Dorothy Max Prior sees an interesting batch of solo shows at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2024. Although some turn out to be other than what they first seem to be…

As ever, there were very many solo shows on offer at the Edinburgh Fringe this year. Sit in Pleasance Courtyard for 5 minutes, or stroll along the Royal Mile (if you can bear it) and you will be regaled by performers selling you their one-person shows. Many are autobiographical, or comic, or both. There’s more than a fair few focused on personal identity, overcoming adversity, or surviving trauma. Others involve the taking on of a character, or multiple characters, in a storyteller role.

Of course, this being Total Theatre, I’m keen to seek out the work that best fits our remit. We are not strictly promoting ‘physical and visual’ work alone these days, but I’m still drawn strongly to work that has its roots in physical and devised theatre training, for example, coming from the Lecoq tradition or from the circus or clown world.

On the first day of the Fringe, I start in at Summerhall with a very lovely show called Julieta, by Mexican clown Gabriela Muñoz, who was previously seen at the London International Mime Festival with Perhaps Perhaps Quizas. Gabriela goes out as Chula the Clown, who in this case is playing the eponymous Julieta – a lady of a certain age who marks her days alone in her home with a succession of small rituals. It is beautiful clowning. Gaby Muñoz has a fantastic presence as a performer, and really understands the performer/audience relationship – be it the small glances and shrugs or the bigger gestures and interactions (a game of noughts and crosses; a silent invitation to help her with her lipstick or nail varnish). It is also a beautifully designed piece – the set and costume and sound design in her work are never tagged-on extras, but intrinsic elements, providing visual and aural storytelling that work alongside the word-free physical performance of our clown. 

We first meet Julieta at the start of the day – as the cock crows we could say. She arrives into her chintzy sage-green and cream sitting-room carrying her pet chicken, which she places carefully on the floor, and feeds. Although the chicken (a stuffed toy that of course can’t move) doesn’t eat, so after a while, with a sheepish look to the audience, Julieta helps herself to the little corn pellets. We see Julieta breakfasting on water and pills dumped down onto her gilt hostess trolley; Julieta resplendent in her neon orange leotard exercising on her vibrating exercise board (a particularly ludicrous and hilarious scene); Julieta making calls on her rotary-dial telephone; and Julieta listening to old Mexican favourites like ‘La Llorona’ on her transistor radio, or watching TV on her ancient set. And so the day passes to night, and another day dawns. At first, we are in Waiting for Godot territory – witnessing a play in which nothing happens twice. The day progresses much the same as the last (and many more before it, we guess). But then comes the shift. The TV breaks. A repair man is needed. Cue audience interaction. As with previous show Perhaps… (in which our clown heroine procures a bridegroom from the audience) there are no half-measures here. A man is chosen from the audience, and once he’s drawn into the action, he becomes an intrinsic part of the play. There are many marvellous moments with her new co-star, but I’ll flag up just one gem – a magnificent bolero dance, with Julieta in a tangerine organza frock and extraordinarily silly blue rubber-tube arms/rubber-glove hands entwining her new-found lover in an embrace, much to his startled surprise. These gloves, and other objects that play a crucial role in the dramaturgy of the piece, arrive on stage via an invisible second performer-cum-stagehand. Which reminds us that solo performers are very often not alone on stage!

Another, very different, solo show by a female clown is Look After Your Knees by Funny Women finalist Natalie Bellingham, seen at Pleasance Courtyard, which delves ‘into the space inside us left behind by time’, exploring ‘the pain and beauty of growing older’. As we arrive in the space, we see a performance area set with a circular rug, a chair, a standard lamp, a coffee table sporting a small fan, and a number of cardboard boxes, which will give up their contents over the coming hour. Nat enters and her lovely performance energy immediately imbues the room. There’s no fourth wall: she acknowledges people in the audience she knows with a nod and a wink and offers friendly (word-free) appreciation of people she doesn’t – for example, she admires the white marabou stole of the woman sitting next to me with a mimed ‘wow!’. And now she speaks: Isn’t this nice! Being here – all together. A joy. 

