Author Archives: Dorothy Max Prior

About Dorothy Max Prior

Dorothy Max Prior is the editor of Total Theatre Magazine, and is also a performer, writer, dramaturg and choreographer/director working in theatre, dance, installation and outdoor arts. Much of her work is sited in public spaces or in venues other than regular theatres. She also writes essays and stories, some of which are published and some of which languish in bottom drawers – and she teaches drama, dance and creative non-fiction writing. www.dorothymaxprior.com

Race Horse Company: Petit Mal Concrete Circus

Laughing in the wreckage, standing defiant as the world throws things at you – and the rivalry of men up against it. These are the ideas at the heart of Petit Mal.

We start in what seems to be a moody, gloomy garage or basement, the stage so dark that it’s hard to see what’s happening (from my seat in the rear stalls, anyway). Steely blue and dull amber lights. Clunking metal parts, stacked car tyres, discarded planks of wood. The sound of grinding guitars, and Bob Dylan’s growling voice blares out from the PA: ‘Same old rat race, life in the same old cage.’ Cue descent of a rusty old ‘cage’ and some beefy acro and aerial moves from the three-man team onstage. It’s hard to say how and why a big blue yoga-ball and a trampoline belong in this world, but they get worked in effortlessly. In this opening section, the themes and the key skills of the show are established. Company frontman Petri Tuominem is a good all-rounder and a superb Chinese Pole artist with a hard-edged attacking style. Rauli Kosonen ups the ante with his extraordinary trampolining – somehow ultra-relaxed and dynamic at one and the same time. The big and bearded Kalle Lehto is an earthy breakdancer and object manipulator, and a highly magnetic performer who wins my attention again and again, despite the competition. Boys will be boys, and the three tug and tussle their way through a succession of stunning scenes.

If this first 20 minutes had been it, then this would be a brilliant show. Word on the (circus) street has it that this in fact was the original show: a prize-winning short that got feted and supported and eventually made into a full-length show – a show that is somehow less than the sum of its parts. They would have been better off creating three separate short pieces and touring them together. In some ways, this is what this show feels like.

A middle section plays out as a surreal dreamscape. There is a sudden wash of bright light and colour, flashing strobes, and ear-bleeding beats – Scrooge McDuck pops up on-screen, the stage is taken over by a galloping pantomime horse, the space fills up with bouncing balls and falling feathers, a trio of Elvises (Elvii?) in flared white jumpsuits leap around. Why I don’t know, but it’s all enjoyable enough, particularly the terrifyingly funny half-a-horse trampolining.

We then return to the gloomy moody world of the opening section, and Dylan’s ‘Highlands’ starts in again – the song is played at least three times in this 70-minute show, interspersed with Joy Division and DJ Shadow tracks, and compositions by the show’s sound designer Tuomas Norvio. This section is the shakiest structurally – the pace dips and soars, and there are at least three false endings before we get the final scene, which turns out to be a coda rather than a climax – but it’s a great showcase of the circus skills. Rauli Kosonen’s final bout on the trampoline is breathtaking.

Petit Mal has been touring for a few years, yet this performance felt a little shaky. I got the feeling that the company are done with it, moving on (they are just about to start work on their new show, Super Sunday). Or perhaps the slightly slack feel of some sections was a result of the appalling inattentiveness of the audience, many of whom – dressed in Santa hats with drinks in hand, arriving late, leaving early, constantly nipping off to the loo, chatting throughout – seemed to have come to the wrong show. They were expecting some light-hearted entertainment, and Petit Mal is far from that, it’s dark and dangerous. And the show was marketed as ‘an exhilarating spectacle from start to finish’ for all the family, so there were inevitably a fair few cross parents ferrying distressed five-year-olds out of the auditorium throughout.

Circus presentation in the UK, it would seem, is still battling with audience (and perhaps programmer) expectations that it exists to provide nothing more than a fun family spectacle. That aside, Petit Mal is an enriching experience – dramaturgically flawed, but full of extraordinary ideas, and performed by three top-notch circus artists with world-class skills in unusual areas of practice.

