‘Part social realism, part science fiction, with a healthy dose of dystopia’ – 1927’s new show Please Right Back is not quite what it first seems to be, as Dorothy Max Prior discovers at the Edinburgh International Festival 2024

We enter the auditorium to see a whole-stage projection across three screens, monochrome op-art style graphics, and to each side of the stage, a young person dressed in a contemporary take on a Pierrot costume, decorated with letters of the alphabet, each wearing a dunce’s hat upon their head. (These and other fabulous costumes for this production are by 1927’s regular designer Sarah Munro.) As we find our seats, the two leave their posts and follow some of us. If you have the gall to turn and stare them out, you are rewarded with a pencil. I get a pencil… 

The pair remind me rather of the terrible twins in 1927’s first production, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, a Total Theatre Award winning show that took the Edinburgh Fringe by storm many moons ago. Since then, the company have flown to great heights, staging theatre shows and operas across the globe. And here we are, ready and waiting for the Scottish premiere of their new show, Please Right Back, at the Edinburgh International Festival 2024.

Once we’re all seated, it’s lift-off time – and we are whirled into a typical 1927 multi-coloured extravaganza merging Suzanne Andrade’s witty storytelling with the usual gorgeous film and animation work of Paul Barritt. There are fabulous shapeshifting performances by the cast of four (Chardae Phillips, Jenny Wills, Lara Cowin, and Stefan Davis) who work their magic alongside and inside Paul’s superb visual design. 

There’s plenty of razz-a-ma-tazz from this all-singing all-dancing cast. We are presented with a tall tale featuring a stolen briefcase, a talking lion, a boxing kangaroo, and pirates stranded inside a whale. The narrative is built around a series of letters between an absent father and his daughter, Kim. The errant dad, known only as Mr E, (played with great gusto by Stefan Davis) is apparently having all sorts of marvellous adventures in the world (depicted in glorious technicolour), whilst his children, Kim and her little brother Davey, a pair of feisty working-class kids, are having a bit of a tough time on their monochrome-toned run-down estate, what with the piles of rubbish, wild dogs, annoying neighbour Raymond, and exhausted mum Dee who is trying to make ends meet. Plus, there is this enormously annoying woman who keeps turning up at their doorstep to ‘support the family’ – which would seem to mean offering unsolicited advice on matters she fails to understand.

‘We all miss you’ writes Kim to her dad. ‘Please right back.’ 

I don’t think it’s giving too much away to say that it turns out that the children’s father is not adventuring in fabulous faraway lands of spies and pirates – he’s in prison. So the show turns out to be poignantly and wittily exploring the knock-on effects of prison sentences on offenders’ families, and is apparently based on Suzanne’s own life story.

Kim is played by a real live actor (Chardae Phillips) who like everyone else in the cast brilliantly multi-tasks as whatever other characters are needed in scenes her lead character is not in. Her little brother Davey is a cartoon character – although after a while we completely believe in him as a real person. As is always the case with 1927 shows, the interaction between real flesh-and-blood people and animated sets and characters is phenomenally skilled. Kim’s scenes at school, where she is bullied, and hit on by the school’s bad-girl Goth Stacey, who tries to bring her over to the dark side, are really lovely.

The script is, as you’d expect from Suzanne Andrade, full of witticisms and barbs – lots of digs at the way working class families in general and families of prisoners in particular are treated, and lots of criticism of the British education system. But the show, which is in very early days, is currently a little baggy in the middle, and occasionally slightly too ernest and preachy. The mid section could do with trimming a little (although how that happens when you have minutely choreographed every scene to tie in with the animation, I don’t know). In particular, there is rather too much of the annoying ‘care in the community’ lady. We soon get the point, and really don’t need it rammed home. Once we get the revelation that Mr E is in jail, it all slumps a bit and can feel a little over-egged in some scenes. But it picks up again, and we are treated to a fabulous resolution and ending, as the glorious multi-coloured fantasy world and real-life monochrome experience are pulled together with panache.

