This year we had a full house, and the program was more complicated from the get-go. First, the Traverse offered a unique, one-on-one show (I’m Ready to Talk Now), the tickets for which meant 9 separate time slots on our schedule. Second, the two International Festival plays we saw (Make it Happen and Works and Days) were selling out so quickly that we divided our group in half and saw these extraordinary shows on different days. Because the exchange rate was up significantly this year, participants were also given more of a choice to complete their schedule: but most still saw at least 30 shows this year, 23 of them by everyone in our group.
And then there was our own drama: Jenny left her purse at the airport upon arrival (yes, with passport, credit cards, driver’s license, and money). But it was returned the following day intact, with everything except the money! Then Helen, a new participant in our program, broke her wrist after a fall at night. The trip to the Royal Infirmary revealed that ONE emergency room visit in the UK is free. After x-rays, she received a splint and was good to go for the duration (including her added trip to Skye at the end of the program). Denis’s plane from Cleveland stranded him in Newark for a day, but he was able to join us on Sunday evening. We were all prepared for a huge tropical storm on Monday, with predicted winds up to 80 mph, but the rain was gone by morning and the wind seemed refreshing on the surprisingly sunny day! The rest of our time was a cakewalk.
The weather this year was amazingly mild: one day of intermittent rain, three days of temperatures near 80 degrees (hot for Edinburgh), and one day with a windstorm big enough to close some venues (but did not affect our schedule!)
[Note: show ratings based on a 5-point scale were averaged from during our final dinner conversation. Although some refused on principle to give 5s, no show was rated under 2.5.]
SATURDAY, AUGUST 2
After a group dinner at Montpelier’s, a 20-minute walk from our house, most returned home for some much needed rest. But three of us saw the “Big in Belgium” production of Fatal Flower by Valentina Tóth at Summerhall. We all agreed that the actor was young, and that the performance’s billing as a tragicomic musical and “over-the-top” one woman show was appropriate–it was definitely “over the top.” Most interesting was that the actor had been an internationally acclaimed classical pianist, a child prodigy who performed with the Met at the age of 15. She begins the show at the piano, but quickly lets us know how much she “hated all that.” Instead, she wanted to be a performance artist, and here she is one, with an extended ode to “the hysterical woman” (which evidently her former career produced…) The video link here is in Dutch, but you can certainly get the idea:
SUNDAY, AUGUST 3
Sunday morning, our new participants took either the 2-hour City Walking Tour, or the Hop on-Hop Off bus tour to get oriented to the city. By all accounts, the guides were excellent.
Our first group show, The Insider, by Danish company Teater Katapult, was based on a recent financial scandal in which, using a sophisticated tax scheme, scores of banks and financial institutions bilked 50 billion GBPs from European treasuries over several years. The play focused on the trajectory of the young bank lawyer who made millions of dollars facilitating the scam before turning state’s evidence that blew it up. Listening to the play through individual headsets totally immersed us in the action, even though it all occurred onstage inside a large glass cage. The final listing of banks involved no doubt included your own! Rating: 4.3
After a pleasant afternoon break, we saw our first Traverse Theatre show, The Beautiful Future is Coming by Bristol Old Vic productions. Here three separate couples from three different historical eras share thematically interconnected stories involving climate change and its effects in the past, present, and future. In 1856, Eunice, studies a worrying trend in her carbon dioxide readings, but is stymied by a scientific community who cannot take seriously results produced by a scientist outside the academy–and more specifically, by a woman. In the present, a young couple fall in love in the face of increasingly cataclysmic heatwaves and floods. And in 2100, two scientists tend a dying seed bank, trapped below ground as an 86-day storm rages outside. One of them is about to give birth. The play offers a stark reminder of our responsibility to the planet and implicitly asks what we’re willing to do about it. Rating: 3.7
That same evening, our group opts to add a show at the Pleasance Baby Grand called David Elms Describes a Room. An innovative improvised comedy, one reviewer noted “You’d have to be dead not to enjoy it.” With no mic, no props, no set, no jokes, no theatrics, David Elm gently involves the audience in the building of room filled with objects before our eyes. “What is over here?” he asks…”And here, above the door?” and “What about here?” until a heavily furnished, strangely occupied space gradually appears in our collective imagination. Then Elms briefly leaves the stage and re-enters to mime a relationship with each of the items we have placed in the room, deftly suggesting connections between the often disparate objects and constructing a silent narrative for our enjoyment. Nothing showy, but original and entirely engaging. Rating: 4
MONDAY, AUGUST 4
On our free morning, Jenny and Reyes visited the Talbot Rice Museum.
