The 60th performance of Truth to Power Café took place on 3 November 2024 in Vancouver Canada, as part of The Chutzpah! Festival: The Lisa Nemetz Festival of International Jewish Performing Arts. It was presented live with a simultaneous live-stream broadcast across the world. Dorothy Max Prior tuned in from afar, and reports here for Total Theatre Magazine

A stage, with a minimal set: a screen, some rather lovely embroidered banners (made by the UK’s leading banner maker for the trade union movement, Ed Hall), a few stools and a mic stand, soft blue lighting. The audience settle down, and a hush descends as the lighting lowers. 

A man walks onstage. He has photos and other mementoes pinned to his chic dark blue jacket. He looks out to us and speaks. 

The text is not naturalistic – it has a poetic rhythm and metre, and a soft rhyming scheme:

“Don’t let go of what you know

All the bits and pieces that make up you…

And memory’s your only glue”

Then:

“To remember is to pray

Yesterday’s tomorrow is today

Reach inside your head

And resurrect the dead

Whatever made you think they’d gone away?”

Behind him, the video screen kicks in to life. We see images of Cable Street and the infamous 1936 street battle, as local East Enders fought Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. We see Harold Pinter, denouncing the warmongering United States of America. We see former Australian Labor Prime Minister Julia Gillard in her famous misogyny speech pointing out to the sexist male conservative Leader of the Opposition that the modern woman has more pressing concerns than how best to do the ironing. And we see images from a demo, a young woman in close-up saying “I’ve waited too long for justice to be handed down”.

The man on the stage stands, strong and still, with his arm raised and fist clenched in the universal gesture of power and resistance.

The mood shifts, he lowers his arm, relaxes and smiles, and says to this west-coast Canadian audience (and those of us watching from further afield): 

“Hello, how are you? I’m Jeremy, and I’ve come all the way from Australia.” 

People in the audience shout “hello” back. 

This is our introduction to the Truth to Power Café, Jeremy Goldstein’s long-term theatre project inspired by Nobel Prize winning playwright Harold Pinter and his inner Jewish circle – The Hackney Gang, who included Jeremy’s late father, Mick Goldstein, and poet/actor Henry Woolf.

And look: there they are on the screen! The Gang!

Jeremy co-created the show with Henry Woolf (who died just a couple of years back); with some of Henry’s poetry incorporated into the text. Mostly, that text is delivered live by Jeremy, but we have the occasional visitation from Henry onscreen. They make a great double act! The show is very ably directed by Jen Heyes, who has weaved together all the disparate elements with great skill. Part theatre, part activism, each iteration of the Truth to Power Café incorporates memoir, monologue, music, film, visual imagery, poetry and compassionate truth-telling from community participants of all ages, experiences and backgrounds. The participants are each invited to present a monologue in response to the question: Who has power over you and what would you like to say to them? So no two shows can ever be alike – the content is (in part, anyway) determined by who is participating.

Truth to Power Café is structured as a two-part piece. The first part is Jeremy’s own story: in essence, the story of his relationship with his now-dead father.

When Jeremy was researching the piece and combing through the archives of the British Library, he discovered the original typescript of Pinter’s one and only novel, The Dwarfs. The novel, which was written in the 1950s and eventually published in the 1990s, was described by Pinter’s biographer, the former Guardian theatre critic Michael Billington, as holding the key to all Pinter’s later plays. The protagonist, Len, is based on Jeremy’s father Mick Goldstein. 

In one scene in the novel Len says, “I’ve never been able to look in the mirror and say, this is who I am”. This line becomes the lynchpin for Jeremy’s account of his relationship with a father who had always made him feel inadequate. With this archive discovery came a shift of perspective: here was the evidence he needed of his father’s insecurities and lack of fulfilment – which played out through the difficult relationship with his son. His father no longer held power over him: “There it was laid bare, the truth of his lived experience captured with pinpoint accuracy by his best friend, Harold Pinter.”

We learn in the show that the Gang were all born and raised within a 100 yard stretch of Clapton. We are taken to a post-war East London at a time when this self-styled Jewish avant-garde discovered artists like Samuel Beckett and Louis Buñuel; and physically fought with fascists as the Holocaust still loomed, whilst those bombs that had eviscerated Nagasaki and Hiroshima seemed as present as if it were yesterday. “Their world was infected” says Jeremy, as images play out on the screen and the words EMPIRE and POWER loom over the stage. “They had poems in their pockets, and the world up their arse.” We switch to Henry speaking: “Oh, oh, oh – there go the fascists and the cops… But we had a subterranean signal we knew we could trust. When we heard each other’s voices we were watered and fed.