As 1927 aficionados will have noted, none of the original company members are onstage. Suzanne is writer and director, with Esme Appleton co-directing. Paul is, as ever, behind the scenes. And – sadly, I feel – the company’s original composer and performing musician Lilian Henley is not involved with this production. Laurence Owen is a very competent sound designer (he worked on previous 1927 show Golem) but in that case it was in tandem with composer Lilian Henley, who has such a unique touch that she is very much missed. The music in this production is good enough – mostly being pastiche film noir or Disney or Latin jazz or whatever else is being referenced in the narrative, with the occasional musical-theatre number popping up. It does feels a little ordinary, coming after the fabulous musical experimentation of the company’s last show, Roots. But the musical style is all in keeping with the Hollywood-esque mood of the fantasy scenes, which I presume is the point.

After the short-story format of that previous show, it is good to see 1927 return to a full-length narrative, as with The Animals and Children Took to the Streets and Golem. It’s not quite up to the giddy heights of those two shows yet, but it is early days for Please Right Back.  

It’s touring later in 2024, and I look forward to seeing it again once it has bedded in. In the meantime – bravo, 1927. Creating a complex show of this sort is no mean feat, and despite some criticism, I really enjoyed the show. It most definitely has legs (all the better to high-kick with). Jazz hands at the ready!

1927: Please Right Back played 2-11 August 2024 at The Studio, as part of the Edinburgh International Festival. www.eif.co.uk  

Featured image (top) and all other l images: 1927: Please Right Back courtesy of the company / EIF

The two-hander is a staple of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, but this can mean very many different things. Dorothy Max Prior reports back on some of the more unusual pairings seen at Fringe 2024, embracing circus, physical and visual theatre, and live art

The world of circus and physical theatre is teaming with two-handers, and versions of The Two Brothers abound. By which I mean the tradition, established in commedia dell’arte, of two male clowns who play out their rivalry onstage – a tradition that has been continually reinvented over the centuries, embracing pantomime, variety, film (Laurel and Hardy, say), TV (see Morecambe and Wise) and stage shows from the likes of The Right Size and Ridiculusmus. Ghost Light: Between Fall and Flight, presented at Circus Hub by Quebec-based company Machine du Cirque, is a prime example – although the fact that it is set on and around a teeterboard makes it a pretty unusual one.

Two men, one tall, one shorter, both dressed in white tail-coats, and a teeterboard set centre-stage on a simple white set (large circular dancefloor/mat, and upstage a hanging voile curtain). One jumps on the board before the other is ready and sends him flying, limbs flailing, landing off-balance in a thud. He retaliates, and his partner is tossed off the board, landing on the floor with a splat. Of course, this is immediately followed by a breathtakingly skilled set-piece in which they both rise ever-higher, flipping and spinning and somersaulting. A wondrous mix of physical skill and tomfoolery…

The two men are Maxim Laurin and Guillaume Larouche – and although, before seeing Ghost Light, I might have been surprised to learn that the only piece of circus equipment used in an hour-long show is a teeterboard, it turns out that this is more than enough. Partly because these two are world-class acrobats, their skills on the board absolutely superb – but also because they know how to build those skills into a dramaturgically satisfying show. They use very many theatrical tricks throughout the hour. There is shadow theatre behind that voile curtain, the old trick of moving closer to then away from a lamp, creating lovely images. Sometimes going for the obvious really works. There’s a great use of costume-as-prop as variously coloured tail-coats on wheeled stands move on- and off-stage along a rail, adding a puppet-esque effect of extra bodies in the space – these coat-people are then used in very many interesting ways, including as dance partners. There’s a Joker inspired bad clown fight, the two battling whilst dressed in luridly coloured coats. The teeterboard is set on a turntable so it can spin, adding an interesting dimension to the use of the space. Movement choreography is excellent, as is the lighting design, the all-white start to the show shifting to a whole rainbow of colours throughout the hour. Sound design gives us a lovely combination of composed and found sound, from tinkling bells to elephantine trumpeting. There is also the classic ‘I’m quitting’ routine beloved of The Two Brothers wherever they might be found in the world: one performer throws in the towel, and is eventually persuaded to return by the other. In this version, the process is drawn out for as long as it could possibly be. But they make it work – and using their shoes as the vehicle for the quit and the return, create a beautifully satisfying ending. An excellent two-man show – and one of the best and most unusual circus shows at Fringe 2024. 