We all met up at the Pleasance Dome for our Its Gonna Blow! Billed as a fast-paced, fun, and raucous interactive comedy set in 79AD Pompei, the play was produced by Fish 4 Chips, whose Trojan comedy Burning Down the Horse was a fan favorite last summer. Set on the last day before the volcano erupts, the play situates the audience as citizens of a regular town meeting where the mayor decries the protestor as “fake news,” and a number of characters interrupt the proceedings. The four-person company play several hilarious characters in this gently immersive performance, including the bin-goblin hunting butcher, an elderly husband and wife who keep missing each other, angry protestors, and a town crier who gathers meeting agenda items from the audience. Eventually, smoke begins to fill the room, and we flash forward to characters frozen in place in a museum exhibit of Pompeii. As one reviewer put it, “Hysterical history at its bonkers best.” Rating: 4.3
Then for something completely different, we ventured to Zoo Southside to see the award-winning, Prague-based dance troupe Lenka Vagnerová & Company in Panoptikum. Based on 19th century freak shows, complete with evil ringmasters, the group dances through multiple scenes, one more grotesque than the other, in a grand guignol of a theatrical vision. By turns disturbing, humorous, grotesque, and magical, the well-choreographed action situated us as the uncomfortable, gawking audience that cannot look away. There was little consensus afterwards in our group. Some were enthralled by the “magic tricks,” while some found them unconvincing; some absolutely loved the show, and others lamented a lack of coherence. But everyone agreed that the charged soundscape and strange scenarios made it captivating to watch. An excellent video clip of the performance can be found on their website. Rating: 3.6
After a bit of rest and a nice dinner, most of us were off to see Baby Wants Candy, an improvised musical group that is a show-stopping, comedic favorite every summer. Although the program director missed this performance, everyone reported back that the audience-selected play “Finding Emo” (different every night) was a huge hit. The musical showcased all new improv actors this year, and an unbelievably talented live band, again leaving the audience with only one question: how do they do it?! Rating: 4.5
TUESDAY, AUGUST 5
After a relaxing morning, the group saw the 2024 Fringe First hit 300 Paintings at Summerhall. The program offered a good description: “In 2021, Sydney comedian Sam Kissajukian decided to quit stand-up, rent an abandoned cake factory, and become a painter. Over the course of a six-month manic episode, he created 300 large-scale paintings, unknowingly documenting his mental state through the process. In this hilarious, fascinating, and wildly original show, Kissajukian brings audiences on a rollercoaster ride that explores the ties between art, mental health, and creativity.” The play manages to de-stigmatize bipolar disorder without undermining the seriousness of Sam’s diagnosis. Some of Sam’s impressive abstract works were on view again this year at Summerhall. Here is clip that gives some insight into the show. Rating: 4.7
Having seen 300 Paintings last summer, Mary and Jenny caught Kitson’s early morning show This is Not a Bargain, and were not disappointed. Past participants will remember the various shows by Daniel Kitson, who has a huge, and well deserved, following as an artist who traverses easily between stand-up comedy, avante-garde art, and theatre. He is known in part because he refuses to engage in the usual sort of self-promotion: he has no agent, no press releases, no interviews, no television specials, no publications. Just a very large mailing list that he manages himself. Before the fringe this year, I received this message via email:
Daniel Kitson (real name) is in the process of putting together a new show but these shows won’t be that show because that show won’t be finished until the end of September and these shows are happening in August. At best, these shows will constitute a useful if not entirely entertaining stage in the making of that show and, obviously, at worst they’ll feel like an inconvenient and self indulgent waste of everyone’s time.
Having said that it is relatively cheap and it will be done by 11.30am.
However! There will also be approximately up to 20 tickets held back for sale on the door, each morning. So that’s nice/annoying depending on your vibe about these things.