Ed Fringe 2013: The Last Post

Dorothy Max Prior on the Total Theatre Awards winners and nominees

So that’s it – the Edinburgh Festival Fringe is done and dusted. Shows have ended, Awards have been given, and the colourful Brigadoon city (purple cows! red-and-gold Spiegeltents! lime-green Astroturf!) has melted into the mist, leaving behind the stern grey brick of all those kirks and castles, and the quiet and shadowy cobbled alleyways and staircases that Robert Louis Stevenson’s Mr Hyde scurried down after dark.

This year’s Fringe saw a fantastic number of top quality circus shows, and this was reflected in the Total Theatre Awards nominees list, which included no less than six circus or circus-related shows: NoFit State’s Bianco, Circa’s Wunderkammer, Pirates of the Carabina’s Flown, Compagnie Bal’s La Poème, Gandini Juggling’s Smashed, and Stefan Sing & Cristiana Casadio’s Tangram. All of those shows have been reviewed over the three weeks of Fringe 2013, or honoured in Adrian Berry’s circus round-up. This strong representation yielded results, as we had not one but two circus winners of Total Theatre Awards 2013: Flown by Pirates of the Carabina (from the UK, presented by Crying Out Loud at Underbelly) won in the Total Theatre Awards Physical and Visual category, and Australian company Circa received a special Significant Contribution Award in honour not only of Wunderkammer (presented in Edinburgh this year), but of all their other magnificent work over the past two decades, which we feel it is fair to say has changed the landscape of contemporary circus.

Crying Out Loud, one of the most enterprising producing companies in the UK, had a double success in the Physical/Visual category as they also presented Compagnie Non Nova from France, who won with L’Apres-midi d’un Foehn (known to all who have seen it as the lovely plastic bag show). It is a stunningly simple idea that works beautifully: a circle of fans create an airstream that animates an ensemble of different coloured plastic bags, cut and tied so that they inflate into tiny dancing humanoid shapes. If you didn’t see it in Edinburgh and your curiosity is piqued, note that another version of the show (the ‘adult’ version, apparently) will be presented at the London International Mime Festival 2014 (opening 8 January).

So two great winners, but the rest of the nominees were a pretty amazing bunch – and an interesting international mix. Yet another Crying Out Loud show made the shortlist, Compagnie Bal’s La Poème (like Compagnie Non Nova, presented at Summerhall venue), featuring the highly talented circus artist Jeanne Mordoj, using her contortion and manipulation skills to create something unique. As our review says, ‘What a pleasure and an honour to see a performer in such control of her body, and of the imaginary world that she has created on a bare stage, armed with little more than a box of eggs, a harmonium, and a pretty green silk skirt.’

Work by women performers/choreographers from across Europe featured heavily in the nominations list. Not only Jeanne Mordoj from France, but also Markéta Vacovská from the Czech Republic (One Step Before the Fall), and Scotland’s own Claire Cunningham (Ménage à Trois).

One Step Before the Fall, presented by Spitfire Company and Damúza Theater at Zoo, is a collaboration between dancer/choreographer Markéta Vacovská and singer/multi-instrumentalist Lenka Dusilová. Together these two wonderfully talented women create an extraordinary live play between sound and physical action in a piece that is an exploration of (and homage to) Muhammed Ali’s boxing life. In this intensive piece Markéta Vacovská captures the trance-like concentration, energy and focus of the boxer – not through acting but by being. Pushing and pushing herself further and further, she becomes pure, archetypal male energy, and for 45 minutes (I doubt if she could possibly keep the energy up for any longer) works through a moving meditation that, whilst containing little in the way of conventional narrative, nevertheless tells a thousand stories. The live sound (haunting vocals, looped electric guitar, percussion, sampled sounds) is mixed with broadcast recordings of Ali’s voice from the later years when Parkinson’s disease had set in. There is no preaching, no conclusions drawn – the audience are left to form their own views on whether this was a sacrifice worth making. I’ve seen a good few shows about boxing – and I’ve even helped to make one – but this is the best by a long shot. The passion, the desperation, the drive, the joy, the weariness, the pain – it’s all here, an exploration of what it means to be a boxer unencumbered by the usual clichéd storylines.