Paper Swans is a two-hander of a very different sort, an absurdist play by Lithuanian actor and writer Vyte Garriga, presented at Pleasance Courtyard in collaboration with Flabbergast Theatre. As we enter the space, the small stage area is dimly lit and set with a garden bench. Upon it sits a young woman – dressed in a white calf-length ballet tutu, her hair drawn back in a bun, her neck long. She is making paper swans. The floor is littered with the little swans… Enter a male security guard, who tells her that the park is closed for the night. He asks her to leave; she refuses, and insists he helps her make the swans, which all need to be done before dawn. Who is she, what is she doing here, and why does she feel she needs to make these paper swans? There are no answers. Does everything have to have a reason? Eventually, he leaves, frustrated. He returns, and it all starts up again. 

‘Have you noticed we’ve been here before?’ she says. On each repeat, things shift, and we learn a little more: she needs to cover the lake with the swans; she can make the swans fly in the air. But we never arrive at a full, rational answer. As she rises from the bench, we notice that her white tights are bloodied… Eventually, there are names. She is Anna. Anna Pavlova. But she is also Margot Fonteyn, and numerous other famous ballerinas. He is Peter. Or perhaps that is Pyotr? The source of the central image – the swan-like ballerina making paper swans – is eventually openly acknowledged, as the two dance tenderly to the waltz from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. We can also note here that the playwright cites Saint-Saens’ ‘The Swan’ (Le Cygne) from The Carnival of the Animals, which tells the story of a dying swan, as another influence… She describes her own play as a cross between Waiting for Godot and The Black Swan, which seems fair enough! And her surrealist influences are never far away: at one point, the guard says ‘I can feel the consequences on my skin, so this can’t be a dream’ – one of many memorable lines in the play. 

It is a piece in which visual imagery is as crucial a part of the dramaturgy as the text. There is a very lovely use of hand-held light throughout – starting with the obvious choice to have the guard search the ‘park’ with a torch, and moving later into more abstract illumination of faces with blood-red lamps, taking us into psych-horror mode. The two performers, Vyte herself as the girl and Daniel Christomou as the guard, each have their own distinct movement language – his is a highly stylised toy-soldier series of staccato jerks; hers more flowing. as the play progresses, they move closer, literally and metaphorically. Perhaps they are two halves of one whole person, the yin and yang. Or perhaps they are the crafted versus the organic. The play is an open book – make of it what you will. It is a great text, carefully staged, visually beautiful, and performed with great gusto. No, we don’t need to have all the answers… 

Heartbreak Hotel, seen at Summerhall, is also created by a female theatre-maker who performs in the work herself – in this case, New Zealander Karin McCracken, who is half of company EKBM along with director Eleanor Bishop. It could be described as a sci-art piece exploring what happens in our bodies when we’re broken-hearted – but that only tells part of the story. Unlike Paper Swans, in which we have two equal-weight characters in the space most of the time, Heartbreak Hotel gives us one central character, performing what might almost have been a solo show, with the second performer as her foil, playing all the male ‘others’ in her life, from ex-boyfriend, to disco-dancing gay best friend, to Tinder dates, to accountant, to guy in the supermarket who stands awkwardly by as she weeps over the shelves full of chipotle sauces (she and the erstwhile boyfriend had tacos as their last meal together before the split). Simon Leary has his work cut out for him, but rises admirably to shine in every incarnation, with his boy-lesque dance routine a real winner. And Karin McCracken is great as the central character, the unnamed woman with the broken heart who has taken up playing the synth as part of her healing process – cue covers of every break-up song you have ever heard, that manage to be both cheesy and poignant at one and the same time.

