HOW better to start the Edinburgh Fringe 2022 than with a drama about a struggling female actor who – in the midst of the audition process for a theatre production based upon Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 movie Psycho – kills one of the pre-eminent stage directors of the day?
Psychodrama
So it is, then, that I make my way to the celebrated Fringe venue that is the Traverse Theatre to see Matt Wilkinson’s Psychodrama (Traverse, until Aug 28).
A one-woman play, created for the character of an unnamed “actress in her forties”, Wilkinson’s drama is played by the superb Emily Bruni. Struggling to get acting jobs, and justifiably enraged by predominantly male directors’ predilection for casting female actors who are young and pretty, Bruni’s character works in a clothes shop selling expensive, designer label fashion items.
She is, therefore, hugely excited when she receives a rare phone call from her agent to say that the famous auteur theatre director Peter Coevorden would like her to audition for the leading role of Marion Crane in his Hitchcock adaptation. However, it isn’t long before the director’s ego, unusual working practices and personal peccadillos combine with our protagonist’s own foibles to create a situation that is, unbeknownst to the oblivious Coevorden, dangerously combustible.
This entire story – complete with stories of Winona Ryder-style kleptomania, fraught audition-room sexual politics and the principal character’s increasingly frenetic attempts to socialise with people on the theatre scene – is revealed by means of brilliantly observed first-person narration. Wilkinson’s script bristles with knowing, often dark, razor-sharp humour.
Bruni (who is directed here by Wilkinson) is entirely in control, both of her deliciously erratic character and the author’s clever and funny text. By turns laugh-out-loud hilarious, genuinely chilling and improbably sympathetic, she tosses the play’s many comic grenades into the audience with an impressive alacrity.
There is also, in both script and performer, a brilliant dryness of tone. For instance, the protagonist’s brutal humiliation at the hands of the director (which her agent tries to pass off as an example of Coevorden’s artistic eccentricity) is conveyed as unembellished, factual recollection. It is all the more powerful for that.
Although she is seated on a bar stool – like a female version of the great Irish comedian Dave Allen circa 1983 – Bruni’s performance has a wonderfully expressive, physical dimension. Assisted smartly by Elliot Griggs’s lighting design and Gareth Fry’s fine sound and music, the actor paints a panoply of places, people and, often dangerous, situations with spectacular vibrancy.
Angel
There’s another fine solo performance in Henry Naylor’s Angel (Gilded Balloon Patter Hoose, until Aug 28). Set in the de facto autonomous, Kurdish region of Rojava, in northern Syria, the play traces the experience of a 19-year-old Kurdish woman called Rehana (a fictionalisation of “the Angel of Kobane”, the young female soldier who is said to have killed more than 100 fighters of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, aka Daesh).
Rehana is played by the tremendous young actor, and Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama graduate, Yasemin Özdemir.
It is 2014 and, amidst the chaos of the Syrian War, the notoriously cruel forces of Daesh are approaching the Kurdish city of Kobane. As Rehana and her family join the mass evacuation, it becomes clear that her ageing father has decided to stay behind with the Kurdish-led YPG (People’s Defence Forces) to protect his orchard from destruction or appropriation by Daesh.
The YPG – which is closely connected with the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) – is famed for its commitment to equal rights for women and for the bravery and effectiveness of its female fighters. In an early scene in the play, Rehana recalls her father providing her with the “education” of shooting practice – which involved firing holes in soft drinks cans.
The invasion by Daesh would lead to 130,000 Kurdish refugees being stranded on the Syrian side of the Turkish-Syrian border. It also puts Rehana on a path that will lead her into the ranks of the YPG.
The production – which is directed for Torch Theatre of Milford Haven by Peter Doran – is deceptively modest. Minimal set design evokes a small wall. Otherwise, the young actor, kitted out in army fatigues, conjures up her story in a simple, black box performance space.
However, thanks to Naylor’s vividly descriptive text and Özdemir’s captivating, undeniably honest acting, every aspect of the story finds a bold and compelling expression. Whether it is Rehana’s father’s extraordinary encounter with a young religious zealot, her remarkable exploits on the battlefield or the martyrdom of the play’s conclusion, the piece resounds with an unmistakable truth.
It’s a truth that needs to be told. As our narrator, Rehana, says at the outset of the play, the battle for Kobane was little covered by the world’s media, because news agencies pulled their reporters out of the city.
9 Circles
From the conflict in Syria to the US-led disaster in neighbouring Iraq in House Of Cards writer Bill Cain’s play 9 Circles (Assembly George Square, until Aug 29). This European premiere is set within the American penal system. It explores a fictionalised version of one of the most appalling war crimes of the occupation of Iraq by the US and its allies.
In this three-hander, directed by Guy Masterson, Joshua Collins plays a fictional former US soldier who is clearly based upon Steven Green, one of five Iraq War veterans from US military who were convicted of the 2006 gang-rape of 14-year-old Iraqi girl Abeer Qassim Al-Janabi and the murder of her and her family. Based, one assumes, on Green’s testimony in court, the drama considers this most heinous of crimes through the life experience and warped logic of its most notorious perpetrator (four of Green’s former comrades were tried by US military courts, whilst Green, who had been discharged from the army, was tried under civilian law).
Cain's play is, as one would expect, sharp and unsparing. The details of the crime – as recounted in conversations between the ex-soldier and the military and civilian lawyers who seek, or are appointed, to represent him – are, needless to say, horrifying.
The most interesting aspect of the drama is the former-soldier’s insistence that his crime was rooted in his brutalisation by the army and the dehumanisation of the Iraqi people by the prevailing ideology within the US armed forces. Through the military lawyer (played by David Calvitto) we discover that, so desperate was the US army to find recruits for the Iraq War, that the soon-to-be rapist and murderer was allowed in despite not meeting the mental health and suitable character requirements.
The most politically problematic aspect of the play is Cain’s decision to also make it a drama about the cruelty of the death penalty in the US. No US soldier has been sentenced to death – whether in a military or civilian court – for war crimes in Iraq (Green was given a life sentence and died following a suicide attempt).
Collins gives a largely decent performance as a disturbed young man from Texas who should never have been allowed a gun, in Iraq or anywhere else. However, when it comes to the expression of terror and pain that the play ultimately requires, the actor doesn’t have the necessary emotional range.
