What to see at the Edinburgh Fringe...
Edinburgh Fringe - the world’s largest performing arts festival is just around the corner. Several publications have published their top picks for shows at the festival already.
Also worth a read is this interview with Francesca Moody, producer of Fleabag and Baby Reindeer. This festival’s first controversy is over Terf, a play about JK Rowling and her views on transgender rights, which has now shifted venue from Saint Stephens Theatre to Assembly Rooms due to threats of protests. Apparently, the play imagines Daniel Radcliffe staging an intervention on Rowling. The whole series of Baby Reindeer, which started out as an Edinburgh fringe show, explores shame – and that extends to the experience of the festival. Donny becomes so disillusioned with begging people to see his show that he stops trying to attract audiences all together.
To Book
Edinburgh Fringe - I have made a Google Doc with Recommendations and here is what I have booked to see - please do feel free to share with anyone going by forwarding them this email.
And my current schedule for anyone up at the same time:
Reflections
Mnemonic at The National
Complicité’s extraordinary 1999 play returns to the stage 25 years after its inception. Simon McBurney’s legendary theatre company Complicité classically has two modes: clever but fairly narratively conventional takes on difficult-to-stage classics - such as last year’s Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead - and brain boggling experimental journeys that seek to ping your neurons into action. Once you’ve bought into this specific craft of theatre - and don’t expect too much in terms of developed ideas and gripping plot - it’s like staring at the secrets of universe. The result is an utterly engrossing show, showcasing a superb feat of stagecraft and imagination twinned with empathy. The play explores the parallels between the act of memory, the act of migration, the act of ancestry and the act of storytelling all amalgamated into one - oh and there’s a very naked man onstage a lot thrown in for good measure.
The narrative feels like a globe-trotting thriller. On the side of a mountain, a pre-historic figure is found preserved by the ice. Across Europe, a woman desperately searches for her father. In London, a man exits a theatre and waits for his lost love to call back. At the heart of the story is the iceman – the very real figure of Ötzi, discovered in the early 1990s but likely to have lived 5000 years ago. His presence has slowly rewritten decades of assumptions about humanity’s origins. According to the show, if you work forwards, every single person on the planet could be his descendent. Slowly, brought to life as a puppeteer broken chair, he is reborn anew.
As they retell and reframe their competing stories, we are invited to consider memory not simply as a mechanism for recalling past events, but as an ongoing act of imagination. One that allows us to create order and meaning from the overwhelming flood of sensory information we experience throughout our lives.
After Sex at The Arcola, Dalston
An erotic two-hander, Siofra Domgoole’s After Sex follows the trajectory of a couple’s relationship, told almost exclusively through post-coital scenes. Siofra’s writing is deeply lyrican and funny; exploring how the sex we have can change us: a love-song to connection, and to people’s capacity for changing each other’s lives. Really brilliant writing and acting.