The story of the relationship isn’t told chronologically, but zips back and forth in time. The science is brought to us through mini-lectures, and the novel use of a bank of electronic light panels that spell out key words. So, we have the three stages of physical response post-breakup illuminated for us, as each is played out on stage: Protest, Resignation, Awe. Other key words that flash up include Anxious, Avoiding, and Accounting – plus the key dates 10 March (last meal together) and 11 March (break-up day, which unfolds in the local bar). It’s a beautifully constructed piece, performed with humour and intelligence – and we are given a Mary Oliver poem to boot! ‘Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile, the world goes on…’

Also at Summerhall, also from New Zealand, and also featuring one lead performer and one in a supportive role: The Suitcase Show is bought to us by Trick of the Light’s Ralph McCubbin Howell as our lead storyteller, with director Hannah Smith onstage as a ‘visible operator plus’. 

The theatrical conceit here is that we are at the security gate of an unnamed border. A lone traveller (Ralph) arrives with a pile of battered suitcases. A security officer (Hannah) screens the first case – we see the x-ray screen – and asks for an explanation. The explanation takes the form of a dark fairy tale, emerging from the lovely miniature city contained in the case. There are hoof prints in the snow that are possibly made by the devil himself, and a poor little matchgirl who doesn’t last the freezing night. And so it goes. As each case is investigated, more wonders are revealed, more stories told. Lone travellers abound, many coming to a sticky end. There’s a bad-omen bear in the landscape repeatedly viewed from a moving train, a Major Tom astronaut lost in space, and a tale of gold and greed and death under the oak tree. There are all sorts of visual delights housed in the cases: cue shadow play, animation, video, carefully-constructed models, and manipulated objects (both of the performers are also makers). There’s also a nice little interlude as Ralph’s hands are used in a puppet-esque mode to act out an airport lounge romance, breaking the dark mood of the storytelling. All of this would be enough, but there is more. There’s a long and slightly incongruous riff on keeping a bag packed by the door, ready to move out to avoid the bombs or the floods or the fires. No, its not happening here, yet, but sometime soon… There’s also a filmed scene showing the security officer’s colleagues in another room, and what happens when our lone traveller is sent off to be interrogated. The scene is a slightly odd diversion, but it does provide an opportunity for Hannah to get up from her tech table and interact with the audience.    

If there’s a criticism it’s that there is just far too much material here for a one-hour show, and that the central premise of lone traveller stories gets occasionally hijacked. But it is a very enjoyable show, performed with great gusto, and received enthusiastically by the sold-out house.

Over at Zoo Playground, Berlin-based bambule.babys bring something completely different to the Fringe – a feisty feminist psycho-magical ritual, with the performance art work of Guillermo Gomez-Peña and La Pocha Nostra as a reference point. My home is not my home – ‘dedicated to all those homesick for a better world’ is best not viewed as theatre, but rather as a durational, interactive performance and installation piece. 

There are two bodies on stage: director-performer: Anna Valeska Pohl is the Madonna (half-naked, strung with fairy lights, wild-haired) and Michael Pöpperl is our Trash Prophet Jesus (also wild-haired, bearded, wearing a long overcoat and a bride’s veil), blessing us as we arrive in the space. Meanwhile, the Madonna is carrying her Holy Spirit retro cassette player around the space, the refrain ‘Your pain is my pain’ crackling out. 

