fringe theatre

Hamlet, Ophelia – Part One, Edinburgh Festival Fringe

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What would Hamlet have been like as a child? Ophelia? Were they close? Did they squabble or were they the best of friends? Shakespearian Lovers, a new female-led company from Italy, attempt to answer these questions in Hamlet, Ophelia – Part One. In this version Hamlet is played by a woman, bringing a quiet, feminine sensitivity to the role considered one of Shakespeare’s greatest. Despite performing in their second language, the two women have a sound connection with the contemporary English text that shows the two grow from playful children to adults at Gertrude’s wedding to her second husband. There are some major issues with staging and the ending needs work, but this gentle, little play stays true to Hamlet’s personality as reflected in Shakespeare’s text and has the strong foundations of a good script.

Of the two performers, the perky Ophelia is the stronger. She has a natural curiosity and handles the English script comfortably. Hamlet is much more reserved and often too quiet to easily hear, but she has an intellectual intensity that suits the character. Though Hamlet’s femininity is not disguised, masculine pronouns are used throughout – the relationship in this piece wouldn’t differ from one gender to the other, Ophelia is clearly female but Hamlet’s ambiguity interferes with any potential statement about his gender.

The script has a sensible progression through childhood and into adulthood. They play as equals but as they grow, the difference between the son of a king and the daughter of a minister informs their interactions. The affection they have for each other is genuine and heartwarming, though the circumstances life deals them requires formal restraint, even through teenage hormones. The ending needs development and resolution in order to emphasise why the it is where it is, and the reason why this story is being told needs clarification, but the characterisation is sound.

The staging is the primary issue with this production. The venue is too small to allow space to be clearly differentiated through either distance or lighting and there is no backstage. Private moments lose their intimacy and physical expression is restricted, particularly when they are playing, and Hamlet tries to express his grief for his father’s death.

This is some promising work from a new international company. Even though a native English speaker’s advice would be useful to sort out a few minor mispronunciations, the confidence and ability both actors display in performing in a foreign language is impressive. With additional work on the script and fully realised staging, this has potential to be a great two-hander.

Hamlet, Ophelia – Part One runs through 28th August.

The Play’s the Thing UK is committed to covering fringe and progressive theatre in London and beyond. It is run entirely voluntarily and needs regular support to ensure its survival. For more information and to help The Play’s the Thing UK provide coverage of the theatre that needs reviews the most, visit its patreon.

Scorched, Edinburgh Festival Fringe

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Jack, feeble in body and mind, wiles away the days watching news broadcasts from operation Desert Storm. The former WWII soldier, now safe and looked after in a care home, vividly recounts memories from his youth and on the front line. He may not be aware of the present, but his past is ever present and will not let me rest. Solo show Scorched is a moving and honest look at veterans’ experiences of combat and ageing, leaving the troubling feeling that society is not fulfilling its responsibility to this vulnerable demographic.

Lisle Turner’s script, inspired by her grandfather’s life, is an expressionistic snapshot of his thoughts at the twilight of his life. Stationed in Egypt during the war, we hear tales of heat, explosions, and beautiful women interspersed with memories from his childhood. The storyline is loosely constructed; it is episodic rather than wholly linear. This structure works well considering that these are Jack’s memories he plays out for himself rather than for an audience arbitrarily included in the action without being allocated any clear identity.

There are some beautiful design elements: Jack remembers tattooing himself and this is projected on his arm rather than shown with makeup. To see something normally considered permanent conveyed through an ephemeral form is a fitting reminder that nothing truly lasts forever and Jack is nearly at the end of his life. The loveliest of other whimsical projections is on a cascade of sand poured from a dinner tray. This sand is everywhere, like the memories that cling onto Jack’s deteriorating mind and are constantly discovered in unsuspecting places – a clever device either by Turner or director Claire Coache. A simple puppet is used well but not enough, as are mundane objects that transform into others more exciting – an umbrella becomes a fishing rod, a footstool is a motorbike. This object manipulation is a lovely surprise and suits Jack’s mental state well, so it could be utilised further to comment on the childhood of old age.