Ménage à Trois, presented by National Theatre of Scotland at Paterson’s Land, is a dance-theatre piece created by performer/choreographer Claire Cunningham (who is joined onstage by Christopher Owen) and co-director/video designer Gail Sneddon. It’s a visually beautiful piece, well staged. The set design – oversized pieces of dark wood furniture – give a kind of Alice-in-Wonderland feel to the piece, and the animated monochrome line drawings of the video projection are lovely, and well integrated into the show. Cunningham’s choreographic approach is ‘rooted in the use/misuse, study and distortion of crutches’ which here appear in many different guises and forms: suspended from the ceiling as objets d’art; sculpted into Oskar Schlemmer style multi-material dresses; ‘puppeteered’ as dance partners or dream lovers. Owen arrives well into the piece, as the dream lover or companion conjured by Cunningham. There are some stunning images created, but the piece sinks a little in the middle, and is also held back by the text which is hammered home by appearing both in the soundscape and as part of the visual landscape. The soundscape generally could be stronger, but there is one absolutely gorgeous moment when Claire Cunningham sings Mozart’s ‘Deh Vieni Non Tardar’ live – a magic moment.

Also in the Physical and Visual nominees list was Abattoir Fermé’s Tourniquet, one of five shows presented at the Ed Fringe 2013 under the auspices of the Big in Belgium programme of Flemish theatre. Tourniquet is a word-free piece that presents a nightmarish vision, albeit in such a stylised and almost cartoonish mode that it never transgresses into threat. The piece was inspired by clandestine exorcisms that are still performed throughput Europe, and features three ghosts or devils hanging on for grim life (or death). Our gruesome threesome walk an endless treadmill of rituals and compulsive actions. They seem to die a thousand times, never able to leave their self-created limbo. It’s like a cross between early La Fura dels Baus, The Addams Family, and The Night Porter. The images are ostensibly shocking, but there’s a kind of tongue-in-cheek punk knowingness and devilish humour about it all that strips it of any real shock value. Instead, we seem to be looking at a series of beautifully sculpted tableau representing a contemporary view of hell (or perhaps they are trying to purge themselves in purgatory): a naked pale-as-the-moon woman ‘crucified’ on a wooden beam, a big broad bare-buttocked man in a white rubber apron and butcher’s gloves advancing ominously, an unfurled Nazi flag, a Twin Peaks-like lonesome guitar twang, laboured heavy breathing, a constantly repeating TV clip of an American preacher screeching ‘in the name of Jesus I find you, Devil’, a deconstructed rendering of ‘Dream a Little Dream of Me’, and a body drowned in a bath (the puddles are there for us to avoid as we leave at the end) then wrapped in cellophane. All of this washed down by an endless amount of blood red wine… It’s not a show I could say I truly enjoyed, but it’s one that has stayed with me.

Abattoir Fermé, Tourniquet | Photo: Stef Lernous

Also part of the Big in Belgium programme were two other Awards nominated shows: Freeze, by Nick Steur, (shortlisted in the Emerging Artist category); and Bonanza by Berlin (who confusingly come from Belgium not Germany) – a piece with no live performers that caused consternation amongst some critics. Bonanza went on to win a Total Theatre Award for Innovation.

The second winner in this category was The Worst of Scottee, by cabaret artist Scottee, who is mostly known through his work with Duckie. But this show was something else altogether. Directed by the always enterprising and interesting Chris Goode, The Worst of Scottee wove together his bouffon-camp cabaret turns with confessional-autobiographical stories (sex, lies and trolling round the West End) and the occasional blast of recorded film footage (teachers and relatives commenting on his teenage years). It’s all set in a fabulously designed mock passport-photo booth, which is used as a confessional box, Scottee pulling curtains back and forth to hide or reveal himself as each anecdote or song emerges (and he has a lovely voice, actually). It is all a bit naughty and very camp, but towards the end there’s a distinct switch in tone and a heartbreaking story emerges that casts all the previously confessed misdemeanours in a very different light. Crossovers between comedy, cabaret and theatre were upfront in the Awards shortlist, and there was a wealth of one-person shows playing with those forms nominated, from the wonderfully entertaining Victoria Melody’s Major Tom to the outrageously funny Adrienne Truscott’s Asking For It; Jamie Wood’s delightful Beating McEnroe to the irrepressible Squidboy.