My home is not my home is inspired by encounters with people on the margins of society, and uses the iconography of Catholicism to celebrate the poor, the meek and the lowly (who will, we must remember, inherit the earth) and to explore the notion of transformation and redemption. There are prayers and litanies to lost souls (homeless people, sex workers, single mothers living on the breadline), and numerous interactive ritual actions: we are invited to write our sins on Jesus’s body with lipstick, and to force-feed him bananas. It’s tragic, funny, moving, and ludicrous all at once – as befits a ‘soap opera performance’. It also raises the issue of how this sort of work is presented and viewed at the Edinburgh Fringe. Without alternative projects like Forest Fringe, and with the demise of Glasgow’s National Review of Live Art adding to the gaping hole, it is difficult to know where and how it might sit. There isn’t even a category in the Fringe brochure for performance art/live art performance and installation, so it gets placed with dance and physical theatre, but that doesn’t quite do the job. But bravo to Zoo for taking a chance on such an experimental piece (by Fringe standards). And bravo to bambule.babys for presenting such a strong and challenging piece of work. An invitation for theatre-goers to step out of the comfort zone and see something truly radical.  

Back to Summerhall now for the latest Sh!t Theatre piece, the company also having their roots in alternative performance practice (having studied with the legendary Lois Weaver of Split Britches). And although they embrace the mores of theatre to some extent, interaction and ritual are also central to their work. They’ve been away for a while, and in the course of the coming hour we learn why. The show is called Sh!t Theatre (Or What’s Left of Us), which is explained eventually…

It’s most definitely them – there they are, Louise Mothersole and Rebecca Biscuit, same as ever, welcoming us in, no fourth walls here – but minus the customary white face paint. Unmasked, you could say. Or at least, you might say if they weren’t wearing whole-head badger masks, which go nicely with their Quaker-ish monochrome clothes (black suit and white shirt for Louise; a fetching floor-length frock and pinny for Rebecca). There’s also no video or slide-show projections, as is usual in their shows. Instead, the room is set with wooden pews and banners, tankards of beer, and plates of sliced-bread sandwiches curling at the edges. Yep, we are in a folk club.  Time for a song! A song about death! And off we go with ‘John Barleycorn’, who is cut down and crushed so we might have the barley to make the beer we drink. There’s also a long-drawn-out wassailing song, featuring a bowl that audience members contribute to – beer, cider and gin all going in. And yes, it gets drunk. The songs are mostly about death – ‘Here’s a song about death!’ Louise calls out cheerily at numerous points – and include a classic Steeleye Span number, ‘The Shaking of the Sheets’, a reworking of a medieval danse macabre (dance of death) ballad; all performed most beautifully on a variety of musical instruments, the two meanwhile sporting antlers or animal heads. There’s a hint of The Wicker Man and a dash of Midsommar. Their singing voices, always good, seem to have soared to a new level.. In between songs, we are given a typical Sh!t Theatre yarn about their research process – which includes visiting folk clubs around the country, with one memorable one a club in Leeds that burnt down the week after they were there. (‘Not us! Ashes to ashes.’)

But there’s something else going on. The constant references to death, and the occasional ‘Are you doing OK, Becca?’ ‘No. Are you doing OK, Louise?’ ‘No’ exchanges. There’s an enigmatic referral to a missing team member: ‘We don’t have a director to tell us what to do, it’s just us.’ And odd lines here and there like, ‘It is possible to be desperately sad and have fun at the same time’. They were sad, so they found solace in singing folk songs… 

Eventually it all bursts out, in a sombre and beautiful litany that lists the losses and bereavements, and sometimes darkly funny experiences in hospitals and morgues, that both have experienced in recent years. The show, reframed, becomes a memorial for Louise’s father, and for Rebecca’s partner, the company’s director, Adam Brace.

Are they OK? Actually, all things considered, they’re OK. Doing brilliantly. Sad, but ‘joy adjacent’. Life trumps death. The show must go on. Welcome back, Sh!t Theatre.

