Edinburgh Festivals 2015: theatre reviews

This rousing monologue from actor Jade Franks has been a stonking hit this Fringe, and it’s not hard to see why. It’s an enthusiastically told fish-out-of-water story based on working-class Liverpudlian Franks’s - dare I say it - Legally Blonde-esque experience of going to study at Cambridge. You sense she’s probably taken a few liberties with a narrative that isn’t entirely watertight. But it is, nonetheless, a thoroughly winning hour. Working in a Liverpool call centre, the young Franks is piqued by an encounter with a testy posh customer who assumes she’s thick – so she decides she’ll go to Cambridge, crafts a banging statement, and then boom, off she goes. Clad in falsies and tight gymware, Franks is an ebullient hurricane, winning us to her side by sheer force of personality. I would say it feels like she lays her Eliza Doolittle credentials on a bit thick: the show implies she was going to spend her life working in a call centre until a random phone encounter led to her not only deciding to go to uni, but Cambridge to boot. I’d assume there’s probably a bit more to it than that. A bit of artistic license is fine, and the show really comes into its own when she arrives in Cambridge and gets a job to supplement her studies (a big no no, and the fact ). The students she encounters are initially baffled by her, and she them: different accents, different approaches to money, very different ideas in what ‘going out’ involves (she dresses up, they dress down). What’s great...

This simultaneously cuddly and filthy musical two hander from London-based Latin American-centric Alpaqua Theatre Collective concerns Jesús, a sexually confused young man from Peru. Over the course of Jeezus! he acts as our guide to both the Latin American country’s extremely repressive police and social values, and also his own, very specific awakening.  Played by the show’s writer Sergio Antonio Maggiolo, Jesús is very clearly gay, something obvious to everyone but him. But as a confused yet pious adolescent he buries his feelings into his love for his near namesake, Jesus (the magic cross guy). The plot skips around with cartoonish sweetness crossed with essentially blasphemous  naughtiness  - at one point the tender young Jesús tries to purge himself of impure thoughts by sodomising himself with the family’s large wooden crucifix.  Maggiolo plays Jesús with wide-eyed aplomb: it’s the fact they seem to be taking everything so deadly seriously that really makes Jeezus! work. Well, one of the things - the tunes are melodic and funny and as much as the show is very rude, there’s an old fashioned but surprisingly muscular Monty Python-ish streak of humour that keeps it ticking forward. Co-singer/performer Guido Garcia is great in a multitude of roles in Laura KIlleen’s production, from Jesús’s parents (his mum is a sweetie, his dad is basically a Nazi) to – dare I spoil it – the actual Jesus, who his namesake meets via the show’s funniest gag and proceeds to fall literally...

On the face of it the question ‘was Kurt Cobain trans?’ is the very definition of ‘no, next one please’. But Emma Frankland’s new show No Apologies addresses the query with a mix of impish cheekiness and impassioned justification. And to be clear the question is not ‘did Kurt Cobain transition?’ or ‘what pronouns did Kurt Cobain use in private?’ but rather whether the Nirvana frontman’s various proclamations about wishing he was born female, wanting breasts, wearing dresses etcetera etcetera could be viewed as amounting to gender dysmorphia. Had he lived longer or in a different time, might this have amounted to something more?  Obviously this is one one level the stuff of very niche Reddit forums. Frankland is not the first to float the theory Cobain was trans, but it is essentially based on selective, academic readings of things he said in public, by people who didn’t actually know him.  Performing in a recreation of Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged set, wearing the same outfit Cobain wore for the recording, Frankland repeatedly tells us ‘he was definitely trans’. But it’s with a mischievous grin. Might have been – sure. Definitely – I think the twinkle in Frankland’s eyes puts paid to that.  But her yearning for Cobain to have been a fellow trans woman is the real point of the show. As a teenage Nirvana fan, none of Frankland’s celebrity role models or favourite musicians were trans: it was basically an impossibility back then, and is  hardly a crowded field now. If Cobain had...

