As the sun prepares to set on another Edinburgh Fringe, it’s time for a final round-up of my coverage of this year’s fest. It’s been a very strong year with great work from many artists whose work I already know I find rewarding – though I must admit that trying to catch of all of their shows hasn’t left as much time for new discoveries as I’d have liked.
What follows is basically a one-stop collection of all the stuff I’ve written this year – somewhere in the region of 12,000 words, all told. So it’s a bit of a monster!
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A round-up of round-ups
Last week, I wrote this mid-Fringe report, which includes links to lots of my reviews for the Scotsman:
There’s coverage there of acts including Alan Cumming, Barry Humphries’ Weimar Cabaret with Meow Meow, Bourgeois & Maurice, Briefs, Briefs Factors presents Sweatshop, the Creative Martyrs, Dandy Darkly, The Fabulous Punch and Judy Show, Frisky & Mannish, Hot Brown Honey, Ian Saville, The LipSinkers, Lucy McCormick, Michael Griffiths, Michael Roulston & Sarah-Louise Young, Puddles Pity Party, Sven Ratzke and Tomás Ford.
I also wrote a round-up of shows featuring babies, which includes Lady Rizo, Daddy & Robin, Come Look at the Baby and a special moment from Cabaret Chinwag, the weekly panel-cum-mixer I hosted at Fringe Central:
And here’s a round-up review of three shows by the octogenarian powerhouse that is Lynn Ruth Miller:
For the Scotsman, I wrote a round-up of shows involving elements of drag-king performance or FTM cross-dressing, including Cuncrete from Rachael Clerke and the Great White Males; Gender Spanner from Jess McKerlie; JOAN starring Lucy Jane Parkinson aka LoUis CYfer; and Royal Vauxhall, by Des O’Connor. You can read the drag-king round-up here.
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Reviews for the Scotsman
Here’s where you can read all my reviews for the Scotsman that have made it online.
As well as some shows mentioned above, that includes coverage of:
Margaret Thatcher Queen of Gameshows
Pollyanna
Grumble: Sex Clown Saves the World
Nigel Osner: Angel to Vampire!
Laurence Owen: Cinemusical High
Jeu Jeu La Foille: Full Frontal Lobotomy
Torte e Mort: Songs of Cake and Death
The Man Who Knows Everything
Some of my Scotsman reviews have appeared in print but not yet made it online, so I am pasting them here in the meantime. First up, one of my absolute favourites of the Fringe…
4D Cinema by Mamoru Iriguchi at Summerhall
The pleasures of live performance and the pleasures of the moving image are very different. One is about the thrill of shared space, the exchange of energy (and sometimes more) between performer and audience, the capacity of the show to respond to what happens in the room. The other is about outsized glamour, the expressive potential of recording technology, the capacity of the movie to reach unaltered across space and time. Although these pleasures are very different, they aren’t incompatible. But it’s rare to find a work that combines them in as thoughtful, playful, sophisticated, entertaining and brilliant a way as Mamoru Iriguchi’s 4D Cinema.
Greeting us as we arrive, clad only in underwear and dishing out blank 3D glasses, Iriguchi makes for an amiable, unassuming, slightly absurd figure. This impression is reinforced when he dons an extraordinary bit of kit: a small, head-mounted screen with a hole cut for his face and a projector mounted overhead that effectively makes him into a miniature mobile cinema. Film, he reminds us, is a domineering form and also a deathly one: it is a medium in two senses, both a technology of communication and a way to access the dead. Lo and behold, he is possessed by Marlene Dietrich – a performer who excelled both on screen and in live performance – and, with a bit of help from the audience, seeks to relate her life story. Though something about it seems off…
It would be a shame to reveal too many of the show’s details but it is at once funny, quirky and charming and conceptually bold and rigorous. There’s a palindromic, algebraic elegance to its construction, a sense of patterns, echoes, rhymes and reflections that only emerges in retrospect. Together, they throw fascinating light on matters of technology, art and life, exploring how we experience the passage of time and the sense of self through such peculiar practices as live subtitling or making egg nog. The uncanny and melancholic aspects of cinema come through, as do the sensual and transitory facets of live performance. It’s a rare and beautiful thing.