Featured image (top) bambule.babys: My Home is Not My Home. Photo Tay Lunar

Machine du Cirque: Ghost Light: Between Fall and Flight, Circus Hub, 2-24 August 2024

Vyte Garriga/Flabbergast Theatre: Paper Swans, Pleasance Courtyard, 2-25 August 2024

EKBM: Heartbreak Hotel, Summerhall, 2-26 August 2024

Trick of the Light: The Suitcase Show, Summerhall, 1–25 August 2024

bambule.babys: My Home is Not My Home, Zoo Playground, 2-25 August 2024

Sh!t Theatre: Or What’s Left of Us, Summerhall, 2-25 August 2024

For full details and to book for these or other Edinburgh Festival Fringe shows, see www.edfringe.com 

Dorothy Max Prior sees three impressive ensemble circus shows at Edinburgh Fringe 2024 – Circa: Humans 2.0, Cassus: Apricity and Recirquel: Paradisum – all exploring what it means to be human

Legendary Australian company Circa have made Underbelly’s Circus Hub on the Meadows their home in recent years. Last year, they brought Peepshow to the Hub’s big top space, Lafayette. This year, they returned with another outing for Humans 2.0, last seen in 2022; coming after its predecessor Humans, which was presented at least twice at the Fringe. But the company, under the direction of founder Yaron Lifschitz, are so (deservedly) revered that it would seem that they can pack out the Lafayette for the whole run, no matter how many times the show returns.

Each new incarnation of Humans is its own thing, exploiting the specific physicality and skills of whoever is in the ten-strong ensemble at the time. The design is straightforward. No set or props – just a white circular dancefloor, and an intelligent and effective lighting design, with flashes of strobe and the occasional switch to a bright-red flood of light. There’s nothing to interfere with the fact that it’s all about the human bodies in the space – an exploration of what it is to be human, with trust, support, balance, and collaboration to the fore. Bodies are tossed to each other at the speed of light, human towers rise and fall effortlessly, women and men base other women and men from standing, or lying, or kneeling, or (astonishingly) rising from bridge position bearing a body. It is mostly ensemble, and mostly floor-based work (tumbling or acrobalance or hand-to-hand); but there are a few solos, including an aerial silks act – the performer dressed in black, using black silks, in an ultra-elegant routine. My only disappointment: this particular incarnation of Humans 2.0 has done away with the eclectic and varied soundtrack of previous versions – the Caetano Veloso sambas and ‘lizard’ songs replaced by a hardcore four-to-the-floor electronic score that I found a tad too loud and insistent. I preferred the musical variety of the previous versions… It is still a great show, regardless – but I mourned the loss of musical variety.

Cassus is another esteemed Australian circus company – they really do know how to do circus down under! The company return to the Fringe – and to favoured venue, Assembly Garden’s Palais du Varieté – with Apricity. The cast of five enter from different points in this large Spiegeltent, moving through the auditorium to the stage, everyone carrying a lit candle in a glass jar. Each manipulates their jar with dexterity, moving it round the body then placing it carefully around the edge of the circular stage. It feels like the start of a ritual ceremony. As they move into ensemble work, we are given a number of clever and beautiful images of a multi-limbed human candelabra. Next, a succession of solos or duets or trios. Two of the company’s co-founders, Jesse Scott and  Lachlan McAulay, are in the show, along with three female performers. A feature of the company’s work is the celebration of strong women and sensitive men, and in this show we get to see an immensely strong woman base all four of the other performers at one and the same time; there’s a beautiful and tender trapeze double from Jesse and Lachlan; and a sweet moment from Jesse on hula hoop (hoops are not just for girls, folks!). I also very much enjoy the whimsical solo waltz from Lachlan that turns into a meditative Sufi inspired spin. This is paired with a contrasting balance-walk across a row of glass lanterns to the rear, very much in keeping with the contemporary circus fashion of showing us two things at once, but personally I’d have been happy just focusing on the simple and beautiful spinning. Elsewhere, we have a lovely lyra/cirque act ; a fun ensemble tumbling routine to the cheery 60s pop hit ‘I Said Yeah Yeah’ (one of many well-chosen tracks used with good choreographic sensibility in the show ); a good hand-balancing act; various two-handed acro set pieces; and a very nice rope act that saw two flyers and two bases swapping in and out with breathtaking skill. You don’t see ensemble corde lisse two often! Apricity’s tagline is that it ‘illuminates the power of human connection in times of darkness’ – and that’s clearly what we see and experience here. Job done – another success for Cassus.