Typical Kitson (a phrase he often uses onstage about himself). His meandering type of comedy is carefully scripted to appear completely spontaneous–and we could have listened to his “observations” for far longer than the show’s 1.5 hours. Hopefully, next summer. Rating: 5
Lunch break…
We met up at the Traverse for back-to-back afternoon shows. The first, Consumed, was produced by Paines Plough (a well-known UK organization supporting contemporary playwrights) and won the 2022 Women’s Prize for Playwriting. Vaguely reminiscent of Sam Shepard’s Buried Child, the play centers around the gathering of four generations of Northern Irish women under one roof to celebrate (or perhaps, to ruin) a feisty 90-year-old’s birthday party. The “hungry ghosts” appear at the end of the play, when a baby is literally unearthed from under the floorboards. Though expertly produced, with the character of the Grandmother stealing the show, the group did not find this fairly traditional play to be among its favorites. Rating: 2.7
Lost Lear offered a more technologically innovative re-telling of Shakespeare’s play from the perspective of a women with dementia, caught in her old memories as an actor rehearsing King Lear. This reality is maintained by her caring hospital staff and upended when her estranged son returns and must try to reach his mother through the limited role assigned to him of Cordelia. Although billed as “darkly comic,” the play was mostly just sad, focusing as it did on a patient that seemed difficult to like even before she began losing her faculties. Well-acted by Venetia Bowe, the play also featured puppetry, projection and live video effects to merge and unpack the main character’s overlapping mental layers of past and present, fiction and reality. Rating: 3.5
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 6
On our free morning, Jenny and Reyes decided to attend Egyptian-born artist Wael Shawky’s exhibit at the Talbot Rice Museum on the U of Edinburgh campus. The centerpiece of the exhibit are two films that place current events in the Middle East in a rarely told historical context beginning with the crusades and ending with the British occupation of Egypt. The narrative’s shifting power structures, religious charges, and violent actions are carried out by hand-blown glass puppets, which are not only beautiful in themselves (and displayed separately in the museum), but emphasize the fragility of humans and the ties that bind them. The exhibit also honored the 50yr-old gallery’s founder, who was an Islamist scholar.
The group met up at the delightful physical comedy The Crawl, created by Lecoq-trained performers, at the Pleasance Dome (just two steps from the museum). The premise: two rival swimmers, preparing for the race of their lives, on a stage with no water. The actors play an array of objects and characters– bickering commentators, Chad the lifeguard, snooty organizers–in addition to Mytha, a stone-faced Russian whose dreams of being a singer have been crushed by his family and coaches, and Steve, an English “bro” who is just in love with the sport. The original soundtrack immerses us poolside, and the end of this absurdly competitive event is a surprisingly happy one. Rating: 3.8
After the show, we walked to the Meadows Circus Tent to see the world-renowned, French Canadian, acrobatic group Flip Fabrique: Six. In addition to some stunning acrobatics, the performance was also a kind of play: five characters who do not know each other all receive a mysterious invitation to an old house, ultimately demonstrating that six degrees of separation are what connects us to each other. Their acrobatics, a mixture of the ordinary and the extraordinary, were not only flawless, but often funny.
We were pleased to add Apocalypsync to our itinerary, and then urged the entire group to see it. Argentinean performer Luciano Rosso presents us with a masterclass in physical theatre with a production he honed for two years while stuck at home during the pandemic. Without a stage, he performs for himself in a series of hilarious set pieces that brings back the feeling of that time in all its mind-numbing, hysteria-producing claustrophobia. His mimicry of various birds is itself worth the price of the ticket. And the precision of the lip syncing is a marvel–just inches from the stage, it seemed completely real. This is one that we will definitely see again if it returns to the Fringe! Rating: 4.5
Throughout this week, group members experienced the 45-minute, one-on-one show I’m Ready to Talk Now, which took place in a small upstairs room at the Traverse Theatre. Not surprisingly, everyone had a different experience, and therefore, a slightly different reaction to the piece. The play is set in a hospital room dominated by a bed that the audience member is invited to occupy, and facing a screen that mostly shows an unmoving video image of the outside of a hospital. Solo artist Oliver Ayres moves and dances around this small space as his voice (over) tells the story, in very general terms, of his difficult encounter with the medical profession as a trans patient with a serious, rare and disabling disease. The issues involving grief, and facing one’s own mortality, however, easily translate. The most successful moments of the piece, however, come in the show’s first half, when a very engaging Oliver greets and gets to know the audience member, asking questions such as “why did you choose this performance?” The spontaneous dialogue between performer and audience member created a relaxing, intimate, and empathetic space that carried over to our experience of what follows. The Guardian reviewer notes that she left the play wanting to know more–to keep talking. Which was, I think, the point. In his performance art piece, Ayres successfully produces a “radical act of connection.” Rating: 3.3