First Lady by George Orange at Serenity Café
Here are three policies you won’t hear being discussed in this year’s US presidential election: painting the White House lavender; making the Supreme Court entirely female and renaming it the Supremes Court; and swapping the budgets of the military and the education department. But 24 years ago, this was the platform of a genuine presidential candidate: the African-American drag queen Joan Jett Blakk, who ran on behalf of the Queer Nation Party against George HW Bush under the slogan ‘Lick Bush in ’92!’
The campaign was not victorious but it had an impact – not least on George Orange, boyfriend of Blakk’s alter ego, Terrence Smith, and therefore prospective First Lady in waiting. In this revealing, affecting and informative solo show, Orange looks back on an experience that now seems a lifetime away. It’s a very personal tale. Orange was an inexperienced young farmboy-turned-actor from Minnesota and this was his first gay relationship; he vividly describes his infatuation with Smith, how they got together and his discovery of Chicago’s gay scene. Here the personal becomes political, with the lived experience of racism, homophobic violence, the AIDS crisis and state neglect forming a telling backdrop to a explosion of sex, drugs, partying and a political campaign whose camp qualities went hand in hand with sincere radical beliefs.
Although there are some great anecdotes (including one involving controversial live artist Ron Athey and a staple gun), both Blakk and life on the campaign trail remain somewhat at arm’s length. But First Lady is powerfully vivid in many other ways. Addressing us informally with affection, passion and judiciously selected props, costumes and musical selections, Orange paints a rich picture of the joys and tragedies of countercultural queer life at a time when gay marriage was barely a twinkle in campaigners’ eyes.
The Establishment by Dan Lees and Neil Frost at Heroes @ Dragonfly
Dan Lees and Neil Frost are ever so, ever so English in this very funny, increasingly hard-hitting slice of satire at the expense of the ruling classes. Decked out in bowler hats and checked suits, accessorised with brollies and rolled-up newspapers, they come on like a couple of bumbling, fuddy-daddy gents, showing off considerable skills of physical and verbal clowning and improvisation as they dragoon some audience members into a ramshackle game of cricket or anoint another as monarch. They’re dominant in the way they survey the crowd with a patrician air, subservient in the way they’re in the thrall to memories of mummy and daddy.
As they cycle through a variety of quintessentially British activities, the stakes gradually get higher. As City types, they take us through the mechanics of a market crash in jovial detail, making room to try to enjoy some of the trappings of luxurious wealth along the way. There are also incursions into the realms of fox-hunting, duelling and even a spot of colonising – probably the most knowingly awkward part of the night. For the most part, Lees cuts the marginally more sensible and controlled figure while Frost turns up the volume on his performance more often. There’s a wry evocation of Monty Python in a bit about arms dealing while some of the improv moments evoke Vic and Bob to weaker effect.
As the show progresses, there are more direct references to specific recent events but in a way that feels quite organic. For all the knockabout absurdity, The Establishment is underpinned by the recognition that the UK is still dominated by only mildly updated versions of a centuries-old imperial sensibility. The accoutrements might change but, in many ways, things still are what they used to be.
From Como to Homo by Lynne Jassem at Sweet Grassmarket
Given the amount of animation and energy Lynne Jassem shows on stage in From Como to Homo, it’s hard to imagine how much she must have had six decades ago, when she was one of early American television’s child performers. In this dynamic memoir show, Jassem looks back on a childhood of colourful characters and challenging situations, from the vicissitudes of the underage entertainment industry to a mother who constantly threatens to upstage her. There are also troubling issues related to wellbeing: the toll of showbiz on a young body, and the feeling that that body might not really align with Jassem’s true gender.
