Even as the Edinburgh Fringe Festival begins, three weeks feels too short a time to see everything on offer. But, with some careful planning and diligent research, you can make sure you see only the highest quality productions. As the Festival draws to a close, jump on the East Coast Line and give yourself a heady dose of wall-to-wall theatre!
After the End
Pleasance Courtyard, 1.50
A subtle two-hander by Dennis Kelly set in an underground shelter after a nuclear attack. Mark has rescued Louise from the blast while their friends and colleagues were left to burn. Trapped in the shelter, their imprisonment becomes a fight for survival as they struggle to find common ground.
The venue was suitably small with performers just a few feet away from the front row. A couple of lockers, a dim single bulb, two chairs and a radio were enough to create a terrifying picture of enclosure. Conversations turn from food supplies to Dungeons and Dragons. Kelly’s dialogue might seem mundane to some viewers. Yet his work is incredibly difficult to pull off without making the piece feel overly stilted. The performances by the Dundee Rep Theatre Company betray the power-play behind the smallest sentences where no word is ‘innocent’. Veering from Mark’s fascist sympathies to his long-suffering jealousy of Louise’s old crushes at their workplace, now in ashes in the wreck of the world above, their dialogue quickly reveals Mark’s more sinister intentions. The show sustained a tension beneath which, an audience constantly suspected, lurked the prospect of a violent disaster.
As a thriller, After the End will entertain and grip audiences, but the play linger long after. Kelly is an excellent observer of the small evils of the everyday. We are, in pedantic detail, shown the horrific ways in which humans violate one another.
Hedda Gabler
2.30, Hill Street Theatre
Hedda Gabler is forced to suffer quietly under the yoke of a drab marriage to her bookish husband. Like Hedda, the audience is taken in by the affable, bumbling George Tessman. They are quickly reminded that obsession is not necessarily a booming fanaticism; it can be a dull, tepid way of life. Tessman is played with an awkward and absent cruelty. Hedda is driven by the desire to escape the stagnancy of the couple’s tangled milieu of ex-lovers and professional rivals. She meditates on her ability to act, to finally do something of significance. Lashing out, her energy becomes dedicated to dismantling careers and tearing romances apart.
The Palindrome Theatre Company’s production is a refreshing adaptation of a play that is often hamstrung by Victorian, out-moded performances. Rather than merely offering a few tweaks for the sake of novelty, everything from a firmly post-war costume, to a borrowing of idioms from middle-America, reveals the dedication of the production to transform the classic. The script is incredibly fluid. Indeed, its easy to forget that this is a translation of a spiritually serious Norwegian play when the show feels more like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or a campus novel by Philip Roth. The stage was clammy and claustrophobic; the six performers never leave the studio and give the audience an intimate impression of Hedda’s oppressive social network. Live percussion, thunderclaps, gun shots and strobe lighting allowed the company to substitute raw tension in place of musty realism.
Futureproof
17. 45, Traverse Theatre
Futureproof is the story of a closely knit, but eclectic, troop of circus oddities. After violent confrontations with disgruntled ‘townies’ the performers realise that the old freak-show bill cannot pull in crowds as it once did. Riley, their ringleader, is driven to try something bold. Transformation may be difficult but the freaks are forced to adapt to modern tastes, to embrace the norm, with unforeseen, even bloody, consequences.
Nominated for a Fringe First Award for design, Futureproof lives up to its reputation for visual panache. Riley’s Odditorium, a traveling freak-show, is rendered in gritty detail to create a musty backstage clutter from the era of vaudeville and silent film. An automatic piano provides an out of tune entre-act music. When the visual and the performative come together, the result is incredibly stylish. A moving dream sequence during the final moments of the show takes place in the mind of George/ Georgina – made-up half as a stunning brunette and half as a well groomed young man in dungarees (complete with prominent trouser bulge) – and borrows from the aesthetic of a glitzy magic-show. Sign language conversations between the mute Serena and one of the conjoined twins were accompanied by Chaplin-esque subtitles. The dialogue was a little clunky and too many performers up on stage at once, and the jumpy scene changes could seem like an exercise in turn-taking. In fact, we shared the frustration of the punters who paid a little extra to see George/Georgina in the nude: it would have been more thrilling to spend a little more time with each one of the characters. The fable might have been a little old-hat and the show far from perfect but you couldn’t help but gawp. While Futureproof relies on its visual centre-pieces, it is impressive enough not to leave you dissatisfied.
The Wind Up Bird Chronicle
7.30, The King’s Theatre
The jewel in the crown of the Edinburgh International Festival, The Wind up Bird Chronicle is an adaptation of a novel by Japanese writer Haruki Murakami. Stephen Earnheart’s production, seven years in the making, employs puppets, projection, multiple television screens and a wonderful score performed live by Bora Yoon. A noir-inspired hunt for a lost cat, everyman Toru Okada is visited in turn by a series of femme fatales, school girls and nightmarish concierges. In dreams and stories, Toru is transported from 1940s Manchuria, raree shows and a creepy Lynchian hotel. Noboru Wataya, Toru’s sinister brother-in-law, lurks in the darkness as jerky puppets pour each other glasses of cutty-sark. No matter how mad the dreams the set shifts and return to base; the terrifying ‘dream police’ depart and the audience find themselves back at Okada’s anonymous apartment.
The production captures the spirit of Murakami’s phantasmagorical union of East and West. A superb international cast perform harmoniously while cultures, old and new, east and west, rub up against one another. Japanese subtitles are flashed on screen for conversations between everyman Toru Okada and his absent wife Kumiko. The English script was also excellent, based on Jay Rubin’s translations: reading Murakami is always infused by a dry, hard-boiled wit that wasn’t dropped. James Saito was a truly nasty piece of work as Toru’s megalomanic brother-in-law.
At the end of the production, when the lights come up, a collage of tape and chalk crosses on the boards gives some clue as to the technical mastery of the piece. The greatest thrill is how well-wrought this multimedia adaptation is. The Wind Up Bird Chronicle never once lets up in its relentless series of visual marvels.
Titus Andronicus
22.15, C Venues (+1)
Shakespeare’s bloodiest tragedy is given a darkly comic and gothic makeover in this energetic late-night production. Titus Andronicus, a well respected general of Rome, is made the plaything of the Empress Tamora, his onetime prisoner. A cycle of revenge is played out mercilessly and the pace is unremitting. Limbs are removed every ten minutes and tossed about irreverently. Hands are struck off. For the grande finale, Titus chains the children of his enemy to a table, drills a hole in their chests and serves them up in a pie to their own mother.
Brutal and graphically ‘in-yer-face’ there is little subtlety to any of the strong, loud deliveries. Cleavage burst from the tight PVC corsets of Tamora’s vampiric goths. Titus himself looked like a rugby captain. Chiron and Dimitrius, Tamora’s lusty sons, were played as lanky, hulking orks. Sweaty clubbing scenes featured music from Faithless and ‘dramatic music’ (the kind that fills the ad breaks on Sky Sports 1) was pumped out during fight scenes. The production was wildly entertaining. The intimacy of the venue, with the audience on three sides, guaranteed front row seats for rape and murder. Some lucky audience members found themselves fodder for blood sputters and half-chewed cannibal pie. Confrontations were equally immediate and satisfyingly macho. At one point, the machiavellian Aaron leaps into the air, muscles rippling, punching Chiron in the face and kicking Demitrius in the guts. The performers capture the violence of fallen Rome and promise audiences a hedonistic eyeful.