Robin Berry plays Jack with power and pathos, initially with a delicate frailty that gives way to a younger, more powerful man who enjoys boxing, horse riding, dancing and defending his country. Berry has a strong physical presence that is eminently watchable and a range that makes him believe both as the older and younger Jack.

Strengthening and streamlining the staging and theatrical devices will help make the script feel less like a random collection of memories, and reordering some of scenes would also have the same effect. Jack is a fantastic character and the play is a fitting tribute to elderly veterans, though also serves to pay homage to a generation that soon will no longer be with us.

Scorched runs through 29th August.

The Play’s the Thing UK is committed to covering fringe and progressive theatre in London and beyond. It is run entirely voluntarily and needs regular support to ensure its survival. For more information and to help The Play’s the Thing UK provide coverage of the theatre that needs reviews the most, visit its patreon.

The Ruff Guide to Shakespeare, Edinburgh Festival Fringe

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There’s a good amount of Shakespeare-based work for children and young people at the fringe, which is a great way to introduce children to his work as well as give theatre makers a chance to experiment with different styles when approaching the bard’s text. The Ruff Guide to Shakespeare is a mashup of his most popular plays and characters with a biography of his life. There’s a lot packed into an hour, perhaps too much for the primary school middle years that are the target audience age. The show is otherwise well written, well performed and the story line constructed out of Shakespeare’s life gives it a solid grounding on which to sample extracts of his work.

Six Bristol Old Vic students perform Toby Hulse’s script. Though there isn’t a weak link amongst the cast, the strongest by far is Georgia Frost. She has a charisma and stage presence that the others lack, though they all show promise. The company handles their verse well, maintains high energy and warmly encourage the audience of children to join in.

The script is quick and punchy, most valuable for giving the young audience context about Shakespeare as a person in a easily digestible format framed by his “seven ages of man” monologue – a fantastic idea that parallels a short piece of text to a story. There are gags, games and songs that are interactive and playful, though more time could be taken within each activity in order to allow the audience to engage fully. The characters and scenes that are included are some of the most well known, kept short and explained well. There are a lot of them though, and the sheer amount is potentially overwhelming for the younger children in the audience.

Comparable to the Reduced Shakespeare Company’s The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged), this is a jolly, friendly romp through Shakespeare’s life and works that’s great for a young audience. Some tweaking to either cut some of the characters or pitch it to slightly older children would make this an even stronger piece, but it’s polished, slick and jolly good fun compared to similar shows on offer.

The Ruff Guide to Shakespeare runs through 19th August.

The Play’s the Thing UK is committed to covering fringe and progressive theatre in London and beyond. It is run entirely voluntarily and needs regular support to ensure its survival. For more information and to help The Play’s the Thing UK provide coverage of the theatre that needs reviews the most, visit its patreon.

Lucy McCormick: Triple Threat, Edinburgh Festival Fringe

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A cultural relic of its time, the bible is hardly pro-women. Lucy McCormick, here incarnated as one of those vapid pop stars who evangelically (and often inappropriately) rallies for the cause they’re currently backing, wants to turn the spotlight on the new testament’s women. She focuses on their underwritten stories, their emotional involvement in Jesus’ life, and all the fingering and angel snogging that was left out of the text we know so well in Western culture.

Trashy, tasteless, obscene, and absolutely excellent, McCormick’s newest show pushes theatre to to limits of acceptability and beyond – any further and it would be pornographic (arguably it already is), though Lucy McCormick: Triple Threat is still not one for those easily offended. Accompanied by two muscly dancers in Calvins, her three-act play that she dutifully explains scene by scene is the story of Jesus Christ. She plays Mary Magdalene, Jesus’ mother Mary, and Jesus himself, with her backing dancers in the supporting roles. It’s also very funny, though laughter swells from amusement as much as it does from discomfort.

