This review goes out in honour of Gerard Slevin. He was the theatre director who in 1961 came up with a suggestion of how to bring the burgeoning Edinburgh fringe into line. “I think there should be a limitation on the number of halls used during the festival,” he said after staging a play in the Lauriston Hall. “It would be much better if only 10 halls were licensed.”
You can only imagine his reaction now the number of venues exceeds 250. To fill all those rooms with as many as 10 shows in a day, you need an awful lot of material. So much material that today’s arts lover is offered not only shows but also shows about the shows. This is a phenomenon that extends far beyond the fringe to a pop-will-eat-itself culture driven by an insatiable hunger to cannibalise. On stage, as on screen, the schedules are stuffed with parodies, pastiches and tributes.
If, for example, you are scared to leave your front room for fear of missing an episode of Murder, She Wrote, the creaky 1980s vehicle for Angela Lansbury, you can find reassurance in Solve-Along-a Murder, She Wrote (★★★). It is presented by Tim Benzie, who has been touring this campy one-man paean to trash TV since its premiere at London’s Royal Vauxhall Tavern in 2018. His concept is as simple as it is effective: he screens a single episode of the series – with the permission of NBC Universal Television – and interrupts it to make fun of its flaws, idiosyncrasies and heavily underscored clues about the murderer.
Broadcast in October 1985, the episode in question, Sing a Song of Murder, has the novelty value of Lansbury playing not only crime-fiction writer Jessica Fletcher but also her British cousin Emma McGill, a singer who suspects someone is trying to bump her off. Her accent is prone to wander, but no more so than that of Patrick Macnee, playing a fellow variety entertainer whose jokes are not landing as they once did. As Benzie points out, they somehow continue to ply their showbiz trade decades after music hall died out.
Pausing the episode, Benzie gets us to vote on the most suspicious character (will it also be the most famous guest star?) and to spot the tropes of the series, such as Fletcher’s epiphanies and the occasional fluffed line.
The show attracts a handful of initiates watching Murder, She Wrote for the first time – and for them, there is next-to-no catching up to do – but trades primarily on the audience’s guilty-pleasure enjoyment of a series they love despite itself. The formula and the familiarity are part of the appeal and, in mocking the anachronisms, performances and plot, Benzie invites his audience to laugh at itself.
It is gentle and ephemeral and has the merit of not suggesting otherwise. The same can be said about Gritty Police Drama: A One-Man Musical (★★★) in which Luke Kempner, one of the voices behind Spitting Image and Deep Fake Neighbour Wars, imagines a TV police procedural with a cast of 60 and an intermittent song-and-dance score. To cope with demand, he has been adding extra shows to his sell-out run.
Like Benzie, Kempner trades on the audience’s familiarity with the small-screen genre. We recognise the officer with one last case before retiring, the detective with the troubled private life and the eccentric pathologist in the mortuary. And, of course, there is the investigation hampered by cutbacks inflicted by senior management. These are soft satirical targets even if they give the audience the pleasure of recognition, their private screen entertainment made public.
What is more impressive is Kempner’s audacious attempt to stage the whole thing single-handedly. He begins with Line of Duty where the lugubrious Northern Irish tones of Ted Hastings (Adrian Dunbar) alternate with the chirpy chappie Cockney of Steve Arnott (Martin Compston) and the rent-a-northerner earthiness of Happy Valley’s Catherine Cawood (Sarah Lancashire). Having established his crime-show credentials, he expands his cast to include Frankie Boyle as a cold-hearted pathologist, Ian McKellen as a self-obsessed witness and Donald Trump as a Hannibal Lecter-style psychopath.
That he not only keeps the conversation going between these and scores of other voices, but also breaks off for several reworked West End show tunes, powerfully sung, is a dazzling achievement. But for all the energy and pizzazz, it is a throwaway show in which the pleasure is all in the moment.
Also feeding on pop culture but turning it into something strange and distorted are New York writer-performers Emily Allan and Leah Hennessey whose Slash (★★★★) filters celebrity culture through the lens of homoerotic fan fiction. Not since John Sessions brought his free-associative impressions to the Edinburgh fringe in the 1980s has a show gone on such a wayward route from the mainstream to the erudite.
The premise is that two repressed 1950s teenagers, Betty Cooper and Veronica Lodge from Archie Comics, grow tired competing for the same all-American boy and opt instead to fantasise about the relationships of famous double acts. Repressing their own lesbian desire, they act out scenarios in which ostensibly straight couples get sexually close – but never so close as to consummate their desire.
Inspired by K/S zines, which, since the 1970s, have turned Captain Kirk and Mr Spock into lovers, they take in Star Trek as you might expect, but also venture into less predictable celebrity corners. Paul McCartney makes a pass at John Lennon (there’s an Anglophilia thing going on too), Ivanka Trump cosies up to half-sister Tiffany and a drugged-up Sherlock Holmes, who appears to be a pupil at Hogwarts, gets friendly with Dr Watson.
More adventurously, there is room for Richard Burton and Peter O’Toole to have a Shakespearean romance on the set of Othello and for feminists Andrea Dworkin and Joanna Russ to stop arguing about pornography and get physical.
Allan and Hennessey are funny and eccentric – their Stalin and Trotsky hilariously surreal – adrift in a world where the lines between fact and fiction have blurred. Quite what it all adds up to is anyone’s guess, but quite possibly the end of civilisation.
Solve-Along-a Murder She Wrote is at the Space @ Symposium Hall until 26 August. Luke Kempner in Gritty Police Drama: A One-Man Musical is at Pleasance Courtyard until 28 August. Slash is at Summerhall until 27 August.