At the time that the show was written, Henry was the sole survivor of The Hackney Gang. Given that he is now deceased, his presence onscreen, in dialogue with Jeremy’s live presence, adds another poignant layer to the narrative. As Jeremy says: “Our relationship with our loved ones continues after they die – the dead may be invisible but they are not absent”.

We move forward into Jeremy’s biography, as he lives through a diagnosis of HIV+ and an oppressive fear of AIDS. His father is the first person he tells, in 1999 – the response a raised eyebrow that seems to say “bound to happen sooner or later.” Jeremy is very ill, with kaposi sarcoma lesions (“the kiss of death from AIDS”); he is bankrupt; going through a divorce; unemployable for three years; on chemo, smoking meth to numb the pain. He is estranged from Mick, and “erased by my own father” contemplates suicide. In a rare moment of sobriety, he writes to his father to make peace. The letter (which he has, right here and now, in his pocket – he takes it out to show us) arrives on the day his dad dies…

But Jeremy survives it all and 25 years later, here he is! He now understands that Mick was a frustrated writer ‘dwarfed’ by his friends Henry and – especially – Harold. He couldn’t look in the mirror and say “This is who I am”. He couldn’t risk trying and failing in front of them, so he put his head down, forgot about writing, and worked clearing tables, or as a porter at Euston Station.  

Now, Jeremy can finally make sense of the power his father had over him when he was alive. Now, love and empathy meet truth and reconciliation. Jeremy has made peace with his father, and he’s ready to sit down and hand the mic over to others wishing to explore their need to speak truth to power.

Normally, this second act of the show would be an exclusively live cohort of speakers, but for this special 60th edition of the show, played live and simultaneously live-streamed worldwide, we have six people here in the theatre, and two beaming in from afar.

Playing Truth to Power Café in a Jewish theatre festival at this moment in time could potentially have thrown up challenges, but these are met head-on. The two guests from afar both directly address the question of being Jewish right here and now.

Actor and theatre-maker Gina Shmukler from Johannesburg says: “Right now, I’m Jewish and it hurts.” She speaks of trying to talk about about Israel and Gaza to her young daughter. “War is not a means to peace,” she says repeatedly. She talks of the pain of seeing colleagues posting comments on social media that they seem to have no awareness might be hurtful or antisemitic. Of the fact that the pain and horror of October 7th, and the fate of the hostages, seems to have been wiped off the liberal-left agenda. That Israel has gone way beyond anything that could reasonably be described as defence; but also that Hamas has sacrificed its own people. She poses awkward questions, such as, “Why aren’t the women and children in the tunnels when there is a ground offensive taking place?”

She comes full circle, ending with: “Right now, I’m Jewish, and I’m sad and confused.”

The format of the show is that every person has the space to speak their truth to power; and there is no commentary or questioning from our host or from anyone else. Each speaker’s words are theirs to own and proclaim, unchallenged.

Also onscreen, this time from London, is acclaimed Jewish-British playwright Nick Cassenbaum, whose Revenge: After the Levoyah took the Edinburgh Fringe 2024 by storm, winning a Fringe First amongst other accolades (reviewed by Brian Lobel, here).

Nick takes us on a journey. He talks of the power of stories: a power that can hold you in its thrall. He tells us he’s from Essex; and that as a child the founding of and history of Israel didn’t feature too heavily in his life – although he does think that he knew about the Shoah (Holocaust) almost before he understood what death was. Things shifted when he went on a summer camp run by the Federation of Zionist Youth; and then the following year, a ‘rite of passage’ tour of Israel with visits to the Western Wall, and the awareness that “we are surrounded by people who don’t want us here”. Stories are central to the Jewish tradition, Nick repeats. Stories of exile and resistance. Stories that he is now ready to re-appraise. On a visit to the West Bank and East Jerusalem, he is – for the very first time – embarrassed and ashamed to be Jewish. “These stories and perceived realities had a power over me,” he says, “but now I see it all for what it is…”

Our live guests are a vibrant and diverse bunch. Emet Davis, like Jeremy, needs to address the power their father held over them. This is a tale of “love and loss”. Emet, is not the speaker’s birth name. It is a name chosen as it means truth in Hebrew. There is love and appreciation of the now-dead father, who brought “sight-unseen adoration” into Emet’s life. There was estrangement – it isn’t stated implicitly, but it would seem that Emet coming out (as trans or non-binary, we presume), and rejecting a birth identity of female, is key. After their father’s death, a necklace he gave to Emet – bearing the words ‘daughter’, a description not identified with – is handed on to their brother’s daughter.

