Edinburgh Fringe 2009 review: Crave

Sarah Kane is a compass point in the world of edgy student theatre, and this year students from London’s Royal Holloway boldly go where many have gone before.

Crave is Kane’s second last play. It was premiered at the Fringe in 1998, just a few months before her suicide aged 28, and has since been obstinately reappearing in Edinburgh year after year like an angry ghost. Typically considered her most mature work, it’s an unflinching, anarchic projection of her disturbed psyche, told through the morbid mutterings of four strangers in a bar. They are the fragmented voices of one shattered mind despairing over sexual and familial rejection. Together they paint the portrait of a nervous breakdown.

Essentially Crave is a meaningless play, valued for its wild uniqueness and bolstered by the premium of its writer’s death. It has been staged to great effect in some triumphantly creative productions in the past and there will be more good productions in the future, but this particular one is a dud. Crave needs a thoughtful and enterprising director to interpret it in their own way and play around with it. Here, there’s no added value.

It’s a lacklustre narration of a shallow script handled by actors who look cheerfully drama-school, who look smug about putting on a Sarah Kane play, who look like they’re laughing when they grimace in Kane’s incurable agony.

Crave is a blank canvas and a blank canvas is what Royal Holloway Theatre has brought along to the Fringe. Where’s the imagination? What are they trying to achieve?

(Originally featured in Festmag)

Edinburgh Fringe 2009 review: Boy in Darkness

Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy has been described as a fantasy of manners. It depicts a world governed by an absurd yet ironically familiar internal logic akin to Candide’s or Gulliver’s where barons and earls and heirs quarrel and sulk interminably over nothing.

Boy in Darkness is a short story based in the same world but written separately from the iconic trilogy as an off-beat supplement. Since the author’s premature death in 1968 it largely remained out-of-print until it was rereleased in 2007 as part of a motley Mervyn Peake compendium and follows the down-the-rabbit-hole adventure of Titus Groan, the 77th Earl of Gormenghast, as he escapes the banal safety of his castle on his 14th birthday.

Curious Directive’s adaptation has the qualities of a purring cat. It’s a hypnotically serene and enchantingly peculiar cross-breed of physical theatre and puppet show which brings to mind children’s fantasy fiction. In this capacity it’s perhaps a little misplaced in its late evening timeslot, but its softness is endearing, comforting even, and walking out of the show at the end feels a bit like leaving a hot bath after exercise.

At a glance the performers come across as young and inexperienced, but on closer inspection their movements are elegantly economical, accurately animalistic when they need to be, and the lines they speak don’t feel overeducated like they so often do in the hands of drama students. Yann Allsopp is unassumingly good in the lead role, with Fiona Mikel bringing tons of charm to the more demanding part she plays.

Edinburgh Fringe 2009 review: The Lamplighter’s Lament

There’s an Italian expression that often features in long descriptions of certain Renaissance paintings: chiaroscuro, or literally, light-dark. The theory is that bright, vibrant colours contrasted with thick, dark shadows create a striking, majestic beauty, such as in a Caravaggio painting.

Rich Rusk and Gomito Theatre Company’s The Lamplighter’s Lament is, for lack of better words, an exploration of chiaroscuro. Its story is vague like a distant memory, open to interpretation and limited only by your imagination. Three performers who uniformly look like the Mad Hatter mix puppetry, music and tricks of light to paint the picture of a windswept seaside town, and the lonely existence of a lamplighter.

Throughout the show the stage remains as dark as the depths of the lamplighter’s soul. Firefly-like wisps of light, at once the lamplighter’s torch and his ardent spirit, dance constantly in the shadows in a curious ritual that gently brings life to the puppetry, the ghostly stage lights and the myth.

Bedlam Theatre’s acoustics lend much to the invaluable music and sound effects, without which the play would have undoubtedly felt dour. The pre-recorded accompaniment brings something more profound to the puppetry’s whimsy, segueing from softly poignant piano tunes to Celtic folksongs to the caressing sounds of surf.

It’s a relaxing, charmingly incomprehensible show that brings out the troupe’s bohemian exuberance in rainbow colours. There’s a striking chiaroscuro beauty to the visual effects, but one that becomes banal through repetition, and one that all-too-lazily relies on the sound system and the audience’s generous imagination for sustenance.

(Originally featured in Festmag)

Edinburgh Fringe 2009 review: The Devoured

“Run from the beast, run from the beast, run from the beast…”

As the audience enters the room, Badac Theatre Company’s Steve Lambert is running on the spot, dressed in a torn and faded prisoner’s frock and staring wide-eyed into the spotlight above. With a coarse voice he is chanting “run from the beast,” the beast of Nazi oppression. As the lights go down we are on the cusp of the Holocaust.

Audiences and critics will divide sharply into two groups over this vicious tour-de-force as they most vociferously did over Badac’s 2008 offering. The Factory was a highly billed situational theatre piece that turned a part of the Pleasance into a network of Auschwitz gas chambers. Badac Theatre Company shaved their heads, armed themselves with bats and bile, and invited audiences on an authentic tour of Jewish persecution inside. Here, the scope is narrowed to a one-man affair and a small venue with seats.

The group will admire Lambert for his wild and reckless energy as he runs, shouts, spits and sweats without a single moment’s respite as the Jewish ghost he incarnates flees in abject terror from the beast. The performance is a single, unbroken climax, an unflinching ode to derangement and dehumanisation.

“Laughter and gunshots, laughter and gunshots, laughter and fucking gunshots” – short, unequivocal descriptions that spray out with his spit like machine gun fire, volley after volley after volley. “Constant, insane, fucking noise, constant, insane, fucking noise”- no time for reflection, no room for reason, just an agonisingly long, visceral imagining of what it might have been like inside the head of a Holocaust victim as the world around him collapsed.