THURSDAY, AUGUST 7
Several of us opted to see the longtime activist comic Mark Thomas star in Ordinary Decent Criminal at Summerhall. One suspects that the playwright, Fringe First winning Ed Edwards, wrote this play specifically for Thomas, who starred two years ago in Edward’s play England and Son. Mark’s well-known history of left-wing political activism makes him an ideal choice to play recovering addict Frankie, jailed after the Strangeways Prison Riot, and left to navigate a cruel and unusual environment in which no one is exactly who he seems. The twist, though, is that Frankie ultimately discovers himself through his own political choices, and finding that both love and the revolution can happen anywhere. Rating: 4.3
The group then met (in the same space) for Wild Thing by Mechanimal. Truly a fringe show, the play combines odd and unexpected comedy, gloriously silly bits, surprising feats of mimicry, mild audience participation, an otherworldly soundscape, and political relevance. The actor begins by handing out laminated cards with the name of a species–most of which seem absolutely made up. Uglyface Scorpionfish? Darth Vader Giant Pill Millipede? Mexican Flameknee? Thespian Grass Mouse? These are but a small number of the species that appear in the show, and a mere fraction of the 20,000 species listed on the wall at the end of the show–all real, and all extinct or nearing so. We also learn of the actor’s decision to, and see video documentation of, his walk from northern Scotland to a conference in Sweden in order to avoid adding carbons to the environment. Mechanimal’s work is a mix of the strange and the awe-inspiring, all dedicated to increasing awareness of the real-world effects of human activity on the planet. Rating: 4.2
A quick addition to our itinerary was Africa Power: the Colour of Water in the Assembly Music Room. This year, there seemed to be no South African presence at the Fringe, so we lept at this chance to see some African song and dancing. Unfortunately, the group was very young and the dancing was totally overshadowed by the large video projections behind them on the stage. The dancers were talented (and included a contortionist), but the final result was mediocre. A lagniappe before our big evening shows today…
Half of our group met today (the other tomorrow) at the festival theatre for an Edinburgh International Festival highlight. Make it Happen stars Brian Cox in a musical play tracing the rise, and unceremonious fall, of Fred ‘The Shred’ Goodwin’s Royal Bank of Scotland, once touted as the largest in the world. A victim of his own greed and hubris, Fred unleashes the unchecked growth that placed the RBS at the center of the 2008 financial crisis, requiring a government bailout. Fred’s confidence, it turns out, is built upon a misreading of the work of his hero, Adam Smith, played by Cox as an impertinent and inconvenient ghost throughout the play. A well-told, mesmerizing look at a financial world that does not seem significantly different today. Rating: 4.4
The rest of the group (the other half tomorrow) met at the Lyceum Theatre for the entire group’s favorite show, Works and Days. This International Festival production featured no dialogue, just a purely visual feast set to an original musical score inspired by Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons. Aiming to summarize all human history, with an emphasis on man’s changing relationship to the land, the actors begin the play with a startling feat: driving an ancient plow across the front of the stage, tearing out a strip of land from the wooden floorboards. An amazingly well-trained live chicken then sits on the plow while the actors work elsewhere on the stage–then is quickly wrapped in a sack and realistically beaten to death on the floor. (Most of us knew that the bag had been swapped out, but some sat through the rest of the play, wondering if they should leave!) The bag gets stuffed down a woman’s shirt to signify pregnancy, and so the trail of images begins. Horses are played by humans, a house is raised by laborers, a child is lost in a strange forest of huge trees made of multi-colored blocks of wood. Later, naked bodies will drape themselves around a massive steam engine, and a lone woman left to till the ground will be deluged in a rainstorm. When she finally stops, dozens of plastic pineapples will pop up from holes in the stage, raining down a strange harvest. The play ends with a trotting robot dog, headlamp strapped to his head, peering curiously out at the audience. The sheer physical ingenuity and stunning visual imagery of this play were enchanting, especially once everyone learned that no animals had been killed in its making! Rating 4.8
FRIDAY, AUGUST 8
This morning, a couple of us took in the ANDY GOLDSWORTHY exhibition at the National Art Gallery. This 50-year retrospective was extraordinary–and difficult to even fit within the gallery spaces. You can see images of the work, as well as a video by the artist about his process, here.
