Highlights from a teeming line-up at the Edinburgh Fringe — review

This year’s Edinburgh Fringe has an embattled, but cautiously hopeful atmosphere. It began with storms: the Fringe Society sparked anger with its decision to scrap the Half Price Hut and the official Fringe App, both valuable ways for performers to sell tickets. Train strikes and soaring accommodation costs piled on the pressure for artists and audiences. But still, the streets filled up with unexpected sunshine, face-painted flyer distributors and thick crowds of tourists, in a welcome, if fragile return to form. Here are some highlights from its teeming line-up.

Truth’s a Dog Must to Kennel

According to acclaimed theatremaker Tim Crouch, continuing to love theatre after all the havoc of the past two years is “like fucking a corpse”. His solo performance is an affectionate but despairing dialogue with the art form he has made his career in. Its central trick is a good one. While he pretends to decry this moribund medium, he actually shows its power, by using the audience’s imagination to paint the contours of a pricey West End theatre where King Lear is playing, or to flesh out an obscene reality TV scenario whose details he cloaks with a coy “you know”. It’s an emotive, filthy love letter to the almost-lost art of being in a room, together.

★★★★☆

Lyceum Studio to August 28

Head Set

Fringe regular Victoria Melody is one of life’s enthusiasts, known for hurling herself into the worlds of pigeon fancying or beauty pageants or funeral directing and making funny, astute shows about the results. But could her whole career just be a symptom — a way of coping with undiagnosed ADHD? After getting her diagnosis, she turns scientist, exploring why performers seem disproportionately likely to have ADHD. Her hypothesis is that the risk-taking involved in stand-up comedy delivers dopamine hits that it’s hard to get elsewhere. What follows is daffy and dark in equal measure. Melody dives into her investigation with a charisma that defies scientific classification.

★★★★☆

Pleasance Courtyard to August 28

(le) Pain

Most fringe venues smell of sweat and damp. But Jean-Daniel Broussé’s show is full of the delicious aroma of baking bread, thanks to an onstage oven, which he uses to recreate the atmosphere of the rural French bakery where he grew up. As a three-year-old, he sat on a bag of flour to watch his dad at work, mesmerised. Now, he’s queer, gluten-intolerant, and longing to make a life on stage. (le) Pain is full of the ache that comes from being forced to part ways with long-held traditions. But it’s also full of wit and life: in sequinned baker’s garb, he tumbles over a flour-dusted countertop with a joy that won’t be pummelled into submission.

★★★★☆

Assembly Roxy to August 28

Brown Boys Swim

School’s nearly over, and Kash and Mohsen can’t wait to make a splash at the end-of-term pool party. Just one snag: they can’t swim. Karim Khan’s moving, witty play explores the pains of assimilation through the story of two Muslim teenagers who are afraid of floating away from their white classmates. Kash (Varun Raj) is all bravado, launching himself into joyful bhangra dance routines and swimwear shopping with equal abandon. But Mohsen (Anish Roy) is more wary, seeing the way that security guards eye up the pair, and worried about the quiet sacrifices that come with fitting in. The story is given bags of atmosphere by James Button’s ingenious swimming pool set, and Sita Thomas’s movement direction, which means the boys seem to float as they navigate unfamiliar waters.

★★★★☆

Pleasance Dome to August 28

Kathy & Stella Solve a Murder

Paines Plough’s Roundabout venue is having a very, very good year, serving up some of the Fringe’s best shows. Among them is this offbeat gem of a musical about Kathy and Stella, two true crime obsessives with a failing podcast who (plot twist!) find they’ve got a real-life murder to solve. Writers Jon Brittain and Matthew Floyd Jones fill this show with catchy songs and witty, perceptive lines, sketching the ironic contrasts between the language of feminism and the horribleness of the murders this pair are building their careers around. “I can’t see any danger in linking all my self-esteem to the approval of strangers,” announces Kathy as their podcast finally takes off online. Of course, things take a dark turn. Of course, there are bonkers, gory plot twists. But what’s less expected is the warmth this musical shows towards its weird, nerdy, wonderful heroines, as they mess up their investigation — but build their friendship into something that’s bloody marvellous.

★★★★☆

Roundabout to August 28

Sap

Rafaella Marcus’s play is a thriller in miniature, gathering strength from the complex web of ideas it touches on over its 70-minute span. It subtly reveals the stigma attached to bisexuality, as Daphne (Jessica Clark) is forced to conceal her past from her new girlfriend. It modernises Ovid’s Metamorphoses, turning a nymph’s transformation into a tree into a linguistically rich metaphor for the paralysing shame that comes with sexual assault. And it builds to an agonisingly tense pursuit through soulless apartment blocks, showing how ancient power dynamics can rip through the most modern of settings. Jessica Lazar’s direction is urgent and pacy, while Clark’s central performance melts poignantly from naive confidence to abject terror. An unsettling hour or so, but a worthwhile one.

★★★★☆

Roundabout to August 28

Age Is a Feeling

The Fringe is a place that makes you acutely aware of the passing of time: each day divided into precious one-hour segments, and, for regular attendees, each familiar location overlaid with memories. In her wonderfully ambitious solo show, Haley McGee wrestles time and fate to the ground. She sits on a high umpire’s chair to see into her own future, with almost unbearably poignant results — imagining heartbreak, infertility, the arrival of the first grey pube. Her nimble storytelling skills turn a performance that could feel mawkish into something strange and agile, full of an awareness of the impossibility of encompassing a life. It’s a welcome moment of pause and reflection in a hectic, speeding fringe.

★★★★★

Summerhall to August 28

We Were Promised Honey!

There’s more time travel on offer in Sam Ward’s performance: with the energy of an eerily charismatic alien, he sends us soaring into an apocalyptic future. This is climate change theatre, without the hand-wringing and papier-mâché sculptures of doomed rainforest animals. Instead, Ward points to the power of choice. The audience must decide at each point whether to carry on with the doomed narrative of a man who steals a plane, then crashes it — echoing humanity’s own disastrous hijacking of the Earth. Strangers are called on stage to declare their love for each other, deep in a bunker under the Earth’s superheated surface. It’s an apocalyptic, strange hour of theatre that makes you feel grateful to be alive, grateful to be part of a communal gathering of people, even as it erodes the very ground you’re standing on.

★★★★★

Roundabout to August 28

edfringe.com