Edinburgh festival 2018: Lyn Gardner reviews Fringe’s shows exploring relative values

The Ballad of the Apathetic Son and the Narcissistic Mother ★★★★☆ / 3 Years, 1 Week and a Lemon Drizzle ★★★☆☆ / Unconditional ★★★☆☆ / Old Boy ★★★★☆

Lucy Gaizely is 38 and the mother of four children including Raedie who is 15. When Raedie was younger mother and son used to ride on the bus, comfortable in each other’s company. Now, Raedie won’t sit next to his mum on the bus. It’s too embarrassing.

So, Lucy suggested that they make a show together. The Ballad of the Apathetic Son and the Narcissistic Mother (Summerhall, until 26 August) is the result, a piece inspired by the one thing they have left in common — a shared love of Australian pop star Sia and dancer Maddie Ziegler. Lucy says they have done it because it is a way for mother and son to share quality time together. Raedie says he’s done it because his mum said she would pay him. She says he lacks empathy; he complains she wears a suit of armour.

Ballad, one of a number of shows on the fringe this year in which members of the same family perform alongside each other, revels in a wild demented teenage energy as mother and son dance and fight together, their bodies slamming against each other and pulling apart. At times during the show they each bear the other’s weight. She gives him a piggy back as if he was still the despot two-year-old who once demanded the family dance over and over to “(Is This the Way to) Amarillo.” He slings her tiny body over his shoulder reversing the power relationship, giving hints of the man he is so close to becoming.

Ballad is a beautiful show, and it is a messy one. Just as family relationships are messy. It is a an honest one too about how parental expectation can make us think of our children as disappointments when they are simply in the process of growing up, and are often more like us at the same age than we would like to admit.

Sibling rivalry and sisterly affection are put under the microscope in 3 Years, 1 Week and a Lemon Drizzle (Underbelly, until 27 August) created by real life sisters Alexandra and Kate Donnachie. Although Alex says it is mostly her show. Alex is the big sister and is three years and one week older than her sister. Kate has always looked up to her, not least because Alex is five feet eleven. But when she was 19 Alex became anorexic. She stopped being big and became so small that she was given six months to live.

3 years, 1 Week and a Lemon Drizzle is about what the sisters refer to as “that time.” If Ballad offers an opportunity for mother and son to reconnect on stage, reinventing their relationship through the act of performance, then 3 Years is an attempt to say on stage and in public what is too painful to be said in private.

That’s a big ask, and one that the show doesn’t quite embrace. Too often it hides real feeling behind a goofiness which is engaging but which feels as if it is swerving the really hard stuff. Until the final moments when Kate suddenly takes control of the show and asks her sister a pointed question, and Alex answers with raw, painful honesty.

In 3 Years, the sisters examine what it is that makes them similar and also the things that set them apart from each other. There is no mistaking that Stefanie Mueller and Josie Dale-Jones are mother and daughter in Unconditional (Pleasance Courtyard, until 26 August), produced by This Egg whose other show, the superb dressed at Underbelly is one of the deserved hits of the festival.

Unlike other shows on the fringe featuring blood relations, Unconditional is less concerned with excavating the mother/daughter relationship and is more about two women making a show about being female in a fast-changing and unstable world. Throughout their endeavour catastrophe threatens, the flood waters rise, violence is ever-present, and disruptions are frequent: to well-laid plans, traditional structures, journeys made, the show itself.

When Mueller and Dale-Jones eventually get to perform their fictional show within this show, a woman takes over the stage demanding an apology from a man who has used his privilege to jump the queue. There are references to the death of the last male white northern rhino, and the last two of the species left alive: a mother and daughter.

Unconditional is storytelling theatre which weaves it’s strands together with real skill and which — like so many shows on the fringe this summer — takes a knowingly meta-theatre approach. It requires the audience to go with the flow of the piece’s increasingly absurd flights of fancy, but it rewards the patience exerted. Men, it suggests, may have contributed to the destruction of the world, but perhaps women can remake it. Dale-Jones and Mueller do so with imaginative verve.

The future is also being made in the relationships between real life grandfathers and grandsons in Old Boy (Scottish Storytelling Centre, until 26 August) a piece made by Glas(s) Performance with Easterhouse residents. It is played out on a circle of grass with a child’s playhouse centre stage. The youngest participant here is Sam, who is just a toddler, the oldest is in his seventies. It is a gentle, rewarding hour that understands that theatre is a form of play, one in which you can work out who you are and your relationships. Sam plays naturally, oblivious to the audience. The grandfathers relearn how to play through interaction with their grandsons.

If this has been a festival which has put toxic masculinity under the microscope, this show offers an alternative and more benign view of men. Grandfathers and grandsons talk about each other with clear-eyed affection and demonstrate through their own relationships how the past makes the future but the future also keeps the past alive. It is done without a whiff of sentimentality and a beaky tenderness.

Tickets: 0131 226 0000; www.edfringe.com