This year’s Edinburgh fringe has adopted the slogan Fill Yer Boots!, as if to announce a return to the salad days of cheap tickets, independent venues and £1 Deuchars. But the festival still feels bruised, not so much by the memory of Covid as by its own financial crisis. Seeing most fringe shows is expensive enough; mounting one costs a small fortune, forcing amateurs and professionals alike to shrink their companies to skeleton crews.
This may explain an unusually high proportion of single-performer offerings this year, even among the big-ticket shows. Sold out on its opening weekend, The Ballad of Truman Capote (theSpace @ Niddry Street, ★★) is perhaps the most anticipated one-man show, performed by Patrick Moy and fuelled by the considerable clout of its writer, the Scottish novelist and journalist Andrew O’Hagan.
The production suffers under the weight of its hype and does little to vary the well-worn caricature of Capote as a vain, bitchy little queen. Holed up in New York’s Plaza before his storied Black and White Ball, this imagined Capote mainlines martinis, fends off gatecrashers and makes inexplicable forays into a half-rhyming tetrameter, a ringing phone and a knocking door serving as pat presentiments of the long downfall that awaited him in the wake of his famous party.
Those seeking a more imaginative approach to the life of a queer literary megastar might stroll over to George Square for Oscar at the Crown (Assembly George Square Gardens, ★★★). In an underground bunker, exiles from a futuristic dystopia have established a haven of queer tolerance, fuelled by drugs, music and memories of the Real Housewives franchise. Each night, their fabulous but autocratic chieftain leads them in repeat performances of a homegrown musical about the life of Oscar Wilde, celebrating him as a proto-reality star.
This may all sound very fringe, but in fact the show began off-Broadway in 2019 and attracted sufficient clout to pay for nine performers in Edinburgh and a dynamic set of wheelable septic tanks. Lovebombing the room with ever more triumphal bangers, it will find instant favour with fans of the musical Six, and at its best also resembles The Rocky Horror Show, especially during the standout song Julie, in which the cast proclaim (stay with me) that the evil housewife Julie Cooper from 00s soap The OC predicted Armageddon by collapsing the boundary between fiction and reality. The show needs improved sound to help the lyrics pop, but it’s a reminder that the fringe will always reward those who embrace confection and are generous with choreography.
Hence the standing ovation that greeted The Ice Hole: A Cardboard Comedy (Pleasance Courtyard, ★★★). An almost wordless two-hand picaresque, it tells of an Icelandic angler who falls in love with a mermaid, pursuing her across Europe. The punchline is that everything he encounters en route – wildlife, landscapes, even weather – is represented by lifesize cardboard props, each labelled in black marker: a cardboard rod catches a cardboard cod; a cardboard goat excretes cardboard droppings; you get the idea.
Our hero speaks chiefly in a delicious gobbledegook approximating Icelandic. But despite being almost wordless, the show is interested in words, and much of the laughter is provoked by the way it plays with performative language. In fact, The Ice Hole falls down only when it begins to rely too much on spoken dialogue and wordy speech cards, rather than trusting wholly in the comic potential of mime and movement.
No such criticism could be levelled at Agathe and Adrien of N.Ormes (Assembly Roxy, ★★★★), another physical theatre two-hander. They trust not only in the power of silence as a canvas for storytelling, but also the emotional intelligence of their audience and the physical resilience of one another’s bodies. This trust exercise pays off, and on their fringe debut the unassuming Canadian duo have created one of the sleeper hits of the festival.
At first, when the two dancers begin to hoist each other in acrobatic postures, we are merely impressed by their daring, as well as the extraordinary physical strength hiding within their seemingly ordinary bodies. Before long, though, we realise that these breathtaking clasps, lifts and flips are describing the emotional trajectory of a relationship: as articulate and unflinching as any domestic drama.
Inspired, perhaps, by Pina Bausch’s Café Müller, the couple’s dancing tracks the shifting sands of power and desire that swirl around them. Children beside me gasped, not just when the 5ft Agathe lifts the 6ft Adrien on to her own head, but when they sensed her longing to lean on her lover for support, only to find herself leapt upon instead. Only towards the end do the pair seem to find a temporary safety in their own mutual dependence. Spiralling around the stage in an embrace of alternating grip and cling, they seemed to be skating a few inches above the ground.
