Edinburgh Festivals 2015: theatre reviews

Adam Riches’ virtually method approach to comedy – in which he loses himself entirely in a character and accent – has taken a logical turn in the last couple of years, with him now making one-man-shows that sit in the theatre section of the Edinburgh Fringe programme. They’re still funny, but that’s not the main point of these detailed characted studies of real life figures.  Last year it was Jimmy, in which Riches took on the persona of Jimmy Connors, a complicated, pathologically competitive tennis star of the ’70s who’d fallen into obscurity before making an extraordinary comeback in 1991. There are definitely similarities to its follow-up, The Captain. Both concern quixotic-bordering-on-eccentric real-life figures, who were written off only to triumph… in a fairly qualified way. The captain in question is James Webb, the first man to swim the English Channel (in 1875), a feat that was all the more remarkable because despite this being the great Victorian age of exploration, almost nobody gave a hoot about what Webb was trying to do: swimming was only just starting to tentatively take off as lesiure activity and wouldn’t really become popular until the early 20th century. The really big difference between Riches’ two theatre shows is that we do not see The Captain from Webb’s point of view. Instead it’s that of his swimming coach Fred Beckwith, a kind of Ishmael to Webb’s Ahab. It’s a smart move, I think: despite the century separating Webb and Connors’ lives, I can see...

Emma Howlett is a gifted, extremely clever writer-director who scored a deserved Summerhall hit last year with the audacious feminist science odyssey Aether. Howett’s follow-up is The Plot and really (if you’re British, anyway) there is only one plot: the failed attempt to blow up the Houses of Parliament in 1605, aka the Gunpowder Plot. A two-hander performed by Sophie Kean and Abby McCann, we initially meet brother plotters Thomas and Robert Wintour (aka Guy Fawkes’ less famous mates) as they’re playing a word association game in which they pass a lit match back and forth, with the loser the one holding it when it burns down. It becomes apparent from their conversation that they’re dead, and awaiting entry to ‘upstairs’ or ‘downstairs’ although I think Howlett means this as much reputationally as theologically. The fact they’re playing with matches, which didn’t really exist until at least two centuries after their deaths, suggests they’ve been here a long time and that perhaps they’re only going to go up or down when public opinion on the Plot settles.  The plot of The Plot is very heavy going indeed To that end they don a series of costumes and take on a succession of characters ranging from themselves and their fellow plotters to James I and even William Shakespeare to offer a guide to the tangled threads of the Plot, from its nuts and bolts origins, class and religious dimensions, to the full gruesomeness of Fawkes’ execution, to the way Macbeth was inspired by the...

Ben Norris has had a decent career as a poet, actor and writer: notably, he’s played Ben Archer in The Archers since 2018. But in The Distance he looks back to his childhood and deftly sidesteps his future success for a poignant, formally thrilling work that tells an almost true story exquisitely.  As we enter, Norris is jogging at a treadmill, surrounded by a large metal frame. Throughout the show he will alternate running on the treadmill with clambering on the bars, often hanging off them at alarming angles as he tells his tale.  Or, not quite his tale. Although based on true events, it’s a fictionalised version, with a protagonist named Chris, not Ben. As a young teenager in Nottingham, Chris did extraordinarily well in cross county at school, leading to his joining the county’s under-15s running team, a path that would lead him – little by little – to selection by Team GB. Norris’ poetic monologue doesn’t really phrase all this as a story of exuberant youthful triumph, or even obsession, exactly. It’s more that as a young man, he came to an understanding of what he was for. As his body changed shape – lean and wiry – and he became laser focussed on things like the expensive running shoes he needed to replace at regulated intervals, his life progressed methodically, in a single, clear direction. A relationship with a fellow young athlete is briefly touched upon – she asks him about whether he’s happy and even that doesn”t sound quite right – he simply belongs, doing...

Now this is proper hardcore Fringing: two actors and a sheet of plastic in a thin-walled box of a venue, together conjuring an epic thriller about a woman who has travelled to the ends of the earth only to become entangled with an esoteric cult on a farflung, half-forgotten Pacific island.  The protagonist of Jack MacGregor’s play is Kerris (Rebecca Wilkie), a paleoclimatologist (or so she says). She has come to the obscure British dependency of Saint John – an island with a population of 48 – to analyse the local rocks and corals for evidence of prehistoric weather systems. When we first meet her, the rather guarded woman is talking to Joe (Xander Cowan), the Kiwi-accented local who will serve as her contact on the island. He is friendly but flighty, and becomes agitated when Kerris starts asking him about the weird Bible she found in her room, which contains disturbing additional chapters attributed to a mysterious religious figure known only as The Prophet. Fraser Scott’s production is fluid, gripping and scary I don’t really want to say loads more than that because as you might imagine, MacGregor’s narrative contains a fair number of twists and turns. It also smartly keeps you guessing as to which genre it is: folk horror? Action thriller? Detective story? But I think it’s fair to divulge that as the story flashes back to Kerris’s encounters with a succession of other characters back in Britain (all played by Cowan), it becomes apparent that she is not a Sgt...