This gig-theatre piece is interspersed with appropriate pop songs at key moments of the story, accompanied by excellent dancing and raw emotional outbursts. Her personal life bleeds into the act as she slowly falls apart in the wake of the pressures of celebrity life. Take all of those public celeb breakdowns and multiply them by hundreds with a lot more nudity and mess, and you get something resembling the whirlwind of in-yer-face chaos that is Lucy’s stage persona in this piece.

Her commitment to her cause is unquestionable, but the fact that her character finds the actions that unfold acceptable is disturbing, yet all too familiar. That we can watch someone fall to bits with no dignity and laugh at their plight, righteously judging them, is a powerful comment on the levels of voyeurism and exhibitionism that are now bombard us through all of media’s incarnations.

Lucy McCormick: Triple Threat, for all its deliberate mess and audience discomfort, is a fantastically considered social commentary executed with precision and high levels of consideration and skill. It’s the epitome of fringe shows, and a great one at that.

Lucy McCormick: Triple Threat runs through 28th August.

The Play’s the Thing UK is committed to covering fringe and progressive theatre in London and beyond. It is run entirely voluntarily and needs regular support to ensure its survival. For more information and to help The Play’s the Thing UK provide coverage of the theatre that needs reviews the most, visit its patreon.

Missing the Mark: Three Shakespeare Appropriations, Edinburgh Festival Fringe

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As great as it is to see Shakespeare inspiring contemporary theatre makers to create derivative work, like any new writing it has the chance of missing the mark by a long shot. Annika Nyman’s Romeo and Juliet Post Scriptum poses the question, “What happens and Romeo and Juliet don’t die?” and the answer isn’t pretty, nor well thought out or well-written. Z Theatre Company’s The Female Question gives us Shakespeare and his female alter-ego bickering over whether or not they shortchanged his female characters, from whom we hear a lot of moaning. MacBain, part of Summerhall’s Big In Belgium season, retells Macbeth through a hybrid of drug-addled Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love and Shakespeare’s text, giving us MacBain.

Romeo and Juliet Post Scriptum is such a lovely premise, but the route Nyman takes is inexplicably far from the characters Shakespeare created. Romeo is the main issue here. Nyman presents him as an indecisive coward who now regrets the whole “feigning death and running away” idea. Deciding that family is more important than love, he wants to go home and make up with his dad. Juliet, unimpressed by this, tries to convince him to stick to the plan and when he is unconvinced, they argue for pretty much the rest of the play. They speak in stilted English that isn’t Elizabethan, but it’s certainly not modern either, preventing the actors from connecting their text. The characters partly make up, then they argue again. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. The rushed ending is disconnected from the all the fighting leading up to the moment, making the overarching effect one of pettiness that doesn’t relate to Shakespeare’s characters and no clear message about their actions.

It’s 400 years since Shakespeare died, and he and his female alter ego meet for their annual discussion in his office. She’s trying to convince him of their legacy, but he doesn’t believe her. Hamlet has been bugging him lately, and he’s feeling like he didn’t do his female characters any justice, hence The Female Question. He talk to the skull on his desk, texts on his phone and has a desk covered in books about himself and papers. Quite what is occupying his time since his death is never revealed, neither is how he got a mobile phone, why there are two of him and why Hamlet keeps giving him grief. Some of his characters come in for a chat, but the through-line (that was never really made clear to begin with) only tenuously connects these characters to Shakespeare’s inner dilemma. This could likely be due the fact that there are two of the same dead person and the rest of the characters aren’t real. Whilst the idea to give Shakespeare’s women another crack at the spotlight is admirable, the execution is muddy, badly performed and has no solid resolution or narrative structure.