Anyone looking for the next big thing should steer clear of Concerned Others (Summerhall, ★★★★), an unmissable new piece in miniature playing across the Meadows. Like all the most important material at the fringe, it belongs at the fringe: unique, handbuilt and profoundly experimental, it makes the most of the haunted, clinical interior of Summerhall’s Demonstration Room, preserved from the complex’s former life as a veterinary college.
Seeking to illuminate the epidemic of drug- and alcohol-related deaths in Scotland, local company Tortoise in a Nutshell spent several months gathering the testimonies of clinicians, social workers, addicts and their loved ones, and the resulting show makes use of a deft array of artifice to bring to life these all too real accounts: diorama, zoetrope, stop motion and a miniature cityscape populated with tiny figurines. The company’s co-founder Alex Bird is the sole human presence on stage, and even he is almost hidden for most of the play, either behind puppets, screens or the camcorder with which he films the tiny town. On leaving, the audience seemed palpably winded to have witnessed society’s wilful ignorance, and ashamed of our complicity in it: testament to the monumental potential of miniature theatre.
Which isn’t to say that a big-budget extravaganza can’t feel challenging or subversive. Dripping with energy, irony and anger, Dark Noon (Pleasance at EICC, ★★★★) is a savage and gripping live documentary that tells the 300-year history of the American west in 100 uproarious minutes. Adding layers of political sophistication to a familiar story, this Danish production is executed by a company of seven South Africans, most of them black actors performing in whiteface. To call this a revisionist western is an understatement. It cannibalises wild west cliches – the shootout, the saloon, the little house on the prairie – only to eviscerate them with increasingly entertaining displays of post-colonial vandalism.
An entire frontier town is gradually constructed on stage and, aptly for a show this metatheatrical, the audience are repeatedly invited, nay forced, to participate in Dark Noon’s reconstructions, some hilarious, others violent. Enhanced by live video and a revolving suite of narrators, the atrocities itemised in the show are handled with neither sanctimony nor even sensitivity. This is perhaps the show’s crowning glory: the blithe confidence and tactlessness of the retelling mirrors the arrogance we associate with America’s own self-storytelling.
Equally bankable spectacles abound at the Traverse, ever the superior elder sibling to its fairweather counterparts. The Grand Old Opera House Hotel (Traverse theatre, ★★★) is written by Isobel McArthur, who scored a surprise hit in the West End last year with the jukebox musical Pride and Prejudice* (*sort of). Similarly irreverent, her new show is a jukebox opera, lassoing a hodge-podge of arias and employing them in the service of farce.
The plot is suitably daft: an opera-fanatic chambermaid in a haunted hotel woos her true love by leaving a trail of cassettes, leading to a cacophonous tangle of door-slamming, bed-hopping and sudden snippets of Wagner and Verdi, sung with winking vigour by the endearing cast. It may be a bit cosy and tame, but the show reminds us that operas are really just musicals in disguise, and deserve to be enjoyed as such.
For the first week of August, excitement swirls around the big-ticket plays and comedians, but after a few days, the gilt rubs off and something else comes to light that has frantic reviewers queueing for returns. This year, it was something hushed, gentle and genuinely immersive – a term at risk of losing its meaning. It’s devised and staged by Ontroerend Goed, a Belgian company infamous for discomfiting and insulting their audiences, but with Funeral (Zoo Southside, ★★★★★), they use their remarkable powers of invention and persuasion to create a deeply respectful and communal environment in which to allow the audience, individually and collectively, to grieve.
It’s hard to say exactly how the performers achieved it. Perhaps it was teaching us all a haunting dirge in Esperanto, the elegant absurdity of flinging fine confetti over a stone monolith. Perhaps it was the infinitesimal details of loss itemised by the cast: “Pepsi Max with a paper straw”; “his belly rising and falling as he breathed”. Either way, for 60 minutes the venue became an extraordinary sanctuary of tenderness.
“The world is a collection of events,” one performer repeats in Funeral. It’s an apt mantra for the fringe, which besides entertainment and escape is always an arena of memory. To return to Edinburgh year after year is to remember and mourn past festivals while seeking newer and stranger encounters. That’s the painful and wonderful thing about the fringe, and about theatre in general: once it’s gone, it’s gone.