A third winner in the Innovation category was the extraordinary Irish production Have I No Mouth by Brokentalkers, a beautiful, disturbing, and inspiring exploration of bereavement, loss, and grief. For all the heartbreak presented, it is ultimately life affirming – and a marvellous example of how terrible, painful life events can be explored in a theatrically successful way.

The winner in the Emerging Artist category was the show that many saw as the outsider: Sh!t Theatre’s Job Seekers Anonymous, a totally cheery jaunt that featured witty self-penned tunes, some very silly dancing, newspaper skirts, poundshop plastic hula hoops, and a very funny Thatcher skit casting her as the Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz for a cheeky rendition of ‘If I Only Had a Heart’(Iron Man/Tin Lady, get it?) – all the funnier as the set-up had implied that we were going to get ‘The Witch is Dead’. Poor Theatre is their toolbox – along with a very healthy understanding of popular culture and political satire (I’m still chuckling at their Job Seekers interview for the job of prostitute). And these girls can sing!

The Emerging category showed a truly eclectic mix of young theatre-makers doing their thing at the Edinburgh Fringe: the wonderful high energy and professionalism of New Wolsey’s Party Piece; a great second show from Lecoq graduates Clout; more Lecoq-based delights from the all-female company Remote Control, whose La Donna è Mobile gave us a wonderful hour of vivid imagery deconstructing classic views of the female form; a highly entertaining and beautifully structured one-man multi-media show, I Could Have Been Better, by Idiot Child; and the aforementioned Nick Steur’s Freeze – an extraordinary crossover between sculpture and performance which was predicated on one young man’s ability to balance rocks on top of each other.

All in all, a pretty interesting year – and a batch of very worthy Total Theatre Award winners and nominees.

For a full list of the Total Theatre Award winners see here. Nominees listed here.

Berlin: Bonanza

Berlin (who come from Belgium, not Germany!) are known to Total Theatre for their previous UK appearance with the complex and intriguing Land’s End, seen at the Brighton Festival 2012 – part large-scale installation, part film, and part live performance. That show investigated the life and crimes of a town that was sited on the border of France and Belgium, with one house dissected into two nationalities.

Bonanza, a far smaller scale work, is another part of what is a trilogy of shows investigating various takes on small-town mentality – shows which have a definite nod in the direction of the work of David Lynch in their eerie dissection of seemingly ‘normal’ people and landscapes. Unlike Land’s End, this piece features no live performers (unless you count the off-stage technician).

The show caused consternation amongst some audience members and critics who saw it as documentary film rather than ‘theatre’, so let’s just settle this by saying that actually it was neither – it was a piece of time-based live art. It is a piece of fixed duration, set in a theatre space, rather than a wander-in-and-out affair. The audience face a stage dressed with five screens squared up to five projectors and, set on a tilted platform above them, a model village of little wood cabins lit by twinkling lights.

This village – nay, town – is Bonanza, Colorado. Population: seven permanent residents who live in five houses (so one screen per household, lined up under the model of their house) plus there’s a few people who own summer houses, making a voting population of 14. It’s an extraordinary piece of work that (like Land’s End) investigates the weirdness beneath the surface of everyday life. It has resonances with Von Trier’s Dogville, although nothing quite as terrible happens here.

Nevertheless, Bonanza turns out to be a place filled with political and personal intrigue; a microcosm of how the world works. At the beginning, everything is hunky dory. We meet our residents, depicted on screen – sometimes one screen per house or tracking one person’s journey outside; sometimes all screens showing the same image; then again, a Google Earth zoom in from afar; or a still image of a desolate but beautiful landscape. At least, an image that is seemingly still: in one beautifully framed and held shot, a man and a dog are standing stock still in front of a copse of trees, and we suddenly notice that it isn’t a still, the dog’s tail is moving ever so slightly.

‘Don’t believe anything you hear and only half that you hear’ flashes up onscreen as a warning – what seems to be a simple story of simple country folk grows ever more complex and intriguing. Bird-watching, morning walks (‘I never wear a watch – it’s either sun up or sun down’), and Sunday prayers giving way to witchcraft rivalry (‘she works more on the astral plane than me’), vicious feuds with neighbouring town Pueblo, consorting with elves, cabin fever, illness, divorce, and political intrigue at the town board meeting at the Bonanza Fire House (we aren’t allowed in: the five screens show the same image of a shuttered door with murmurings behind it).

