Edinburgh Festivals 2015: theatre reviews

This enjoyable if extremely lightweight musical is based around a substantially made-up version of the complicated relationship that existed between tech titans Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Written by Jordan Allen-Dutton, Erik Weiner and Hal Goldberg – aka the US team behind previous Fringe favourite The Bomb-itty of Errors – the songs are for the most part melodious but flyaway baubles. But there’s no denying that silly as it all all, the whole thing comes together when our geek heroes break into rhyme: an obnoxious rap-rock number in which the newly hip Microsoft founder declares ‘I’m Bill Gates, bitch’ is unfortunately very funny, and the climactic rap battle between the two protagonists is basically worth the admission in and of itself. Kane Oliver Parry is very enjoyable as Jobs, here portrayed as a slick, self-absorbed hippie who shamelessly steals from and manipulates others to help him design products that people think are cool rather than ones they actually need. It’s to the credit of Parry that he emerges as the hero of the story without it ever descending into weird fawning – this Jobs is an incorrigible rogue rather than an out-and-out bastard, and his amorality credibly feels like an extension of his free-love philosophy. Dan Buckley’s Gates comes across less well, a bullied geek who is driven into the heights of megalomania by a cocktail of vast success an resentment that Jobs remains forever cooler than him.  Despite Gates’s more benign latterday image, the...

This review is from 2015. A Gambler’s Guide to Dying returns for a tenth anniversary run at the Traverse in 2025. This is a nice way to start the Traverse’s Fringe programme: performer Gary McNair’s monologue ‘ A Gambler’s Guide to Dying’ is a tribute to his grandfather that blends a nostalgic warmth and a few good chuckles with some smart stuff about the nature of storytelling. It’s a bit MOR, but agreeably so, and crucially for a show about stories, it has a pretty good story itself. McNair’s grandfather was a gambler and teller of tall tales; often the two went hand in hand. ‘A Gambler’s Guide…’ repeatedly returns to an ever-shifting yarn about him supposedly putting a bet on England to win in the ’66 World Cup final, and allegedly getting beaten up in a bar in the Gorbals as a result. The young McNair was in awe of the old man, but as he tells it, he came to realise that not everything his granddad said was strictly true; that he was a gambling addict and a spewer of hot air, whose anecdotes often put an outrageous spin on the fact that he was neither successful, nor popular. But if it’s a show about a loss of innocence, it’s also about overcoming disillusionment and reaching an understanding with older generations. McNair comes to understand the small pleasures that gambling gave his grandfather, the comfort that exists in storytelling, the joy in buffing an anecdote until it becomes more memorable than true. And at the end of his life, when he was stricken with...

This review is from London in 2024. We tend to think of New Yorkers as pathologically grouchy souls. But primary schooler-orientated NYC wizard Mario the Maker Magician is defined by his infectious elan. Whether he’s goofing around with the petty logic of a seven-year old or accessibly expounding on his love for Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, it’s the giddy atmosphere that the Sesame Street and David Blaine-endorsed Mario fosters in his show that makes it work as much as the actual magic. And the magic is great: a lot of sleight of hand stuff that impresses and winds up the smaller members of the audience in equal measure, plus a fair amount of out-and-out trolling of the adults. And this is the key: while never actually losing control, Mario encourages an air of borderline anarchy that’s extremely good fun (one audience member is required to look after a box and run off if Mario gets anywhere near her… which he does, a lot). His nominal USP is his homemade robots and devices (the ‘maker’ bit), and it has to be said that while these are very much part of the show – there is a very cute extended section with one little DIY droid – his act doesn’t lean on them quite as much as one might expect from the spiel. But that’s hardly an issue unless you’re an obsessive robophile: Mario himself is the main attraction. To be honest, aside from shonky kids’ party entertainers I’m not sure I can remember another children’s magician playing in London, let alone one turning up...

This review is from the 2022 Edinburgh Fringe. Darkfield’s hallucinatory audio dramas are practically their own genre and I don’t think it’s totally unreasonable to say that if you’ve seen one before, you basically know what you’re getting yourself into with a newie. ‘Seen’, of course, is not the operative word: like predecessors ‘Seance' and ‘Flight’, ‘Eulogy’ takes place in total blackout conditions, inside a sealed shipping container, with the show prerecorded and relayed via headphones - a trippy audio drama relayed in disorientating binaural sound. There’s a twist with this one, which is that our headsets have microphones in them, and throughout the show we’re asked a series of yes/no questions about ourselves - it’s mostly at the beginning and I started to wonder if there had been any point to it, but it actually builds up to an extremely amusing twist at the end – it’s a throwaway gag, but it’s a good throwaway gag. Otherwise, it’s a traditional Darkfield adventure: that is to say, a batshit crazy story that involves us being entered into some sort of bizarre contest at a strange hotel, where we’re put under the charge of a ‘helper’ who seems to be tasked with taking us through a ritualistic series of actions that must be followed to the letter if we’re to succeed in the contest. We do not follow them to the letter… and things get very dark. The plots in Darkfield shows always seem to follow the vertiginously swirling logic of dreams, with abrupt changes in location...

This review is from London, October 2024. Arcade will play at thet 2025 Edinburgh Fringe, along with Darkfield’s Eulogy and Darkfield Radio. Blackout theatre specialists Darkfield – aka Glen Neath and David Rosenberg – have spent years crafting meticulously disorientating immersive worlds that audience members experience via sophisticated headphones-based binaural sound design, performed in entirely lightless shipping containers. On the whole, they feel like surreal, sinister dreams: evocative but you’re effectively a passenger – just along for the ride, with no real agency of your own, and as the (very short) shows wear on and you get acclimatised to the darkness I’ve generally found the whole thing starts to feel a bit sillier. Arcade is a clever and unsettling leap forwards, giving you a degree of agency as you’re stood at an old school arcade machine with a big button on it that you press to indicate ‘yes’ in the choose-your-own-adventure style story. You do not in fact play an arcade game, but the general understanding in the interactive story relayed through your headphones is that you’re an avatar named Milk in a game that you could either interpret as intended to be imagined as sophisticated VR or taken literally as a headphones game from Darkfield. Whatever the case, you’re thrust into a violent, absurdist dystopia and while one button might not sound like a lot of agency, when I got shot point blank in the head within about 30 seconds of starting after making an...

This review is from the Royal Court Theatre in London in December 2024. As Sutara Gayle’s intensely autobiographical show starts, the theatre sits in darkness, while a soulful, passionate, overture begins. Already, it feels like we’re bearing witness to something spiritual. And then we see her; Gayle, otherwise known as Lorna Gee stands angelic and sturdy, ready to tell her life story.  And what a remarkable story it is. The Legends of Them takes us back to reggae pioneer Gayle’s childhood in Brixton, through her sexual awakening, early music career and on a transformative trip to India. We see her moving from one school to the next, into the care system and finding her soul through singing. Is all of it coherent? Absolutely not. Gayle flits from the body of one person in her life to the next, sometimes without any change in her physicality at all. In just a few seconds, she is her mother, a child psychiatrist, and her sister. There is no sense of a linear structure, with the narrative jumping around haphazardly.  You’re sure to leave the theatre slightly bewildered. But, once you accept it is a bit of a minefield, Gayle’s otherworldly presence is hard to look away from. Blending music with history, video with raw emotion onstage, she is a force to be reckoned with. In scraps she reveals herself through her memories; scenes from her past flash into reality and then disappear once more. Gayle has had a life so rich that even one of her recollections could form a full play...