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Taking a show to the Edinburgh Fringe is more perilous than ever, so it’s refreshing to discover that artists are still taking artistic as well as financial risks. The standout shows this year are anything but safe bets, combining experimentation with impressive levels of thought and polish. You won’t find theatre like this anywhere else.
Nan, Me and Barbara Pravi
This isn’t a show with an easy elevator pitch, but watch it and its appeal is obvious. Hannah Maxwell’s autobiographical show starts in a mundane way. She’s sat on her nan’s sofa in Luton, eating cottage pie, summing up her warm relationship with the woman she’s caring for with zingy one-liners: “five decades of technology have passed her by, four waves of feminism barely splashed her toes”. But soon, it turns out her nan’s just fine, and it is Maxwell who’s struggling. She pours her boredom into an obsession with Eurovision star Barbara Pravi, one that leads her to learn French, master MI5 levels of espionage, and retreat into dizzying fantasies.
Maxwell’s got a suave, appealingly old-fashioned performance style, masking this story’s emotional sharp edges with jokes and showmanship. But eventually, her mask slips. This show is about so many things — caring for an elderly relative, infatuation, addiction — but ultimately it’s about one thing, which is learning to see patterns in your own behaviour, and beginning the painstaking work of unravelling them.
★★★★★
Summerhall to August 27
Gunter
Another hard-to-classify work, Dirty Hare’s Gunter, is an absolute joy. An all-female cast play, sing and conjure their way through the story of a 17th-century English witch trial, unearthed by real-life historian Lydia Higman (who just happens to play a mean electric guitar). In haunting scenes, unfolding to a bluesy soundtrack, the apparently bewitched Anne draws pins from her mouth, and dances with the kind of overt sexuality her community forbids. But Gunter is also a stranger creation than it might sound, full of odd juxtapositions and surprising tonal shifts. The town’s hysteria is mirrored in projected scenes of 20th-century football hooliganism. Spine-tingling folk harmonies are shattered by Higman’s blunt woman-on-the-street commentary. Naff indie guitar riffs clatter into scenes of demonic possession. This show is an incantation, working dark magic in a tiny room.
★★★★★
Summerhall to August 27
Concerned Others
As Fringe audiences fall for bleakly funny heroin caper Trainspotting Live, Concerned Others offers a different view of addiction. In this multimedia solo show from Scottish company Tortoise in a Nutshell, Alex Bird pans his video camera over microscopically small scenes of desolation made from inch-high model railway figures, their tiny grey faces assuming a troubling gauntness as they’re projected onto a big screen above his head.
Other screens show old public information adverts (“heroin screws you up”) or flash statistics (“Scotland has one of the highest rates of drug-related deaths in the developed world”). But Bird’s performance doesn’t feel didactic, thanks to a carefully assembled audio collage of real testimonies from people with first-hand knowledge. Their words argue powerfully against the shame-based “moral model” of addiction, revealing the trauma and social deprivation that drives people towards chemical consolations. It’ll stick in your mind as surely as Trainspotting’s infamous toilet scene.
★★★★☆
Summerhall to August 27
Dark Noon
Spaghetti Western movies depict Frontier life with misty-eyed affection. Isn’t it time someone rubbed the vaseline off the lens? Danish experimentalists fix + foxy reckon so. In their ugly, powerful performance Dark Noon, they collaborate with black South African actors to create an epic look at formative scenes from North America’s history. There are cowboy cruelties, sexual assaults, summary executions of native Americans in the dust. Audience members are dragged on to be sold a Coca-Cola, or to be sold off in a slave auction. A stage that was once bare earth fills with hastily erected wooden excrescences, like worm casts left by gold-digging colonialists. And all the while, the cast narrates this society’s dysfunction in the tones of the white anthropologists who once shaped the west’s unfavourable views of Africa: dispassionate, yet utterly damning.
★★★★☆
Pleasance at EICC to August 27
The Insider
Another excellent show from Denmark, Teater Katapult’s The Insider is a Faustian narrative of corporate greed. A suited man draws stick figures and outlines of stacks of cash on the walls of his glass cubicle. He’s discovered the CumEx tax evasion strategy, and it’s child’s play. Writer Anna Skov Jensen deftly shows how a young lawyer is nudged into embezzling millions as part of a cabal of colleagues who tell him that he’s not part of society, he’s above it: an apex predator, feeding on invisible victims. Christoffer Hvidberg Rønje is compelling to watch, full of inner torment as he tumbles into cocaine binges, rages at his children, and tries to justify himself to incredulous prosecutors. Audience members wear headphones, which use binaural sound to make his every panting breath or anxious heartbeat ricochet straight into our ears, thrilling and nightmarish.
★★★★☆
ZOO Southside to August 27
Dugsi Dayz
There are gentler horrors on offer in Sabrina Ali’s play Dugsi Dayz. Four British-Somali girls are stuck in Islamic school detention when the lights cut out, so in the absence of their teacher, they invent stories to terrify good Muslim children. By torchlight, one girl tells how her black-clad aunties sucked the life and freedom out of her like a swarm of vampires. Another tells of being sent back to Somalia by her mum to lose her westernised ways. When the bulbs flicker back on, there are lighter moments. This hijab-wearing ensemble cast are hilarious, as they gossip, bicker and break the rules to smuggle in vapes and make-up. Ali’s play manages to be culturally specific and universal all at once, sketching the familiar joys of teenage rebellion from a rarely seen perspective.
★★★★☆
Underbelly to August 27
The Ice Hole: A Cardboard Comedy
Being able to find pure childish joy is a skill, just as meditation is — and if you’ve mastered it, you’ll be delighted by The Ice Hole, a cardboard-based comedy by Compagnie le Fils du Grand Réseau that’s suitable for people of all ages. Two French blokes enthral a vast 750-seat space (one of the Fringe’s biggest) using only cardboard props that represent everything from planes to mermaids to mutual resentment. It all feels like a neatly packed metaphor for the whole Fringe: the endless ingenuity with limited resources, the performers growing to hate each other as they stretch themselves to their limits, the rapturous applause making the pains and paper cuts all worth it, at least for a few moments.
★★★★☆
Pleasance Courtyard to August 28