Priyanka Shetty’s one-woman docu-theatre play is subtitled ‘the show that Trump does not want you to see’ and on the one hand this is probably broadly accurate: the notional leader of the free world is so brittle I’m sure he’d ban anyone, anywhere, from seeing anything even mildly critical of him given half the chance. On the other hand, I suspect he’s not specifically aware that there’s a solo show about the 2017 Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia playing at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe.  Originally from India, Shetty came to Charlottesville to study acting at the University of Virginia, which is in the city. Her degree forms a sort of fraught subplot to #Charlottesville. Shetty apparently didn’t have a good time, in her opinion experiencing racism from not only some students but also the staff, who failed to cast her in a production – despite this being mandatory – because of her accent. Essentially left to her own devices, she put together a solo show about Unite the Right, which didn’t please the faculty either.  But here the show is - albeit refined over a number of years - and now directed by Yury Urnov. And it’s a solid introduction to both the events of the rally – which many of us will remember – and the precise context to them – which are probably hazier to the average Brit.  Unite the Right was nominally a response to the city of Charlottesville’s decision to remove Confederate statues from its streets. Various factions from the right – different...

Trouble, Struggle, Bubble and Squeak is the new show from Victoria Melody, whose whole thing is like being a madder, lower budget Louis Theroux, who embeds herself in unusual hobbies and professions for years on end, eventually making shows about them. Undertakers, pigeon fanciers, competitive dog shows and on her last out – 2022’s Head Set – the amateur stand-up circuit. Although she deftly plays it up – she’s always had a terrific sense of comic timing – there’s no denying she is ‘a character’, and she’s fully aware of this. ‘I often make excruciating but relatable errors’ she observes, accurately. The headline hobby here is English Civil War reenactment. Kind of. As the show begins, Melody describes how, in the wake of her recent divorce, she turned up at an isolated reenactment via public transport, without knowing anyone there, much to the bemusement of the assembled armies (who all knew each other already and had come by car). Still, she found a warm welcome and was given a musketeer’s uniform by a kindly group happy to turn a blind eye to the fact she was rubbish at musketeering.  One problem: she’d actually joined because she’d fallen in love with the idea of the short-lived Civil War-era dissidents the Diggers, who advocated living off the common land of the country. But she’d fallen in with a group of Royalist re-enactors, who had nothing to do with the Diggers, a Parliamentarian concern. But as they’d been so nice, Melody simply stuck with them. This is all good...

You don’t need to have seen the last Edinburgh Fringe monologue that playwright Ed Edwards wrote for comedian Mark Thomas to appreciate the new one. But if you caught 2023’s England & Son, it makes for a fascinating contrast with Ordinary Decent Criminal.  England & Son was the harrowing story of an ex-juvenile offender whose life is fatally poisoned right from the start by circumstances outside his control, not least the legacy of British colonial rule as passed down via his violent father. It was gaspingly intense stuff that confirmed that after years of increasingly theatrical solo shows, Thomas could indeed act. Personally, I found it a bit misery porn-y, but it was still impressive I’m not sure if Ordinary Decent Criminal is a reaction to England & Son so much as an acknowledgement that you can’t really make the same play twice. But while Thomas is again playing a criminal with the same accent, age and mannerisms as Mark Thomas, the title is not ironic. Frankie is a nice guy. Sure, he’s gone to prison for drug dealing. But it’s just a bit of weed, he’s never hurt anyone, has an activist background, a social conscience, and he cares desperately about his partner and her son. Edwards seems determined to avoid the miserable bombast of his last play For the most part it’s the story of one man’s journey through the British prison system. There’s a familiarity to the narrative if you’ve ever watched a film or TV show set in jail (Paddington 2 absolutely counts) as Frankie...

This intriguing if – to my Fringe-fogged brain – intangible performance triptych from Emergency Chorus is based around three pieces that in their own wry, mysterious way deal with the human need to predict the future. In the first part creator-performers Ben Kulvichit and Clara Potter-Sweet address anachronistic forms of weather prediction: we’re all familiar with the barometer, but what about the storm glass, a sort of Victorian instrument that allegedly changed colour if a storm was imminent? And then there’s the tempest prognosticator, a hysterically complicated instrument based around a ‘jury’ of 12 leeches, who would move about within it as they sensed an imminent storm? Kukvichit and Potter-Sweet discuss these while offering rudimentary, rhythmic movement over tottering drums and gentle eddies of feedback. It’s cool: it’s not really a ‘dance’ piece in the sense that the duo are trained dancers, but it has a not dissimilar sensibility to a dance work, an evocation rather than an explanation. In the second and most abstract part the duo are deep in a cave system, their torches attempting to penetrate a wall of dry ice, stalactites clinging to the ceiling. The soundtrack is now a cacophonous post-rock roar, drums penetrating our heads like drills. Towards the end a babble of human voices expressing worries about the future rings out. It’s not immediately clear why they were in a cave system, but in the more lucid part three we meet Roger the Hermit, a mystical...

