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