightly scripted shows on the fringe – Doglife, detailing the life of Scottish former gangland enforcer Thomas McCrudden, isn’t up to sniff. It’s sometimes hard to work out what’s being said, who it’s being said to, and what happened when. Yet engage simply with what is being offered, and you’ll be rewarded with something as compelling as anything you’ll see this year: cold, hard, dark truths about the toughest lives lived in the UK today.
McCrudden – following up last year’s acclaimed Doubting Thomas, again presented by Grassmarket Projects – is a muscular hard-man who revisits and even re-enacts violent moments from his feral, criminal past, the women in his life (the cast are untrained actors) dismayed at his volatile moods, but themselves swinging between being in thrall to his monosyllabic presence and rejecting him. He can take us right now to meet the kind of desperate people who’d have been Macbeth’s murderers-for-hire, McCrudden says, yearning to break the chains of his brutalising conditioning but aware also just how reluctant society is to let him move on. DC
A sobering, sometimes tension-filled hour.
Tickets: 0131 560 1580; summerhall.co.uk
DeLorean
★★★☆☆
Where Assembly Rooms (BallRoom)
When Midday
Until Aug 27
In a nutshell...
Billed as “The story of the car from the Back to the Future movies”, Jon Ivay’s play needs to go back to the drawing-board. It crudely bolts together the incredible tale of how fast-lane American entrepreneur John DeLorean arrived like an angel of salvation to build his futuristic DMC-12 in Belfast at the height of the Troubles, and came a cropper. There’s too much over-revved exposition (“You don’t get to be vice President at General Motors without having balls” etc), accompanied by some highly variable American accents in Ivay’s uneven production.
And yet Cory Peterson smartly captures DeLorean’s monumental self-belief, which finally cracks under the pressure of disastrous financing arrangements and a deranged attempt to get a helping hand from the mob. The enveloping giddy rush derived from his careening progress towards insolvency and disgrace (thanks to an FBI sting), a journey full of sudden twists, turns and nail-biting swerves, keeps you hooked all the same. Watchable, then, despite its glaring flaws – but it could be so much better. DC
Tickets: 0131 623 3030; edfringe.com
Letters to Morrissey
★★★★☆
Where Traverse Theatre
When Times vary
Until Aug 27
In a nutshell...
“Don't forget the songs/ That made you cry/ And the songs that saved your life,” Morrissey famously advised in Rubber Ring, a nudge to those tempted to forget how much they owed the blessed song-makers (well, him). And in Gary McNair’s nicely judged, just the right side of nostalgic solo show – performed by the author – we get a full-on hour of reverential (but not humourlessly so) tribute to Mozzer.
Revisiting his bleak Scottish home-town, McNair gives thanks to the singer for bringing beauty to a place of ugliness, and providing a “gateway for us working class folks to engage with our emotions when everything else told us to suppress anything that wasn’t the norm”. He remembers the gauche letters he penned to the king of the maladjusted as an adolescent in the Noughties – the epiphany of hearing the words “I am human and I need to be loved” on Top of the Pops, and, threaded through this reminiscence and (unanswered) correspondence, the lack of love in his ostracised best-friend Tony’s life – and the bleak consequence of that. Slight but potent. DC
Tickets: 0131 228 1404; traverse.co.uk