Paradise lost or hell on earth? The jury is out. A beautiful, haunting and troubling piece of work.

Bonanza won a Total Theatre Award 2013 for Innovation, Experimentation and Playing with Form.

Brokentalkers: Have I No Mouth

To the tune of Roy Orbison’s In Dreams our three performers enter the space – there’s Feidlim Cannon (actor, director and co-founder of Brokentalkers theatre company) playing himself, his mother Ann playing herself, and an actor (introduced as Alan) playing their psychotherapist Eric Keller and other roles. The absent character at the heart of the show is Sean Cannon, father of Feidlim, husband of Ann. What plays out over the next 75 minutes is a beautiful, disturbing, and inspiring exploration of bereavement, loss, and grief. For all the heartbreak presented, it is ultimately life affirming – and a marvellous example of how terrible, painful life events can be explored in a theatrically successful way. Be warned: you’ll be left Crying along with Roy as the cast take their bows…

We start with a ‘not very good’ (Feidlim’s words) piece of video art, in which he tries to capture something of Sean’s spirit by filming a glass of Guinness placed in various locations (pubs, parks) beloved of his father. We also learn pretty quickly that there is a second absent character in this story: Little Sean, the youngest son of the family, who died not long after birth. There’s some very lovely questioning of how memory and imagination intertwine as Feidlim tells us that he remembers being lifted up to peer through the glass window at the hospital nursery to see his new baby brother, and Ann tells us – and him – that this couldn’t have happened. Little Sean (and the surviving middle son, Pádraig) are represented onstage by life-size photos pasted onto cardboard cut-outs.

One of the lovely aspects of the show is the constant re-casting of people, objects, and images. Feidlim plays himself but sometimes speaks Ann’s words. Alan is mostly the psychiatrist, but later morphs into an eerily bandaged Sean Cannon. Pádraig’s recorded voice features later, and baby Sean is not only a cardboard cut-out but also a doll – a Chucky doll, says Feidlim in disgust, accusing his mother of morbidity in her choice of objects (the doll is inside a cardboard box, representing the child’s coffin, which Feidlim hates). The story of his father Sean’s unnecessary and ultimately fatal hospital operation is played out with one of those horrid Operation Rescue Kit boardgames. Photos, fake snow and balloons also feature…

Whilst the story is ostensibly about the deaths of Sean senior and junior and the bereavement process, what it turns out to be mostly about is the mother-son relationship. Through fantastically drawn detail, Ann is framed onstage (by Feidlim’s words, through her own words, and in her remarkable calm and focused physical presence) as a wonderfully complex character: a Reiki practitioner who loves the colour purple and Australian soap operas; and then again a traditional Irish Catholic mother who teaches her children to cross themselves when they pass a church and who puts holy water on batteries to revive them.

Feidlim meanwhile rants against the world – terrified that he’ll be viewed as a ‘fucking Norman Bates still living with me mam’ in his thirties, and still feeling the pain of his dad’s foolish promise to his eldest son that he’ll ‘never die’.

One of the really interesting aspects of the show is the interaction between the three different performance modes – here we have an actor-director using his own autobiographical material, a non-actor performing, and an actor playing real characters in the other two performers’ stories. It’s Quarantine’s Susan and Darren and then some.

It’s a weird thing, painful personal memoir (on page or stage). Once you decide to put it out there, then it becomes your art, not just your life – and you have to be willing to craft it in a way that makes it something other people can own too. Have I No Mouth does this very effectively – a brilliant show, a worthy winner of a Total Theatre Award 2013.

Let’s Talk About Rape! Taboo or not taboo at Ed Fringe

Hello Edinburgh! Everyone alright? Having a good time? So hey – here we are seeing a few shows, and what do you know? People just won’t shut up about rape. It’s out there. We all know it’s out there in the big bad world. But I mean it’s really out there at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2013, and issues around taboo and what is or isn’t acceptable on stage have been hot topics, onstage and off – in theatre, in comedy, and in the spaces inbetween.