Pantomime in August? Oh no it isn’t! It isn’t, actually. True, She’s Behind You is a self-penned celebration of the daming career of Edinburgh panto legend Johnny McKnight, that’s performed by him in full Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz-themed outfit. And he does throw sweets to the audience. But he also swears a lot and eschews a fairytale plot in favour of an autobiographical night in which he shares stories from his career in panto, something that has taken up much of his adulthood. It’s a funny old show, but it starts off strong. Directed by the great John Tiffany, it fizzes into the room effervescently. There is, quite simply, a lot of mileage in a dame coming on stage in the middle of August and swearing a lot: it’s giddily subversive of the genre’s wholesomeness while embracing its undercurrent of naughtiness, and there’s just an illicit thrill to being reminded of panto at this time of year, like scoffing a plate of mince pies in March. Kenny Miller’s set is uncluttered by props, but built around a big star of colourful lights that glitters and twinkles like the world’s most fabulous dressing room. After a while it gets more earnest, as McKnight talks about what we might call his panto journey, which has taken in two decades, 18 dame performances, and 30 writing credits. The sweary veneer is largely put to one side and he speaks earnestly about his youthful days in panto and playing the sexless Silly Billy role, graduating to daming, getting pissed at an aftershow...

The omens were always good for Ohio, which is produced by Fleabag and Baby Reindeer hitmaker Francesca Moody and had a transfer to the Young Vic nailed on months before the Fringe started.  It’s the work of Abigail and Shaun Bengson, aka indie folk duo the Bengsons, aka a band you probably haven’t heard of if you live over here because their oeuvre seems to largely consist of theatrical performance pieces that haven’t toured outside of the US… until now. I’m not going to pretend I know much more about them than the above paragraph but if I had to guess I’d venture that Ohio was intentionally devised with the object of introducing the duo to an overseas audience. It’s a potted history of the pair’s lives, albeit a dreamy, impressionistic one, starting with Shaun explaining how he lied to his son about the existence of an afterlife in order to cheer him up. It then moves through such subjects as the worm Abigail had as a childhood pet, Shaun’s loss of the Christian faith of his childhood, and the degeneration of his hearing that led to him developing severe and incrementally increasing tinnitus. It’s hard to describe the show formally. The pair would make good kids’ TV presenters - she’s bouncy and ebullient, he’s dry and courteous. There is definitely a presentational aspect to the whole thing: I learned an awful lot about the mechanics of tinnitus! There’s also an intoxicating wildness to it all: despite literally beginning with a denial of the existence of God, the whole...

At the beginning of their new show Philosophy of the World, the three members of In Bed with My Brother – that’s Nora Alexander, Dora Lynn and Kat Cory – shuffle on sheepishly to announce that they’re now so skint that they’ve been forced to write a commercial show with a linear narrative that will feature absolutely no nudity. This is all a lie (apart from probably the being skint part) and what follows continues the trio’s tradition of coming up with shows that actually sound like middlebrow-awards bait, but are in fact splenetic leftfield punk-rock conflagrations in which they take their tops off. So there was Tricky Second Album, their show ‘about’ the KLF burning a million, that was really a caustic takedown of the exploitative nature of the theatre industry. Most recently, PRIME_TIME at the Barbican was an assault on Jeff Bezos so frenzied that it didn’t concern itself with any sort of contextualisation or scene setting but just consisted of an escalating series of insults and murder fantasies – hating elevated to raw art.  Now they’ve (sort of) set their sights on The Shaggs, one of the all-time great musical oddities. Hailing from smalltown New Hampshire, the sibling trio’s domineering father was told by a fortune teller that his daughters would be in a successful rock band, something he chose to wholeheartedly believe. And so throughout the late ’60s and first half of the ’70s, Dorothy, Betty and Helen Wiggin were dragooned into becoming The Shaggs, who recorded a...