MacBain has the most promise due to it’s Summerhall location, but this one-trick pony also disappointed. Despite excellently imposing lighting and sound design, the performances of Kurt and Courtney off their heads playing at talk show interviews that randomly morph into a two-person Macbeth with children’s toys is almost completely pointless. There is no commentary on the Macbeths’ power dynamic, sexuality or guilt. The only thing of any interest is the introduction of “the babe that milks me,” a son that eventually committed suicide. Otherwise, the banter between Kurt and Courtney, a powerful, mythic couple in their own right, comes across as self-indulgent stoners. Watching MacBain is like being the only sober person at a party where everyone else is off their nut, having a great time making in-jokes and reminiscing, only truly coherent to each other. When they are finally pinned and silenced beneath a descending sheet of plexiglass covered in vibrating cutlery, it is sweet relief.

In three unrelated productions that have premises with potential to offer fresh insight into Shakespeare and his work, the lack of dramaturgy and clear concept is painfully apparent. None of them managed to have any meaningful follow-through and most ended with an unspoken question hanging in the air – “what was the point of that?”

The Play’s the Thing UK is committed to covering fringe and progressive theatre in London and beyond. It is run entirely voluntarily and needs regular support to ensure its survival. For more information and to help The Play’s the Thing UK provide coverage of the theatre that needs reviews the most, visit its patreon.

A Dream of Dying, Edinburgh Festival Fringe

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On 16th June 2009, the body of a man was found dead on a beach near Sligo, Ireland. He had given his name as Peter Bergmann at his hotel, but postmortem investigations determined that was an alias. In the days running up to his death, CCTV recorded the man methodically moving around Sligo but taking advantage of cameras’ blind spots, he disposed of all items that could possibly be used to identify him. Monologue A Dream of Dying creates a young man who plans such a death in his future in an attempt to justify why Bergmann might have died the way he did. This quiet, reflective piece may not be the most exciting theatre at the fringe, but its subject matter is a sensitive look at life’s inevitability and the desire to control these final moments.

Lawrence Boothman embodies the fictionalised Bergmann, his friends and family from childhood through to recent graduate on the cusp of the rest of his life. As he contemplates what life will bring him – career, wife, children, grandchildren – he expresses the lingering fear that it could all go wrong. In either case, because life is so unpredictable despite the best laid plans, he is able to plan his death with mechanical precision. The calm rationale is both understandable and unsettling.

Boothman attacks the role with vigour, perhaps too much so in transitions that become rushed. Treasa Nealon’s text follows a natural narrative progression and Boothman tells it with instinct for its rises and falls, lingering over moments of tenderness and celebrating milestones. There’s an anti-theatricality to the piece, but it’s a good story well told.

Peter Bergmann’s true identity was never discovered. His remains evidenced late stage prostate and bone cancer so it is easy to draw conclusions as to why Bergmann chose to end his life. The saddest thing to consider is that whilst he worked hard to make himself unidentifiable, there may have been no one to look for him when he disappeared. A Dream of Dying, though not particularly theatrical, feels like a fitting homage to those that have died unknown and unclaimed the world over.

A Dream of Dying runs through 27th August.

The Play’s the Thing UK is committed to covering fringe and progressive theatre in London and beyond. It is run entirely voluntarily and needs regular support to ensure its survival. For more information and to help The Play’s the Thing UK provide coverage of the theatre that needs reviews the most, visit its patreon.

A Tale of Two Cities: Blood for Blood, Edinburgh Festival Fringe

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A Tale of Two Cities: Blood for Blood is a rather different beast from Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. This choppy, convoluted adaptation lacks the detail and finesse of the novel, though adds a lingering threat and gloom that hangs over this story of revenge and espionage that spans two countries. Though not specifically modernised, the set alludes to greater powers and constant obstacles, but dominates the production and interferes with the action. The script is initially confusing and takes time to settle, but the lost opportunity to capture attention from the start causes the production to never really find its feet.