The second group will see Badac’s unrelenting evocations of torture and terror as an obscene and distasteful orgy of aggression. There’s not a single moment of lyricism or melancholy or contemplation. The story is quite unashamedly one-layer deep and excessive in its brutality to the point of absurdity.

In one segment, Lambert describes the beast armed with barbed bats attacking fellow prisoners in his concentration camp, getting closer and ever closer as victims fall limp to the ground around him. A chant is repeated 20 times in a horrific musical frenzy, a maddening factory-line cacophony: “Jewish cunt. Rips the flesh. They scream. Nearer.” It’s pornographically simple, and worse still, it’s easy to imagine that Badac are cheaply exploiting one of the most sensitive of modern historical subjects for dramatic effect.

As a machine running out of power and coming to a grinding halt, The Devoured eventually just stops, and as a ghost phasing out of existence, Steven Lambert just turns around and quietly disappears through the curtains. By this point his prisoner’s frock has changed colour and is weighing heavily on his shoulders – it has been through a lot and absorbed an inordinate amount of Lambert’s sweat, in the most intensely energetic of monologues. It’s a striking reminder of the enormous commitment this actor has made towards Badac’s principles in a production which—notwithstanding difficult moral questions—undoubtedly packs a punch.

(Originally featured in Festmag)

Edinburgh Fringe 2009 review: Luck

Staged in the former Spiegel Tent and by a theatre company called Making Strange, Luck comes labelled with weirdness and whimsy. And true to its vibes, Megan Riordan pulls together a wonderfully capricious multimedia show in which she spills the beans on her peculiar upbringing and the tricks of her father’s trade as a professional gambler.

And the beans go everywhere with her hyperactive discussions flitting from one topic to another like a roulette ball bouncing recklessly between slots without ever settling. Sentences are left unfinished, subjects abandoned without conclusion, always restless, always in a rush to move on, like the impulses of a gambler, like the ephemerality of luck, cha-ching, cha-ching, cha-ching!

But it’s not her problem, and that’s because we the audience are in control – sort of. Those in the front row are given dice, coins and whatnot with which to determine the show’s fate every three minutes or so. With a bit of luck—and no two shows are the same—she’ll divulge some fascinating details about how her father’s team of elites gained an advantage on the house at Blackjack.

At other times we get discussions about superstition, a wild dance here and there, and—this may be what her show is really all about—confessions of her insecurities. And thus emerges from all the organised chaos the poignant humanity of an individual terrified by the vertiginous complexities of chance and probability with which she was made to grow up. This, I’ve learned, is something called ‘constitutional luck’.

(As featured in Fest Magazine)

Edinbrugh Fringe 2009 review: Auto-Da-Fe

There’s a nostalgic vision of the Fringe in Edinburgh’s grassroots consciousness in which shows are like tapas, small treats to be cherished for their variety. Some plays aren’t to everyone’s taste, but part of the fun is in trying a bit of everything, and there’s a palpable sense of adventure in the air. The sun’s even shining. But in reality, visitors can’t afford to freely experiment, with landlords charging double on August rent and a cartel of big venues driving up ticket prices.

Fired Up Production Players’ Auto-Da-Fe is an oyster from the sepia-toned Fringe past. It’s modestly priced, lasts half an hour, and reaches out to punters on risibly garish fliers whilst being a perfectly decent, irreproachable production. It’s a little known play creditable to one Tennessee Williams who came up with about 50 such one-act plays over the years.

True, they’re as short in scope as they are short in running time. And there can be little doubt that they’ll remain in the dark while ambitious dramatists see them as lightweight alternatives to the Pulitzer-winner’s more obvious works. Then there’s the difficulty of selling a half-hour show to punters expecting at least an hour’s entertainment.

So this is a rare opportunity. It’s an eloquently written vignette about guilt and redemption set on a suburban porch in New Orleans that’s smoothly delivered by the American troupe who earnestly reproduce the playwright’s trademark mal-à-l’aise in very short time. I have a feeling, however, that the brevity of it will leave many of today’s audiences feeling short-changed.

(As featured in Fest Magazine)

Edinburgh Fringe 2009 review: Killing Me Softly

Last year, Richard Fry came to Edinburgh on a tentative mission to try out a new career. Now aged thirty-something, Fry’s life consisted of a rough childhood and a slew of unremarkable jobs, until a few years ago a fairytale-like twist changed his life beyond recognition. Turning up on a whim to a drama school’s auditions, he left with a scholarship and the promise of a life outside pub work. But promises are often white lies in the cutthroat world of the performing arts, and a pat on the back from a proud teacher doesn’t translate into food and a roof.

But Fry’s 2008 initial bid, a stunningly good monologue called Bully, did. Having checked into the dullest room in the Gilded Balloon, unfamiliar with Edinburgh and unknown to the world, he came out with enough praise and ticket sales to turn him professional. And so this year he’s not so much visiting the Fringe as setting up camp. Killing Me Softly, another home-brewed monologue in verse, is the crucial decider which will see him become either a one-hit wonder or a sure-hitter.

Fry’s theatre is a breed that bites and Killing Me Softly is quite unambiguously not a cuddly companion. With Bully-style volatility it swings from happy-clappy karaoke to a car crash, from a dirty joke to domestic torture. It’s a turbulent ride, but one fuelled by the sharpest wit and an unwavering, intense humanity that moves mountains. Killing Me Softly looks very good on the shelf next to Bully and it looks like Fry will be sticking around.

(As featured in Fest Magazine)