Budapest-based Recirquel, led by director Bence Vági, are another company with a strong reputation at the Edinburgh Fringe, following 2023 sell-out success IMA, and the Total Theatre Awards shortlisted My Land (2018). This year, they bring us Paradisum, which like those previous shows seen, feels strongly influenced by mythology. Here, creation myths, and myths of resurrection and regeneration, are at play. It features an ensemble of six, two female and four male performers, all equally adept as soloists and ensemble players.

We start with one lone figure ‘thrown’ into a void, twitching back into life. The last man on earth or the first? Our ‘Adam’ evolves to stand, then moving into an aerial suspended-pole act. As the piece progresses we meet five other characters who emerge from the primeval swamp, crawling and twisting in Butoh-esque choreographies to a soundtrack of eery drones, synths and cello. Each gets a scene on their chosen apparatus – cirque, straps, hand-balancing on high, a ladder-balancing act that incorporates juggling, and a percussive acrobatic act on and around a large wooden box. Each seems to be portraying a process of evolution and exploring the relationship between gravity and levity – between ground and air, between the apes and the angels, with the occasional devil around too. The juggling feels a little out of place (it is always hard to see juggling as anything other than itself) – but everything else works well thematically.

Design-wise, we have a scenography of low lighting and swirling mists punctuated by occasional dazzling spots, and the use of a huge, swaying dark cloth that is manipulated to envelop and reveal figures emerging from the gloom, making them occasionally look like Harry Potter style Dementors, although at other times like fabulous snake-like beasts. There’s a sweet moment when one of the scary-looking beasts is gently patted on the head by a performer. The cloth is used at the end for a lovely moment of transformation and revelation, as our now fully-human characters reach up to the heavens in a gesture of joy and celebration. The soundtrack has by this point moved on from the primeval swamp drones through the use of strings, human vocalisation, percussive beats, and animal screeches and hoots, into a fabulous jungle concerto, in acknowledgement of the inter-dependancy and communion of all earthly life. 

Hallelujah!

Featured photo (top): Cassus: Apricity

Circa: Humans 2.0, Underbelly Circus Hub,  2–24 August 2024

Cassus: Apricity, Assembly Gardens, Palais du Varieté, 1-25 August 2025

Recirquel: Paradisum, Assembly Roxy, 2-24 August 2024

Edinburgh Festival Fringe, 2–25 August 2024. For further information and to book tickets for these and all other Edinburgh Festival Fringe shows, see www.edfringe.com 

Brian Lobel gives us alternate takes on Nick Cassenbaum’s Revenge: After the Levoyah, a ‘two-hander comedy heist that blows the roof off what it means to be Jewish in the UK. ’ Here’s our starting point: Twins Lauren and Dan meet ex-gangster Malcolm Spivak at their grandfather’s funeral. Malcolm, who’s ‘had enough’, enlists the siblings in a ragtag Yiddishe plot to kidnap then-Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn… Now, choose your viewpoint and read on :

Revenge: After the Levoyah – Review for Non-Jewish Audiences

Revenge: After the Levoyah is a brilliant, comedic, two-handed, action-packed satire that looks unflinchingly and uproariously at a community in crisis. Beyond the flattened narratives of ‘how the Jewish community feels’ about Labour, Corbyn, and anti-semitism in Britain in the lead up to the 2019 election (which were the purview of what felt like every column from The Guardian to Jewish Chronicle to The Times), Revenge uses its multi-roling performers playing gangsters and rabbis and repairmen and Holocaust survivors (and many more) to exemplify the multivalenced perspectives of the UK’s contemporary Jewish community. And the overwhelm of when all those voices speak at once, under pressure, and under the microscope of a country which can’t or won’t think beyond a monolithic British Jewish experience. 