For something completely different, we were all welcomed to “the jar” for Pickled Republic, which was part of the Made in Scotland program. A very talented Ruxandra Cantir greets the audience of the Anatomy Lab in Summerhall as an abandoned tomato, just past her prime, wanting nothing more than to be selected, tasted, eaten. Cantir reemerges in a huge, ugly, puppet potato head atop a slinking, glittering evening gown in order to seduce and to sing for us. The lonely gherkin, the baby carrot, and the anxious onion follow, all gazing above to avoid certain death by “FORK!” A surreal and light-hearted theatrical cabaret that made everyone laugh and groan, by turns. With imaginative choreography, hilarious songs, silly puns, and rapid-fire costume changes, these vegetables give the performance of their lives (as well as their lives) to the audience. What’s not to like? Rating: 3.8
Perhaps because we had just seen such a light-hearted and engaging show, the next group show was a bit disappointing. Billed as a “chilling, propulsive debut thriller” by a bestselling author and Olivier-nominated producer, Skye: A Thriller is supposedly a riveting ghost story. And yet, the action is not at all scary or even unsettling, except perhaps to the characters themselves. Within the frame of a podcaster who wants to hear her story, we learn that Annie and her siblings glimpsed their father while holidaying on the beach at Skye, even though he died in a car accident four years before. The sighting sparks misgivings about what they were told about his death, and Annie’s relentless search for her missing parent ends tragically, in another car accident, and another death. A dark tale that remains oddly remote, like the island itself. Rating: 2.1
SATURDAY, AUGUST 9
The regular Saturday Farmer’s Market on the Castle Terrace Parking Lot did not disappoint. Pickled herring and kippers, fresh cheeses, fruits and vegetables, macaroons, honey, dried and fresh meats, coffee, gin, and more.
Next door at Traverse 2, the group saw Rift, written by U.S. playwright Gabriel Jason Dean and inspired by his own real-life relationship with his brother, a convicted murderer and high-ranking member of a white supremacist group within the prison. The question posed by the play is whether it is truly possible to love someone whose beliefs you abhor. The play involves heart-wrenching, relevatory, and also light-hearted meetings between the younger progressive writer and his older brother, with whom he shared a traumatic childhood. Years elapse between meetings, and we witness changes in both characters, but especially in the young writer, whose guilt and unresolved pain make him more easily manipulated by his older sibling. The story is a heart-wrenching one to tell, and with it, the playwright makes a nuanced argument for understanding, tolerance, and hope amid our current polarizing extremes. Rating: 4.2
Later in the afternoon, a few of us took in Tale of a Potato at the Zoo Playground. For once, the title of the show precisely indicated the action: it’s the life story of a potato, the protagonist, who is born, goes to work, falls in love, and expresses feelings about his world of other tubers. Set on a wooden butcher-block table with dirt, a knife, and real vegetables, the show is less a puppet show, and more an expansive children’s activity. Cut a potato in half, pound in two nails for its eyes, pick it up and move it around as you tell its story…unfortunately, the narrator’s broad Italian accent made the dialogue difficult to understand for some in our group. But, really, there was not much to miss. Original, cute, quirky. Rating: 2.2
Fringe First winners Xhloe and Natasha of What if They Ate the Baby? fame, were back this year with a play about growing up as a young boy in the Vietnam era. A Letter to Lyndon B. Johnson or God: Whoever Reads this First is a masterfully choreographed, exuberant piece of physical theatre that perfectly captures a range of childhood emotions through their games and (always boasting) commentary–from playful joy to fear to heartbreak. These are not the boys who would defect from the war, but rather the boys who can’t wait to join up. With a soundtrack perfectly evoking the time period, the audience is transported to a more innocent time with full knowledge of what their future holds. We will look for talented duo this next year! Rating: 4.8
SUNDAY, AUGUST 10
Denis and Steven toured the castle with Little Fish Tours this morning, giving the tour guide (a stand-up comedian in his off hours) rave reviews.
In the meantime, several of us ventured to Traverse 2 to see Red Like Fruit, despite an intimidating poster for the show that promised an angry and painful retelling of sexual abuse.
