Bloody Trams review

One Fringe show we probably can’t expect to see in London anytime soon is the Traverse’s delightful and damning verbatim play about the Edinburgh trams system, the £760m white elephant  project that laid waste to swathes of the city centre for a walloping seven years, vastly over both schedule and budget. But if you’re in Auld Reekie this week, this late night gem comes heartily recommended.

As an annual visitor, it’s hard not to find the glacial process of the work absurdly amusing; as a local resident, you may well have had your livelihood ruined by the street outside your business being dug up. 

‘Bloody Trams’ approaches the issue from both sides: on the one hand many of – maybe even the majority of – the testimonies included in Joe Douglas’s production make it clear that whatever the end result, the process was a complete fucking shambles. It was blighted by amateurish construction cock ups  (a street was dug up twice as nobody had any record of what had actually been laid there the first time) and poor communication from both the council and project management company Transport Initiatives Edinburgh. It damaged some local businesses and soaked up millions in government funding during periods of recession and austerity. As has been widely noted, it would allegedly be cheaper to pave the streets between Princess Street and Leith with gold than it woud have been to build the trams.

But the play is no rant – rather it’s a cabaret of sorts, with all parts played by evening wear-clad Jonathan Holt and Nicola Roy, who parrot the interviews from their iPhones while playing the part of our entertainers for the night, smarming and preening and occasionally burst into song, accompanied by dissolute piano chappie David Paul Jones. Inevitably some of the people Douglas interviewed had some pretty funny things to say, while some of them were just plain drunk – the pretty, diminutive Roy is given all the roughest Glasgow accents to handle, and it’s very funny. And there’s a certain Dunkirk spirit to it all, almost a sort of celebration of a shared regional and even national trauma.

It won’t put you off getting a tram – but it’s an amusing way of explaining why their delay was no laughing matter. 

By Andrzej Lukowski