The performances by Gemma Barnett and Dylan Corbett-Bader are deeply sexy – a masterclass in comedic timing and in portraying a diversity of characters with care and generosity. And the script is filed with whatever would be the Jewish equivalent of Easter eggs (Passover matzo balls?) which bring a specific Jewish community and ecosystem to light in a way which is rarely seen. Be warned: there are words you will not understand and that are not explained to you, and Jewish audiences will be laughing at moments that you won’t. But that’s ok, there’s growth in being an outsider. But also, for your reference: Beshert means soulmate/destiny; Palwins is the most famous kind of Jewish wine drank at Shabbos dinner (might the Jewish American in me say it’s culturally comparable to Manischewitz?), and the Board of Deputies… there’s not time in this review to talk about the Board of Deputies. But know that they’ll all be referenced in quick succession inside this whip-smart satire which bravely shows Jewish culture from its own perspective, with its own languages, and its own sense of sense of trauma, laughter and love.

Revenge: After the Levoyah – Review for Jewish Audiences

I realised I was the only Jew in the audience at the National Theatre when I belly-laughed during Roy Cohn’s death scene in Angels in America. During the most sombre moment of Angels in America Part II, the protagonist Lewis – a gay Jewish man much alienated from his Jewish community – nervously goes to say Kaddish over Cohn’s body, and instead, says Kiddush. The prayer over wine, instead of the prayer over the dead. 

Oh I laughed! And laughed! And laughed! And around me: damning silence. 

Five minutes later, Lewis questions his own mistake (which gets a laugh from the wider audience), but the first time he says the Kiddush is a joke reserved just for the Jewish audience. I had never known, with such certainty, that I was the singular Jew in an audience. The genius of this scene in Angels in America is that it speaks directly to its Jewish audience in a way which is unapologetic, targeted and available only to the well-behaved Jews who had paid attention in Sunday school. And boychik, I had paid attention! 

Revenge is like this scene in Angels in America, over and over and over again (in a good way!) in which there’s a lot of entertainment for non-Jewish audiences, but the really deep jokes are just reserved for us. And I even know that, as a Jewish American transplant in the UK, even 17 years in, there are still a lot of references which will go above my head. So rich is Cassenbaum’s script, so wide-ranging his slate of references, so deep is his commitment to capturing this community in all its glorious diversity. Revenge: After the Levoyah gives us contemporary British Jewish life without the need to be palatable to non-Jewish sensibilities, without the need to be loved by the Board of Deputies, or without the need to fit into more convenient political narratives. It’s a bold work which astutely centres Jewish life inside an Essex household and which never aims to speak for a universal Jewish experience, or an agreed Jewish opinion about Corbyn.  

Revenge speaks profoundly to a Jewish audience that will be open to hearing it. The play skilfully avoids being a show about who’s right and who’s wrong and instead gives us what Jews have needed and what antisemitism, and being under such a microscope, often denies us: an epic action adventure somewhere between Kill Bill, Fangirls, White Teeth, Angels in America, Rambo, Brooklyn Nine Nine, The Great Escape and Fiddler on the Roof. 

[Just kidding, it’s nothing like Fiddler on the Roof, I was just testing in case non-Jews were reading]. 

Oh and if you didn’t read the Review for Non-Jewish Audiences above, I’ll summarise: Go see Revenge: After the Levoyah. It’s sexy, funny, radical, smart, and those heads of absolutely gorgeous hair will make you kvell. 

Featured image (top) Revenge: After the Levoyah – photo Christa Holka

Nick Cassenbaum’s Revenge: After the Levoyah, directed by Emma Jude Harris, runs at Summerhall 1-26 August, as part of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2024. See edfringe.com for further information on this and other Ed Fringe shows.

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