However, the play was very different than we had imagined. The main character, Lauren, begins by asking her friend, Luke, to read her story to the audience. Later we learn that that Lauren believes her story will only be listened to if it is read by a man. The audience is complicit in this power dynamic since we do listen both attentively and empathetically. Lauren is a journalist who has been reporting on a high-profile case of domestic abuse, but begins feeling uneasy in during everyday meetings with male colleagues and friends; she begins remembering things that happened in her childhood, and the ambivalence she still feels about them. Her life eventually starts to crack, and she loses the ability to understand her own story. Although billed as “an interrogation of the complexities of complicity, consent, patriarchy and traumatic memory in the post #MeToo era,” the play is quieter, more ruminative, less strident than the billing would suggest. It’s a story that most women will recognize. And the scream advertised in the poster is a silent one. Rating 3.8
Our next play, Dregs at the Scottish Storytelling Center, also features a man literally speaking for a woman. In this case, though, the woman is deaf and her character is a selkie, stranded on land, looking for a way home. That way goes through the loud and drunken chaos of a night out in Glasgow. The interpretive dynamic is perfect for the story–for the stranger she meets is of a different species, after all, and translation is required. Performed in both BSL and spoken English, the play blends storytelling with visual theatre; and by the end of the play, we can almost “read” the Selkie’s signing ourselves. Far from disrupting our experience of the story, the BSL signing was beautiful, raw, and compelling. A unique take on a famous Scottish legend Rating: 4.0
While Steven and Peter were lucky enough to grab tickets to Rosie O’Donnell‘s stand up show, and Helen was taking in the one-person, the rest of us braved the spitting rain to see Dance People at the Old College Quad. As an International Festival production, the piece came with higher expectations that were not ultimately met. The French-Lebanese company is known for its interrogation of democracy and dictatorship, for choreography in open spaces, and for its inclusion of the audience in its dances. However, the result was a hodge-podge of individual movement on a huge, square, stage that seemed neither innovative nor particularly inviting to join. Perhaps the biggest disappointment of our trip. Rating: 1.5
MONDAY, AUGUST 11
On our free day, several people took a boat ride from the Dalmeny coast on the Firth of Forth; two took a Rabbies tour to the Highlands, one spent the day in the library, another set up his private evening performance of The Psychic Poetry Project for our group, and the director had drinks and dinner with friends. Generally, a very good day!
TUESDAY, AUGUST 12
After some technical difficulties that delayed the show, we were ushered into Traverse 1 for the opening preview of Nowhere by actor and activist Khalid Abdalla (who played the head terrorist in United 93 and Dodie Fayed in The Crown). One of the most complex and ambitious shows we saw this season, Nowhere refers to the space of the stage where the actor feels most safe within a world that is not at all safe, a world moving from crisis to crisis in which millions are dispossesed of their homes and have literally nowhere to remain. The space of this stage will become “the field on which we meet, beyond right and wrong” to discover and interrogate the layered personal, political, colonial and postcolonial histories we share–as well as the neoliberal moment that most recently defines state actions. Born in Glasgow to Egyptian born parents from a family of political (often jailed) activists, Khalid intersperses his own story with the story of his country’s dictatorships, and their historical relations with other countries and regimes. It is a play that moves quickly and with an intensity that is fueled by Khalid’s own active and empathic presence, as well as his desire to make us see things that we often choose to tune out. Remember the dove that is sent out from the Noah’s arc, but must return finding nowhere to land? Such is the image of our current situation, as well as its hope. The play ends with Khalid’s heartfelt comments on the Palestinian genocide, by then a mere extension of the story he has already told. The play was powerful, and potentially transformative. Rating: 4.3
For our next play, we moved to a large storage container called The Box to see the New Zealand production of Alone. The play takes place in the near future with two female astronauts trying to save the earth with their experiments with seedlings on a failing spacecraft. Beginning with everyday workplace tensions (can we please turn the music off?) and personality differences (scientist vs. engineer), the dialogue between the two gradually becomes more illuminating, political, and existential. When the lights go off and contact is lost, the play becomes more tense: one astronaut ultimately chooses self-sacrifice while the other is left to contemplate her impending death. Despite the gripping scenario, the play is filled with humor and easy to watch. Rating: 3.8
Since we missed the performance of Flick (director’s scheduling error) at Summerhall a few days ago, we decided to try again. Hailing from Adelaide, Madelaine Nunn’s solo show focuses on the terribly bad choices a hospice nurse makes when she “falls for” a new, surprisingly young patient. He asks her to retrieve a book for him; she does, but also settles in and keeps returning to his apartment as if it were her own. We later learn the motive for her odd, creepy behavior is the recent, but never processed, loss of a friend. The play is dark, but very funny. Unfortunately, we missed the ending when Summerhall’s fire alarm went off. I guess you could say we missed this play twice!