Taking an ironic approach to the subject of rape is Adrienne Truscott, one half of the circus/cabaret act Wau Wau Sisters, who wins the prize for the longest and most cumbersome show title on the Total Theatre Awards shortlist: Adrienne Truscott’s Asking for It: A One-Lady Rape About Comedy Starring Her Pussy and Little Else!

She starts her show naked from the waist down – although her head is well dressed, resplendent in a trademark Wau Wau blonde wig. She’s bright and breezy and she bounces round the small space welcoming her audience. ‘Anybody here been raped? Anyone rape anybody?’ she asks, in a wide-eyed, disingenuous Marilyn mode. No rapists in the audience? Well that’s odd, because statistically that’s unlikely – they must all be at someone else’s show. Maybe someone somewhere, muses Adrienne, is doing a show to a whole room full of rapists.

A madcap hour ensues, a mix of sharp-witted subversion (she does a hilarious role-play scene with a male audience member about saying no), comic mockery, and a savage critique of the current trend for rape jokes amongst some male stand-up comedians. Playing the scatty blonde bombshell, she creates a comic persona who can stick the darts in with a smile on her face – her naming and shaming of American comic Daniel Tosh is brilliant (he’s the guy who, when heckled for telling a rape joke, replied ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by five guys right now?’) The point that Adrienne Truscott makes brilliantly, comically, is that regardless of what you feel about what is or isn’t taboo in comedy, he failed spectacularly in how he dealt with the heckle. He just wasn’t funny. Adrienne shows us what he could have done instead… I’m interested in the Tosh controversy, and the issues it raises around taboo (or not taboo) in comedy, so I do a bit of Googling after seeing Adrienne’s show. I discover that after his infamous retort, Tosh tweeted: ‘the point i was making before i was heckled is there are awful things in the world but you can still make jokes about them.’ Yes Daniel – but you wouldn’t tell a racist joke about blacks being attacked, and then if an Afro-American in the audience challenged you, say something like: ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if five white guys lynched this black guy right now?’

So let’s leave Tosh blustering and justifying and get back to Adrienne Truscott, who magnificently fights bad comedy with good comedy. Fight them on their own terms, that’s the way to do it! The jokes and raps and skits are all jollied along by various plays on dressing and undressing that involves multiple bras and wigs (and a nice spotty dress that she needs help squeezing into), and some witty and waggish interactions between film projections and the naked parts of Ms Truscott’s anatomy (pussy beards – I’ll say no more). Sitting somewhere between comedy and performance art, the show is a clever challenge to stereotypical ideas about rape, and an interesting critique of the male gaze – although to play devil’s advocate, I’d also say that its success is aided by the fact that she has the sort of body our society deems to be fit and attractive. A body which she has the right to display in a performance context in any way that she wishes, I hasten to add – but just noting that there might be a very different audience response if a different sized/aged female body were to be on display. She doesn’t win a Total Theatre Award but her consolation prize is the Foster’s Comedy Awards Panel Prize (which comes with a £5,000 cheque). As we are mentioning the Fosters, we can also note here that ‘feminist’ stand up comedian Bridget Christie was the overall winner.

At the other end of the spectrum, Nirbhaya is a serious look at rape, murder and extreme abuse of women. The show’s title is taken from the name given to the then-anonymous victim of the infamous case of rape and brutal physical assault on a Delhi bus that resulted in the death of the woman thirteen days later. The word means ‘fearless’ and the young woman, who had suffered the most appalling attack, violated in every horrible way you could imagine by six men wielding metal rods, became a symbol of resistance and protest for thousands of Indian women (and men). The woman is named at the end of the show, despite the fact that under Indian law it is not considered acceptable to name the victim of a rape. Her story acts as the nucleus of the play, around which circles stories of other abused Indian women, their stories ranging from childhood sexual abuse by ‘uncles’ to a woman whose lips are cut off for taking part in a Bollywood movie audition and allowing a stage kiss with a male actor. To make sure that this is not seen as exclusively an Indian problem, the story of an Indian woman gang-raped in America is included in the piece.