The set is a baffling assemblage of chairs, with a sound desk commanding attention centre stage. There are a lot of chairs; the stage is literally filled with rows of them reminiscent of a large school room, with enough space in between for one person to cautiously pass. This slows movement to a sleepy pace that clashes with the story’s tension, and after the initial visual impact, they are largely unchanging.

Performances are of a good standard across the board with some excellent multi-rolling. The actors do well to keep a high level of vocal energy despite physical limitations caused by the chairs. The selective use of microphones adds distance and authority, though their inconsistent use is more of a muddled hindrance to the performers and themes in the story.

The story naturally has conflict that helps keep it going, but initial exposition doesn’t lay enough groundwork to create solidly increasing tension. With the reliance on text needed to compensate for the staging, its patchiness makes clashes between characters feel sudden and forced.

A Tale of Two Cities: Blood for Blood certainly has some interesting seeds of ideas, but the script needs smoothing and design needs to be re-thought so it helps the action rather than hinders it.

A Tale of Two Cities: Blood for Blood runs through 28th August.

The Play’s the Thing UK is committed to covering fringe and progressive theatre in London and beyond. It is run entirely voluntarily and needs regular support to ensure its survival. For more information and to help The Play’s the Thing UK provide coverage of the theatre that needs reviews the most, visit its patreon.

A Fool’s Paradise, Edinburgh Festival Fringe

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“Americans can’t do Shakespeare,” joke the five women from A Fool’s Paradise.

The self-deprecating, all-female company of players from Baltimore boot that myth out of the theatre with relish. Having learnt 45 scenes, speeches and moments from Shakespeare’s cannon, they promise to perform 30 of them in 60 minutes or else one of the actors gets a pie in the face.

In this delightfully raucous hour, the audience chooses what the actors perform from a bingo card that adds play to their autonomy, and they’re encouraged to take photos as well. The performances are a mix of styles, from emotionally committed and realistic through to outrageous slapstick. Some stick to Shakespeare’s text, some eschew it all together. Some use audience volunteers, some use props. The range is reminiscent of variety, vaudeville and US-style improvisation shows, creating a wonderful mix of theatrical traditions. It’s part-game show and part-celebration of Shakespeare teetering on the edge of total chaos. The atmosphere becomes wonderfully Elizabethan, with the actor/audience and actor/character boundaries heavily blurred.

Kids get involved in order to fill their bingo cards and win sweets, adults are swept away by playful joy. The performers’ response rate is lightening fast and each of them plays about a dozen or so roles. It’s a fantastic display of improvisation, multi-rolling, ensemble and physical skill, and the company are warm and charismatic, sharing enthusiasm rather than alienating through an acrobatic display of Shakespeare knowledge. The material isn’t all from his most popular plays, either – they include histories and the late romances though not all of the scenes include context, which makes it a challenge for even the most Shakespeare-familiar to keep up.

It’s a shame they aren’t here for the whole festival as it promises to be different each night and the exuberance of the company is a delightful celebration of Shakespeare’s greatest moments.

A Fool’s Paradise runs through 12th August.

The Play’s the Thing UK is committed to covering fringe and progressive theatre in London and beyond. It is run entirely voluntarily and needs regular support to ensure its survival. For more information and to help The Play’s the Thing UK provide coverage of the theatre that needs reviews the most, visit its patreon.

Life According to Saki, Edinburgh Festival Fringe

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Author Hector Hugh Munro, otherwise known as Saki, is in WWI’s trenches. He and his men been out there for nearly a year, and they are long fed up with life on the front. To entertain his fellow troops, he tells the stories that have already made him a well-known writer. Life According to Saki mixes biography and fiction as Saki tells the audience about his life, interspersed with silly and bizarre anecdotes. The cast of six play both soldiers and the character’s in Saki’s stories with fantastic energy and physical commitment, but the structure of the play and Saki’s pontificating soon grows repetitive. An excessively long ending and too many stories ushers in eventual tedium despite a polished show with high production values.