Tonight, the entire group gathered in Queen’s Theatre to see Scottish folksinger Karine Polwart in Windblown. Filled with moody, otherworldly music, Karine dedicates her work to the lofty, 200-year-old Sabal palm of Edinburgh’s Royal Botanic Gardens–a tree that suffered initial dislocation, then outgrew the roof of its 19th c glasshouse home, and is finally marked for removal to make way for a new conservation research facility. The narrative of the piece touches on historical legacies, ecological losses, as well as the hope promised in multi-generational gardens. In the last moments of the piece, a final twist to the story: we find that the Sabal Palm is not really an exotic plant at all, but rather Mexico and Florida’s most common species of palm. But the tribute to its demise is lovely all the same. Rating: 3.2
After what seemed like hours of waiting (the starting time of 9:30pm was pushed to 10:20), the four of us who remained did manage to see an extraordinary punk performance by anti-Putinist protest collective Pussy Riot: Riot Days in Summerhall’s Demonstration Room. They were just as brash, compelling, and “ready to revolt” as one would imagine from the antics that earned them sentencing to a Russian prison. The story of their escapades was narrated in images on a large screen behind them throughout the show, going far beyond their initial arrest in Moscow. The music itself was surprisingly good, and though a few chairs were provided, we were mostly on our feet for the show. The merging of memoir, protest theatre and electronica aimed at activating the audience to continue their work–and the audience lapped it up. Rating 4.3
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 13
On our last day, we were excited to see Belgium theatre group Ontroerend Goed’s new piece Thanks for Being Here at Zoo Southside. The group is always a good bet, offering innovative theatre that often breaks down boundaries between audience and players. This show set about to do the same as the audience members literally become the actors in the show. Playfully shifting perspectives between the live stage and the previously videotaped audience, the actors skilfully narrate the “action” of our entrance to the theatre space, getting (or not getting to) our seats, changing places, slowing things down, talking among ourselves, and so on– as we watch ourselves on the screen from just moments before. So begins a play dedicated to the recognition that without the audience, there would be no play. One memorable moment involves an actor (previously sitting in the audience), leaving the stage and trying to enlist someone to come into the show just to look at the stage. Unsurprisingly, two people have “excuses” but a third does peek in from the hallway, and everyone erupts in spontaneous applause. Only later do we realize that nearly everything we see has been generated by the comments of former audience members, who have been asked for their suggestions (as we are) at the end of the play. Issues of intrusion and consent do come up but are dealt with playfully, and the warm-heartedness of the company keeps us from being uncomfortable. After two weeks of theatre, it was nice to be thanked for our presence! Rating: 4.5
Perhaps deciding to stay in this space for the next play was not a good idea, but we did. A solo performance, also produced by Big in Belgium, called Swiping Right, began with a very good idea but went on too long. Sophie Anna Veelenturf is an avid online dater, but realizes that she identifies herself as left-wing and so automatically filters out those with different political views. Despite this, she dated right-wing men three times in her past (each every different, but none with good outcomes). To better understand how our political views affect our social and sexual relationships, she decides to interview her former boyfriends as well as other friends about their experiences dating people with different political perspectives. The performer is somewhat constrained by her reliance on pre-recorded conversations, but the real problem is editing–at the fringe, most plays are an hour or just over, not nearly two. By the end of the play, the actor had lost her previously sympathetic audience, restless to be on to the next show. 2.5
Our final show, Wendy Houstoun’s Watch It! may have also been one of the performer’s last. Houstoun has had a successful, 42-year career as a thoughtful performance artist blurring the boundaries of dance, confessional monologue, and stand-up. While her aging body may prevent her from performing the stunts of her youth, she can still boast of her accomplishments (and she does), tell jokes, and move about the stage with deliberation and ease. The performance is organized around the idea of a game show in which the contestant is required to present an hour’s worth of material that would entertain and make the audience laugh without upsetting anyone. If she veers too close to the controversial, we hear a loud buzzer. But veer she continues to do, and she won’t be silenced. Houstoun has developed a unique brand of political performance that focuses on the intersection of language, movement and ideas–and this show was a fitting tribute to that work. Did I mention we liked it? Rating: 4.
Our final dinner at Dine, atop the Traverse Theatre, was a delicious ending to the trip. Thanks to (left to right) Reyes, Denis, Julie, Helen, Mary, Steven, Peter, and Jim for the 2025 memories! See you next year?