Non-binary Kitra Jeanne grew up “not knowing that ‘I’ was possible”. They also have a father that has held power over them – “My father was petty; is petty” – and they speak of redefining and redesigning the self. “Queer Power is beautiful. Trans Power is beautiful”.

For Lisa Webster, it is her son who holds the power. An adult son. She’d like him “to grow the fuck up, move the fuck out, and get your own life”. But that is not going to happen. He has multiple needs as someone with intellectual disabilities, chronic health problems, and behavioural difficulties. And there is very little care out there in the community, with a lack of resources and support – she lives on a small island in off-shore Vancouver – so it all mostly comes down to her. “My life revolves around him,” she says. And her monologue ends with a declaration of acceptance – the power her son holds over her is the power of love.

Patricia L Morris addresses ageism in her talk. “Age magnifies the dirty secret of not mattering into a deformity”. She challenges the people who look through her, or push past her. The drunk girl in an alley who screams out, “you’re old, you’re going to dies soon, so what do you matter?” She riffs on the word ‘matter’. “I’m not matter; I want to fly” she remembers telling her brother when she was little. She wanted angel wings then, and she wants them now. Canada’s national poet Leonard Cohen said “it really doesn’t matter”. But he’s wrong, she says. “You do matter. No matter what.”

Sophie McNeilly is less concerned about being invisible than of “being afraid of being looked at”. And why? Because she wants “to be in charge of how you look at me.” By age three, she was aware that she was fat – a whole lot bigger than any of the other girls in the ballet class. She says “fascists hate fatties,” and that they look at the large body with disgust and fear. “The tiny fascist in my brain hates the shape of me,” she says. She talks of a process of “double-looking”, in which she “watches herself being watched”. But now she needs to move on: “I have to let go. I have to let you look at me.” And she stands, proudly, and we look…

Marsha Lederman takes us back to the theme of  Jewish identity. “The people who have power over me are the ones who have left,” she says, telling us that she is “still defining myself as the child of Holocaust survivors”. She feels her parents’ presence constantly – sad that they didn’t live long enough to see her married and a mother; glad they didn’t witness her divorce and struggles as a single parent. “I’m worrying about dead people worrying about me,” she says, to a big laugh from the audience.

With all the stories told, truth to power addressed nine-fold, Jeremy stands and dons a crown. We can be heroes, just for one day! Henry joins him onscreen. 

“You’ve got to slide between the living and the dead…

What’s that drumbeat? It’s my dad!”

Onscreen, Jeremy is sporting wings: 

“My tattered wings made from the garbage of my heart.”

Now, everyone is standing. “Blow our trumpets, angels,” says the onstage Jeremy – and everyone raises their arms in unison. Amen.

Truth to Power Café has toured across the world to great acclaim, challenging outdated notions of what community-engaged theatre might look like. All aspects of the production have been created and delivered with the utmost care. By placing himself within the show, Jeremy Goldstein models one way that we can tell truth to power, addressing the person who holds the power over us, whilst simultaneously giving permission to all participants to do it their way.

A wonderful piece of contemporary activist-theatre – hard-hitting but tender. Long may the Truth to Power Café thrive and grow.

For more about London Artists Projects and the Truth to Power Café, see https://www.truthtopower.co.uk

All live show images: Chelsey Stuyt for The Chutzpah! Festival: The Lisa Nemetz Festival of International Jewish Performing Arts, Vancouver 2024.

Truth to Power Café was presented at the Norman and Annette Rothstein Theatre in Vancouver, Sunday 3 November 2024, as part of the The Chutzpah! Festival: The Lisa Nemetz Festival of International Jewish Performing Arts. It was simultaneously live-streamed worldwide.

Created, written and performed by Jeremy Goldstein with Henry Woolf. Directed by Jen Heyes. 

Read Speaking Truth to Power, Jeremy Goldstein’s account of researching and creating the show on Total Theatre Magazine, here.

Truth to Power Café Melbourne premiere 5, 6, 7 February 2025 at Theatre Works as part of Midsumma Festival.  

For more about London Artists Projects and the Truth to Power Café, see https://www.truthtopower.co.uk

‘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.