Nirbhaya

So how do you critique a show like this? For some, the subject matter, the importance of this story, is enough to justify its existence, and making any commentary on how it works theatrically is problematic. For me, there are criticisms of it to be made of it as a piece of theatre, and if the story is presented as theatre then it has to be critiqued on those terms. So here goes…

The staging is safe and familiar territory – I can understand why the aesthetic decisions on soft lighting and tasteful visuals got taken, but there is an odd jarring between the harsh stories told and the theatrical playing out of them. There’s lots of post-Complicite walking on diagonals (to denote the streets of Delhi), and some well delivered but rather old-fashioned hero-and-chorus ensemble scenes (the actual bus rape scene is totally pointless – trying not to be too graphic or offensive, it offends in its tastefully passé physical theatre styling). Verbatim texts are delivered downstage in the spotlight by the cast (who have various degrees of professional performance skill), all in turn telling their own story – other than the actor playing the dead victim from Delhi who switches from in-character acting to playing a kind of singing narrator/witness of the others’ stories, and the one male actor in the show who plays the bus victim’s companion, various abusers, a victim’s lost son, and finally a kind of Indian male everyman, standing with his female compatriots against the abuse of women happening in his country.

There are serious questions to ask about the way the theatre piece is used as a kind of conduit for public witnessing, therapy even. (Although it is not the only show to do this – see also the Total Theatre Award winning Have I No Mouth, far more successful theatrically, in my view). In one of the most harrowing scenes in Nirbhaya, a scarred (physically and mentally) victim of appalling abuse weeps openly as she tells her tale of being beaten, doused in kerosene, and set on fire by her husband. Her scars are there for us to see. Yes, it’s her choice but no, I’m not comfortable with this. Good, some may say – feel uncomfortable. But I’m convinced I’m feeling uncomfortable for the wrong reasons. I feel attacked, caught by the throat. I’m desperate for a bit of good old-fashioned Brechtian alienation. There are other ways than this, I feel.

Taking a totally different approach to the theatrical dilemma of addressing real-world oppressions and abuses come Belarus Free Theatre whose Trash Cuisine uses a variety show cum cookery programme frame to highlight the many forms of man’s inhumanity to man (and woman), a show principally about capital punishment and torture which takes in genocide, rape and murder along the way. The cookery theme also forces us to look at our attitude towards animal farming and cruelty. I’m much happier with this more detached approach to its ghastly subject matter, enjoying the horrible humour and irony, being startled into hearing and learning things I didn’t previously know, and reappraising things I did know, but it would seem to be one of those Marmite shows. I loved it, many hated it.

I ended up wondering how Belarus Free Theatre might have dealt theatrically with the Delhi rape and murder case as subject matter. I was desperate for some between-the-lines questions to be introduced into the narrative of Nirbhaya: the collusion of women (mothers and mothers-in-law most often) in the horrific physical and sexual abuse of young women, for example. And here’s something to be discussed: the accused driver of the bus, Ram Singh, died in police custody on 11 March 2013. The police say he hanged himself – defence lawyers and his family suspect he was murdered, possibly after beating and torture. Who cares – no less than he did to another human being, say some. But to stand up and defend the human rights of those who behave appallingly – there’s the challenge. One thing I loved about Trash Cuisine was its unequivocal opposition to torture and the death penalty, no matter what, whilst yet flagging up some of the awkward questions that raises, including the difficult (for some) question that many of the people we – the liberal West, the Amnesty supporters – are trying to gain clemency for are people who have tortured, raped, abused, murdered others. But that’s the ultimate test, isn’t it? Love has redemptive powers – love your enemies, love those who harm you. That’s what Martin Luther King said, and I suspect he was quoting one Jesus of Nazareth.

Fight them with love, or fight them with comic wit and irony and a few vaudevillian songs and dances – the choice made by Adrienne Truscott, Belarus Free Theatre, and other of my Fringe 2013 favourites such as Theatre Ad Infinitum, whose Ballad of the Burning Star deals with the most difficult of subjects armed with a man in drag, a chorus of dancing girls, and an hour’s worth of scathing humour.

As for the question of taboo, I’d steal a line from Rachel Mars and say nothing is out of bounds in theatre or comedy – it’s the way you tell them that counts.