The next hour is indeed a joy – a delightful mélange of verbal storytelling, carefully enacted movement motifs, object theatre, and gentle clowning. It’s a show about growing up. About being old enough to know what you want (some of the time, anyway). About surviving bereavement. About re-evaluating the distresses of childhood. About the joys and the pains of adulthood. The sea is a central motif – we return to it in numerous ways over the hour. The child Nat wondering how the tide goes in and out, learning about the cycles of the moon. An older self walking off her grief barefoot on the rocky shoreline. A fantastical story of an encounter with a stranded whale, which acts as a metaphor for the need to accept that sometimes you just can’t make things better, all you can do is to be there. At the end, the marabou lady sitting next to me turns to her friend and says, ‘Well, it wasn’t really about dodgy knees or old age, was it? But I did enjoy it!’ The show is co-created and directed by eminent clown/physical theatre performer Jamie Wood, and this supports the notion that although we might be seeing just one person on stage, they are not standing alone.

Over at Zoo Playground, Duncan Hodgkinson invites us ‘To Dream the Impossible Dream’, in his first solo show Dante and the Robot – which is also directed by Jamie Wood. Here, the fourth wall is firmly in place, which is perhaps a dramaturgical decision intended to flag up our hero Dante’s extreme isolation. The year is 2087, and Dante lives alone in his bedsit with only his house robot – called She-bot, an amusingly lo-tech talking bucket – for company. He’s almost 25, and about to receive his first ‘upgrade’. We find out more about these upgrades as the show progresses – turns out that he and the bot will become symbiotic, so he’ll never again have any privacy, not even a private thought. His life is bleak: he hates his job, and his girlfriend has headed off to Japan, rejecting contemporary urban life in favour of walking up a mountain barefoot and living off foraged herbs and mushrooms. Dante finds mental escape from the distresses of his life through the writing of a screenplay about a Spanish knight who is not named, but bears a close resemblance to a certain battler of windmills! 

Like many sci-fi tales, Dante and the Robot is far more about our current culture and concerns than it is about the future. It references our relationship to AI, the climate crisis, the obsession with youthfulness, and the appeal of dropping out from the urban rat-race. Apart from the upfront reference to Don Quixote, we also note allusions to Brave New World, with the errant Japanese girlfriend taking on the role of the (Rousseau inspired) Noble Savage. The piece has a very minimal set and staging: white tape on the floor marks out the living area; with nothing but a thin mattress, an empty frame on the wall, and the She-bot in the space. So with very little visual stimulation, it all comes down to the actor’s skills – and luckily Duncan Hodgkinson is an able performer, who manages to juggle the very many strands of the story (and it is a pretty dense text) with a confident delivery, and a strong physicality. 

Over at Assembly Checkpoint, solo performer Sasha Krohn presents The Weight of Shadow, in collaboration with theatre company Flabbergast – an intensely physical, nay visceral, depiction of distress. The stage, set with a single bed, is drenched with intense green and blue lighting, and a thrumming drone fills the space. A foot, a leg, then a whole body emerges from the bed. Shaven-skulled, bare-chested, jerking and twitching to an intense electronic soundtrack – we are reminded of legendary physical performances by the likes of Derevo and Al Seed. The disturbed and disturbing figure moves from bed to floor to chair, a painful journey. A wrenching joust with a hoodie and again with a coat. An encounter with a mirror. Everything is jagged, on edge. Back to bed, and a dramatic switch to red lighting for a straps routine embodying a recurring nightmare, the twisting figure ultimately hanging upside down – a strong image. A slightly clunky transition back into the bed, and once again the sleeping figure wakes, and it all begins again. There’s no let up. It’s a physical tour-de-force by a very talented performer – a disturbing picture of mental illness, enacted with precision.

Back to Summerhall for Cosmos, a really unusual solo show – although like many of the shows discussed here, one created by more than one person. In this case, the team is aerialist and actor Ashtar Mullem (previously seen in the Total Theatre Award winning Palestinian Circus show B-orders) and co-creator and director, Clement Dazin. 