This is a distinctly American piece, from Jassem’s New York accent to references such as Perry Como (the popular crooner on whose show she used to appear), as well as the form of the solo memoir peppered with thumbnail impersonations of larger-than-life characters. In its way, the format feels as old-fashioned as black-and-white variety TV but Jassem delivers it well, along with some cracking tap routines, mime work and a real sense of anxiety and discovery around the issues of identity she grapples with. There’s a sweet finale as well.
Also not yet online, this round-up of three magic acts rooted in dysfunctional couplings: Duo Bogof: It’s a Kinda Magic!, Peter and Bambi Heaven: The Magic Inside and Die Magik Kunst.
As Robert-Houdin observed, a magician is in fact an actor playing the role of a magician. And when there are two of them on stage, they’re usually playing the role of a happy couple as well: friends or lovers whose collaborative rapport is meant to put us at our ease and provide a reassuring backdrop for the technical feats of wizardry on show. There’s plenty of mileage, therefore, in pulling at the seams of that relationship and seeing what happens when professional codependence is set against personal friction. There are three comedy magic shows at this year’s Fringe that do just that, featuring conjuring performed by duos in character as couples with more than their share of issues.
It’s an approach that relies on a balance between decent magic tricks and engaging, amusing character work. Unfortunately Die Magik Kunst struggles on both counts. Grainger and Hans are supposedly lifelong buddies who grew up in Nazi Germany, found success in Vegas, lost it, and are now on the comeback trail with Hans, the slightly younger and healthier one, harboring some long-gestating resentment against Grainger. The duo perform from beneath full-head latex masks which, though eye-catching, make emotional expression next to impossible. Given that they barely speak either, it’s hard to get to know them in any detail. But the focus of the show isn’t really on their rapport so much as so-so tricks and tired slapstick jokes about failing older bodies plus a Nazi gag or two.
There’s also a whiff of political incorrectness about Peter and Bambi Heaven: The Magic Inside. The duo in question here are young-ish Aussie lovers whose magic act is an expression of their mutual infatuation and simple bloody-minded force of will in getting it on stage and seeing it through. There’s a running theme of Bambi, a former cage dancer, being excessively sexual and ‘out of control’, with the mildly Partridge-esque Peter continually obliged to physically rein her in. It’s a regressive set-up yet the performances (by Gypsy Wood and Asher Treleaven) are so committed, funny and endearing that it’s impossible not to get swept along. The tricks are deliberately shonky but the production is smart and on point.
The most interesting of the shows is It’s a Kinda Magic!, featuring Duo Bogof. These two are a long-married couple who are pretty much done with each other – he’s a continual disappointment to her, she’s an embarrassment to him and the show is basically a grinding material obligation, although they’re still capable of taking pleasure in it when it goes well. There’s considerable emotional depth here, partly through bittersweet comic videos that open up the pair’s lives in peculiar and affecting ways. And the tricks are highly inventive – not as magic per se but for the way they use video technology to play around with perception in simple yet conceptually ingenious ways. A final cautionary note: if you haven’t gathered by now, these magic shows aren’t really suitable for children.
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Other things I’ve seen
I’ve also seen plenty of shows beyond those I’ve been covering for the Scotsman, though I haven’t had a whole lot of time to write about them. A few quick words here about those, then…
I was happy to get a chance through Forest Fringe to participate in a project I’d heard lots about, Rosana Cade’s powerfully simple one-to-one show, Walking:Holding. It’s actually is not so much one-to-one as six-to-one: as the sole audience member, you’re taken to a spot where you meet someone with whom you hold hands for a five-minute stroll around the city streets. They then hand you off to another participant for another five minutes and so on. There’s no script, just conversation and a couple of set components – a certain question from one person, a look at your reflection with another. It’s potent stuff, instantly intimate and relaxed on the one hand, strangely new and disorienting on the other. With male participants it felt somewhat like the close-yet-vigilant experience of holding my boyfriend’s hand; with a female participant I felt a bit of the access to normative symbolic power that I guess straight couples get all the time; with an older participant I felt a mutual kind of caregiving; and with a visually impaired participant I felt a sense of responsibility (which I suspect was patronising and misplaced). Overall, there was a push-pull of vulnerability and empowerment that gestured towards better ways of relating to one another as individuals and society. I loved it.
