Here’s the second tranche of Scotsman reviews from my brief trip to this year’s Edinburgh Fringe. You can access the first tranche here and details of shows can be found here.
Love Song to Lavender Menace
Five stars for this gorgeous two-hander, a warm, complex and passionately queer tribute to an 80s Edinburgh bookshop.
Read the full Scotsman review here.
A Generous Lover
La JohnJoseph’s elegant, incisive and intoxicating update of the Orpheus myth engages with mental health, trans identity and glamour.
Read the full Scotsman review here.
Fascinating Aïda’s Adèle Anderson
Who knew a show about disappointment, depression and death could be so much fun? Beautiful musicality too.
Read the full Scotsman review here.
Lady Rizo: Red, White and Indigo
A characteristically wild, witty and transporting show about current American woes, from guns to fame to misogyny.
Read the full Scotsman review here (halfway down the page).
The last three reviews have been published in the Scotsman but not yet made their way online so here they are in full. I’ll replace with links as and when they appear.
Myra DuBois: We Wish You a Myra Christmas
If you’re partial to an acid-tongued drag queen from Rotherham with funny bones, a fine line in withering put-downs and a relaxed attitude towards scripted material then you’re in luck: Christmas has come early thanks to Myra DuBois! This festive-themed set is unapologetically plonked into the middle of August with admirable chutzpah, its unseasonally seasonal vibe defined by a cardboard Christmas tree and fireplace, DuBois’s remarkable red, green and gold ensemble and enough Quality Streets to lob at half the audience. There are also a couple of yule-themed medleys and singalongs to drive the point home.
For the most part, though, We Wish You a Myra Christmas sees DuBois doing what she does best: riffing off the audience in her trademark style, incredibly quick-witted and frequently caustic yet keeping the audience on side, engaging in passing with progressive politics while poking fun at aspects of the gay scene and everyday culture. It’s something of a marvel to see her, say, identifying an audience member as an “executive sports lesbian” or proposing that Stephen Hawking’s body might have tasted like “a beefy yoghurt” and then gauging, engaging and adjusting the mood in the room depending on who’s tickled, who’s offended and who’s just along for the ride – and commenting on what she’s doing as she does it for good measure.
It’s just as well that DuBois so an assured in this respect because there’s not a huge amount of prepared material in the show and much of the format relies on coaxing good contributions from the crowd. An additional set-piece or two might add a bit more turkey to the Christmas dinner table, as it were. But that won’t put a damper on things when there’s more than enough mince pies, chipolatas and stuffing to go round.
Briefs: Close Encounters
Each year, the Australian performance collective behind Briefs goes from strength to strength. Not only do they continue to refresh their flagship circus-boylesque showcase but they also produce the awesome Hot Brown Honey troupe and this year have brought over the gorgeously bizarre Yana Alana as well. All this shows another aspect of the commitment to nurturing and supporting smart, provocative and uproarious performance of the kind that makes Briefs’ self-titled shows so consistently fabulous.
This latest show, Briefs: Close Encounters, is loosely themed around a futuristic, science-fiction vibe, realised through some nifty hi-tech lighting rigs, space suits and hugely assured compère Shivanna’s out-of-this-world wardrobe, which roams from post-imperial pomp to bronzed iconicity, fierce alien queen to tangerine-fuschia explosion.
The opening group number sets the tone – not of futuristic SF but of glam fun with its campy take on classical musical routines, all pastel-hued top hats, tails and outsized powder puffs. Individual numbers maintain the company’s high standards, with terrific aerial work variously incorporating hoops, cages and striptease and a neat alarm-clock-based speciality act. There’s naughty, colourful fun in the science lab with Louis Biggs and Mark Winmill and a gloriously surreal domestic dance routine from Harry Clayton-Wright as a frustrated housewife and Tomas Gundry Greenfield as a lamp (just go with it).
Perhaps most impressive of all is the rolling crescendo of turns that brings things to a climax – a breathless success of stadium lighting, bump-and-grind backflips, spinning set-pieces and electronically illuminated hula hoops, juggling pins and bikinis. Most delicious of all is Clayton-Wright finding conspicuous pleasure in a very unexpected way – not, for once, with an eye on audience enjoyment but for what feels like the performer’s own gratification on their own terms. And that’s the basic, and very welcome, Briefs message: showcasing self-determined pleasure and encouraging it in others.
No Kids
The new production by Ad Infinitum (Translunar Paradise, Ballad of the Burning Star) is a two-hander from artistic directors Nir Paldi and George Mann, an off-stage gay couple exploring on stage the genuine question of whether they should pursue parenthood. It’s an engaging, energetic and thoughtful piece that usefully questions the pervasive but possibly harmful idea that having children is the natural and noble thing to do, and the pressures and assumptions that come with it.
Paldi and Mann play themselves and other real and imagined roles – and regularly break into Madonna-themed numbers – as they explore various related matters, including a miraculous conception, adoption and its intrusive process, surrogacy and its complex geopolitics and the pernicious effects of homophobia in public and in the home.
Yet, for all its questioning, No Kids remains surprisingly conservative. “Straight people don’t own parenthood.” Paldi insists, but even as the show exposes some of the limitations of normative family life, it never imagines any alternatives, remaining unquestioningly wedded to the default model of monogamous nuclear domesticity. Nor, for that matter, does it admit that the new arrival might be LGBTQ itself: it’s easier, apparently, to conceive of a Nobel prizewinner or a second Hitler than a queer child.