Anna Lewis’ design is excellent; it clearly indicates the trenches and is flexible for the imagined worlds elsewhere. Costumes are WWI uniforms that fit the cast of women and men smartly – they are not frumpy, unaltered hire costumes. The puppets by Claire Roi Harvey and Suzi Battersby are also very good, with the cock being particularly charming with a great range of realistic movement.

The script is where it begins to fall flat a few stories in. Each one is very short, some only a few minutes long. There are about eight or ten altogether, and the constant shift from tale to tale is exhausting. The are performed with great physical comedy, accents and verge on the fantastical; each one is lovely but there are way too many. Episodes from Saki’s life are bland and dry filler, and the two styles feel forced to miserably cohabit in the same structure. The tacked-on conclusion preaches about how to live one’s life, then drags on even longer into a song and a poem. Though it blatantly states its message of living life to its fullest, the connection to the hour of stories preceding it is tenuous.

Three or four longer stories with depth and detail, and less of Saki’s biography (if any at all) would make this a much more engaging play. The premise of a soldier entertaining his troops is a fine one, but The Life of Saki comes across as self-centred and lecture-y with some silly, disconnected interludes.

Life According to Saki runs through 29th August.

The Play’s the Thing UK is committed to covering fringe and progressive theatre in London and beyond. It is run entirely voluntarily and needs regular support to ensure its survival. For more information and to help The Play’s the Thing UK provide coverage of the theatre that needs reviews the most, visit its patreon.

A Midsummer Night’s Dreaming, Edinburgh Festival Fringe

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Tang Xianu and Shakespeare were writing about similar themes at the same time, on opposite sides of the world but never met. Teaming up to create a cross cultural performance, Leeds University and International Business and Economics University (UIBE) in China each took a play from each other’s culture and created a new play inspired by the foreign text. Inspired by the Chinese legend of Sophora, a spirit of the woods associated with visions and dreams, UIBE chose A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Adding multiple levels of reinterpretation, they swap the lovers’ genders and who fancies who in order to comment on gender roles in China and the pressures young people face. Performed in English, the students struggle to connect to the emotion behind the words but their adaptation is a complex and clever commentary on relationships and social expectations.

The Sophora Nest Hotel, run by three nameless staff members with otherworldly powers, is an escape from university studies for glamorous young couple Lysander and Hermia. They are followed by their friend Helena, who’s in love with Lysander, and Helena brings along Demetrius, the geeky, shy boy who will do anything for her. Helena is blind to his love, and instead uses him more as servant than a friend. Mostly in contemporary language, the lovers’ plot thread from the original unfolds but rather than the boys being drugged, its the girls, who then both fall in love with Demetrius. Lysander, who orders Hermia around to no end, needs to learn to not take advantage of her. Helena needs to do the same with her devoted sidekick.

All the chopping and changing from the original is wonderfully refreshing, and effectively communicates our need to open our eyes to those right in front of us rather than focusing on our own wants. Other themes emerge as well, particularly the pressure on women that results from being under their father’s thumb, then their husband’s. All four characters also have the drive to be the sexiest, cleverest and have the fanciest gadgets. Though China is so far away, it’s both comforting and disconcerting that young people feel this the world over.

The three hotel staff add a lovely dynamic. One is purely logical and analyses the hotel guests’ behaviour. A second wants to play tricks, and the third tries to maintain harmony between the first two. The emphasis on balance between this trio and the lovers feels distinctly eastern, and one worth worth considering in the west.

Though still maintaining an amount of student-level execution, the insight these Chinese young people provide through their script is provocative, relevant and culturally eye-opening.

A Midsummer Night’s Dreaming runs through 13th August.

The Play’s the Thing UK is committed to covering fringe and progressive theatre in London and beyond. It is run entirely voluntarily and needs regular support to ensure its survival. For more information and to help The Play’s the Thing UK provide coverage of the theatre that needs reviews the most, visit its patreon.