Another stand-out was (I Could Go On Singing) Over the Rainbow at Summerhall by FK Alexander, who happened to be one of my hand-holders too. This was another high-concept piece based in an ostensibly simple, repetitive pattern that yielded surprising depths. The audience is shown into a smallish basement room already reverberating to loud white-noise-like audio, where Alexander stands in front of two black-clad assistants at mixing desks. The sound remains intensely high as the show begins with heavy beats added in: one self-selecting audience member steps forward and hands Alexander a ticket; she dons a sparkly black jacket and red slippers, applies a touch of make-up, takes the punter’s hand, looks into their eyes and sings Over the Rainbow over a track, barely audible under the noise, of Judy Garland singing it too. Bright lights flash at the climactic high note, Alexander kisses the punter on the cheek, smiles and thanks them, then steps back, removes her shoes and jacket, takes a swig of water or bite of food and waits for the process to start again.
This happens about a dozen times over the hour. The repetition at first threatens to be boring or even, given the noise, aggravating. But it soon settles into the status of ritual, something like a sacrament. Alexander’s physical gestures and vocal delivery cleave to a distinct pattern but the exchange with each audience member is of course different. There’s a palimpsest of repetitions at work: Alexander repeats Judy Garland’s performance, of course, but also hints at the repetition involved in any performer’s working life: do it, rest, repeat (not least at the Fringe). There’s also the gay-anthemic context in which Over the Rainbow has been repeated over the years – the sacramental aspect – as well as the transactional ritual of the exchange of the ticket and the gentle competition among those present to take their place at the altar.
For a bit of queer sacramentalism you can’t go wrong with Christeene. This year’s show, Trigger, finds the beautifully foetid swamp witch on terrific form, with a powerful set of mostly new hip hop-infused bangers, all tied together with her own brand of radical naïvété. Gotta set the ponies free, gotta keep your tank filled, a hole is a hole, a banana is a conduit to the world. This is church, in the bowels of the Underbelly, the “butthole of the castle”. Christeene could also be regularly spotted around town – enchanté – including a late spot at the Assembly Checkpoint as part of the Supperclub, filling the converted church with Patti Smith’s Pissing in a River and looking and feeling like a racoon loose in the house.
More queer celebration at the weekly Dive and Summerhall present… C U Next Tuesday Cabaret party, a mix of set acts and guest spots. This year’s theme was homage, prompting tributes to icons like Divine and David Bowie. Trans performer and playwright Jo Clifford took to the rainbow soapbox to affirm that “as we change the toilets, we change the world”. And host Miss Annabel Sings channeled Prince for a rousing revivalist welcome and Leigh Bowery for a sensational closing number that was like a dirty nativity.
Seiriol Davies’s chamber musical How to Win Against History was both tongue-in-cheek and deeply felt, which was apt for the story of Henry Cyril Paget, fifth Marquis of Anglesey, a flaming queer late Victorian who splurged one of the Empire’s great fortunes on theatrical dreams and follies before dying young, and whose story just about survives despite his family’s best efforts. Davies is deliciously askew as Paget, the centre of a fabulously zingy, cheeky tragedy that raises its victim to martyr status without pretending he wasn’t a bit of a monster. It’s also a very canny balance of formal accessibility and political radicalism, with plenty of serious fun to be had around the terms ‘real people’ and ‘regrettably’. Fruity verbiage too.
It was a pleasure to revisit David Benson’s, Think No Evil of Us: My Life With Kenneth Williams, which is now 20 years old. I had remembered Benson’s uncanny impersonation and the deeply ambivalent sense of love, appreciation, bitterness and suffering it evokes – the doomed effusiveness of the young Kenneth (“I am one of the finer things in life”), the sour certainty of the old (“I’ll kill myself, that’ll show ’em”). I remembered less clearly the moving and sensitive material about Benson’s mother’s mental illness although she provides the show’s finest line: “it’s only the voices in my head keep me sane”.