We enter the space to see Ashtar sitting calmly at the foot of the cream silks that are hanging down centrestage. The theatrical conceit is that we are joining her in a yoga and meditation class. She welcomes us, invites us to breathe with her, before sounding her Tibetan bowl, and getting out her stretch band. There follows a long autobiographical monologue, delivered while she bends and contorts herself into all sorts of extraordinary shapes. ‘Where is home?’ she asks. ‘My body was my first home,’ she continues. She tells us about her home, the holy city of Jerusalem, and its three religions – Jewish, Muslim and Christian – who all lay claim to it as central to their faith. She talks of her relationship to her grandmother, and the deals she struck, agreeing to go to worship if she got a trip to the market afterwards… She never names her grandmother’s religion, and makes it clear that she is mighty tired of the conflicts around faith in her country, Palestine. She is critical of the 1948 international agreements and subsequent events that have seen her country chopped up and shrunk, but although she is clear-cut in her beliefs, and expresses them in a forthright way, there is always levity and a wry humour in her delivery. Not least because the words come from an upside-down face poking through her legs, or from a body back-bended into a bridge position. When she turns the right way up momentarily, her face looks all wrong! Perception and point-of-view is everything… 

The show also includes two beautiful silks routines, one emerging from a scene in which a man in the audience is brought on stage to chop onions whilst she dances for him. (A man wearing a French beret, so for a moment I suspect he’s a plant, but I think it’s just coincidence!) Not quite Salome style, but she uses the silks to drape and veil her body, as she moves sinuously on the ground and in the air. The riffing on masculinity and men needing to cry (hence the onions!) doesn’t quite come off with conviction, and the ending of the piece feels a little odd, as she moves back into yoga teacher mode – but overall, it’s a beautiful piece of work. Great to see circus skills used so inventively. 

A Little Inquest Into What We Are All Doing Here describes itself as ‘a solo show in celebration of togetherness’. Josie Dale-Jones sits alone on stage behind a desk. She has had a difficult few years. She created a show called The Family Sex Show which aimed to explore issues around sexuality and gender with children, in a loving and caring way, but her intentions were misunderstood, and she found herself at the heart of an enormous storm: receiving threatening letters and emails accusing her of being a paedophile and suggesting she kill herself; becoming the subject of derogatory podcasts tarring her as a pervert; and having the show cancelled and her Arts Council funding withdrawn. All this information is presented in a series of monologues and litanies; delivered with clarity and conviction. She plays a section of the obnoxious podcast and sits stony faced as the swearing and insults pour forth. Ultimately, this is a story about survival. She calls out those who have done her harm (including Arts Council England) with courage and determination.

But although she sits alone, she’s not alone. She has her family (her parents are renowned theatre makers, co-founders of Hoipolloi), her company comrades (she is director of theatre company ThisEgg, creators of the brilliant dressed), and dear supportive friends. This show is a collaborative creation, with the team including ThisEgg co-creator Laurence Cook, and director Rachel Lemon. It is beautifully staged, with an excellent lighting design (being ‘in the spotlight’ an ongoing metaphor). There is a lovely shift in energy as Josie exits and re-enters in a gold lamé suit, giving us a fabulous tap dance routine to ‘That’s Entertainment’, replete with wings and crab-rolls – this girl can dance! We see in this routine a young, eager stage-school pupil looking forward to her career in the biz, unaware of the set-backs to come. Or we see an older and wiser artist, able to smile and shine beyond the hazards, and dance herself dizzy with joy. There’s another theatrical twist towards the end of the show – a Deus Ex Machina moment involving another person that I won’t spoil!

So really and truly, she is not alone. Had I known the subject of the piece, I might not have gone along to see it – I have a resistance to theatre shows about theatre. But this is something far more than that, a truly uplifting piece about resistance, survival and community.  

Theatre is by nature a collaborative artform, and the lesson from all of the shows seen here is that even if it’s a solo show, it is more often than not a team effort.

Featured image (top): Ashtar Mullem / Clement Dazin: Cosmos

The Edinburgh Fringe 2024 runs 2 August till 25 August, various venues. For further information on all Edinburgh Festival Fringe shows, see www.edfringe.com

Gaby Muñoz: Julieta, Summerhall, 1-11 August 2024 

Natalie Bellingham: Look After Your Knees, Pleasance Courtyard, 1-25 August 2024

Duncan Hodgkinson: Dante and the Robot, Zoo Playground, 1-25 August 2024

 Sasha Krohn and Flabbergast Theatre: The Weight of Shadow, Assembly Checkpoint, 1-25 August 2024

Ashtar Muallem / Clement Dazin: Cosmos, Summerhall, 1-11 August 2024

ThisEgg: A Little Inquest Into What We Are All Doing Here, 1-14 August 2024