Ablutions

As the Oscars approach, spare a thought for Hollywood’s failed actors. The flipside of the coiffured hair, red carpets and slinky gowns of Tinseltown is less easy on the eye. With an impressive instinct for character, young newcomers Fellswoop Theatre dive headlong into the cesspit world of a handful of bar-haunting lost souls, once seduced by the bright lights of LA, but now struggling with drink, drugs and despair. It’s an arch portrait of a clutch of characters whose dreams are at the bottom of a whisky glass.

This Edinburgh Fringe sell-out piece is an adaptation of the first novel of Canadian writer Patrick Dewitt which follows an alcoholic bartender as he lives his sorry life, blurred by his being permanently off his face. His liver is fucked, he’s been HIV-positive since birth and his wife looks set to leave him. And all around him are the dregs of existence.

This is only Fellswoop’s second ever show, but the Bristol-based company marks a fresh, individual outline for itself. Music is a constant element; three of the company play haunting tunes with a slight country-and-western twang to accompany the main character’s twisted, unhappy musings. Called, disarmingly, You, the barman describes his festering body and his filthy world first-hand. And as he gets to his peers, the musicians transform on stage into the likes of Curtis, the bar’s drunk, sexually inappropriate regular and the scabby drinking joint’s ditsy, impressionable owner.

The gruesomeness is pretty relentless and though the scene changes from bar to road-trip, the nastiness doesn’t. It’s hard to tell what the point is: a portrait of all this is fine, but it’s not much fun. The laughs come from Harry Humberstone and Fiona Mikel’s excellent characterisations. They play all the other roles in the piece and Humberstone is particularly convincing as the bar’s manager, whose coke, pill and booze binges reduce him to a floppy, mumbling wreck, while Mikel segues smoothly from hurt wife to drunken partygoer.

There’s something like a blackly comic, American underbelly charm here and the company’s use of music is great, but don’t come hoping you’ll leave anything other than disgusted by your fellow man. Silver screen glamour this ain’t.