There was more delectable poetic lunacy from Paul Vickers in Twonkey’s Mumbo Jumbo Hotel, the latest in the Twonkey cycle of peculiar puppetry, song, storytelling and bizarre prop work. The Wheel of Psychic Knickers remains in place along with challenges such as whether he can feed a coconut frog enough of Peggy’s raspberry spaghetti to turn a lump of wood into Pinocchio, the squeezebox ballerina. A drunk, violent baby, the zinc tears of Jesus and a turkey dinner on top of a wardrobe in an alley are also involved. Apart from the singular sensibility, Vickers’s rich, reedy vocals, and his palpable pleasure in performance, one of the main pleasures of a Twonkey show is always seeing who is convulsed in hysterics and who remains stony-faced throughout.
A second bite of the Twonkey cherry in Twonkey’s Drive-In: Jennifer’s Robot Arm, Vickers’s first play, in which, under the influence of a malign semi-imaginary neighbour boy, a girl cuts off her arm to the consternation of her dappy dad and jaded mum. A passing professor (Vickers) might have the solution but at a steep cost. It’s a weirdly colourful and unsettling piece with shades of Brimstone and Treacle or even Teorema, teetering between grotesque caricature and genuine pathos, buoyed by strong performances that locate it somewhere between David Lynch and Vic and Bob.
Fun times at Yeti’s Demon Dive Bar, the sketch comedy show from the EastEnd Cabaret team. There was an air of faint hysteria to the whole thing the night I went – possibly hungover Fringe Monday exhaustion, possibly good clown work, but it made the whole thing go with a bang. A distinct departure from the EastEnd Cabaret characters, this offered surreal musical fun, clever call-backs, delirious audience work and lots of properly daft laughs.
I enjoyed Julia Croft’s If There’s Not Dancing at the Revolution, I’m Not Coming, a whistle-stop perf-art tour of the cinematic male gaze involving the constant removal of clothes, the surprising appearance of food and drink, and witty use of filmic material from All About Eve to Psycho to Basic Instinct.
I also enjoyed The Singing Psychic, Marysia Trembecka’s endearing creation – a kind of astrologer who dishes out life advice based on chart-topping songs from audience members’ birth dates. It’s great when it hits the target but the real heart of the show is in the story of a character determined to follow her passion and find her own way.
The iniquities of the housing market, the pressures of living with an artistic partner and a bit of light stalking come together in Sh!t Theatre’s Letters to Windsor House. Using letters sent to past residents of their slightly dodgy council flat, as well as lo-fi video footage and cardboard props, Louise Mothersole and Becca Biscuit explore the transient lives of Generation Rent and sing about adult babies.
Figs in Wigs were fun in their show Often Onstage, which included cod-Shakespearean round dancing, boyband pastiche and corporate gobbledygook. Beneath a bizarre array of material were connections to do with career development and sustainability, populism, credibility and success. Remember: “fear is the cockblocker of dreams!”
A quick mention for Cabaret Chinwag, the weekly panel-cum-mixed I held at Fringe Central each Thursday afternoon. I was really happy with it and am grateful to guests Bourgeois & Maurice, Hot Brown Honey, Lili La Scala, Miss Annabel Sings, LoUis CYfer, Sven Ratzke, Michael Roulston, Sarah-Louise Young, Tomás Ford and Mamoru Iriguchi. I think my highlights were Lili’s haunting a capella rendition of a Scottish folk song, Tomás gently slapping a punter’s face to the tune of YMCA, and Annabel singing What a Wonderful World to a real-life actual human baby.
Also a big thank you to Kate Kavanagh and Laura Kressly of the Network of Independent Critics, a bold and vital new project to promote thoughtful, innovative critical engagement without whose crowdfunded subsidised accommodation project I wouldn’t have been able to spend as much time at the festival as I did, see as much or write as much.
And finally here’s a picture from Pollyanna’s production of Brexit: The Musical.
Thanks, Edinburgh! Bye!
Brexit – The Musical at Pollyanna, Edinburgh 2016
