Edinburgh Fringe Theatre reviews: Sorry (I Broke Your Arms and Legs) | Is the Wifi Good in Hell? | Jack Goes to Therapy: A (Somewhat) Romantic Comedy | Dummy in Diaspora

Sorry (I Broke Your Arms and Legs) ★★★★

Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33) until 25 August

THEATRE

Is the Wifi Good in Hell? ★★★★

Underbelly Cowgate (Venue 61) until 25 August

THEATRE

Jack Goes to Therapy: A (Somewhat) Romantic Comedy ★★★

Zoo Playground (Venue 186) until 25 August

THEATRE

Dummy in Diaspora ★★★★

Zoo Playground (Venue 186) until 25 August

Go back a decade or two and the Fringe would have been awash with theatre about gay lads discovering their sexuality, even plucking up the courage to admit it to friends and family in what felt like a traumatic rite of passage. Have social attitudes become more enlightened in the intervening years? Let’s say so – that seems one reason, at least, for something of a shift in focus in gay coming-of-age dramas – as four strong solo shows this year demonstrate.

In Maybe You Like It theatre company’s funny and fast-moving Sorry (I Broke Your Arms and Legs), for example, the feelings that nervy, nerdy Sam Wilson has for the suave and sporty Clint seem evident to everyone in Year 8 but himself. Things are made far murkier, however, since the object of Sam’s affections is also his direct rival for the much-cherished position of Head Boy (no tittering at the back, please). 

It’s perhaps debatable quite how cool and clued-up 12-year-olds might be about such matters of emerging sexuality, but let’s leave that to one side. This is very much Sam’s show, delivered in an endless and hilariously rambling PowerPoint presentation (he spent hours on the transitions, and it shows). It is clearly a labour of love for writer/actor James Akka too, who delivers a performance shot through with breathless enthusiasm and child-like awkwardness, and no shortage of meta-theatrical, fourth-wall-breaking asides either. 

There’s a deliciously hard edge to Akka’s creation, too – for example in Sam’s terrible (accidental?) act that gives the play its title. There is the suggestion at the show’s conclusion that admitting to himself what everyone else has known all along might have avoided all the trauma and injury in the first place. But the things that stay longer in the memory are Sam’s obsessive list-making, and Akka’s endless, wide-eyed energy.

There are far fewer laughs on offer in Lyndon Chapman’s bleak but brilliantly incisive Is the Wifi Good in Hell?, which takes Margate pre-teen Dev through school, university and into early adulthood, while the world around him changes beyond all recognition. Apart from a run-in at a local fast-food joint that gives the play its name, the fact that Dev is gay is, in itself, barely an issue.

More important, and interesting, is what kind of “gay” he might be, as Chapman isolates and identifies five specific gay voices and identities for his damaged protagonist to inhabit as he navigates his meandering way through relationships, homes and purposes. Chapman is both needy and somewhat alienating in his own lead role, but he sets Dev’s sexual development cannily within questions of class and gentrification, privilege and deprivation in an enjoyably rich, sometimes elusive portrait of gay identity. If you’ve seen the show’s poster, you’ll recognise the sinister, seaweed-garbed entity that haunts Dev’s consciousness, and whose own identity Chapman only reveals at the play’s touching conclusion – which suggests there’s plenty of work still to do with gay self-acceptance.

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The age of 29 might seem somewhat ancient to be coming to terms with your sexuality. But for Canadian kindergarten teacher Jack – already a proudly out gay man, though he might be reeling from a recent break-up – it’s the age at which (like Chapman’s Dev) he begins to wonder what kind of “gay” he might be. 

Vancouver-based Zac Williams’s solo show Jack Goes to Therapy: A (Somewhat) Romantic Comedy doesn’t shout its themes quite as loudly as Akka or Chapman’s creations, but it’s a quietly perceptive and gently comedic interrogation of gay identity and self-disclosure all the same. Is hooking up with as many guys as possible in a desperate search for a co-traveller for a pre-paid-for trip really the right route to post-break-up recovery? Or might Jack do better, as his all-knowing therapist suggests, by simply trusting others to understand his hurt? 

Williams delivers his play with quite a contained sense of focus that threatens to undersell his message. But in the end, Jack Goes to Therapy acknowledges that everyone (well, almost) has their own frailties and wounds, with abundant – and winning – warmth and compassion.

To sexuality, add issues of race, language and culture for Chicago-based Esho Rasho’s vivid and semi-autobiographical Dummy in Diaspora. His lead Essa is the son of Iraqi refugees to the US (the dark ironies of whose situation aren’t lost on the young man), and he is virtually forced to come out as a teenager by his mother’s incessant interrogations. His sexuality is never really in question, though he finds some striking ways to consider it – most memorably in a chilling encounter with a gay Trump supporter, for example. 

Rasho is probably the most brutally honest, too, among these four creators in facing up to the physical expectations of gay culture. He describes a fascinating relationship with his own body, which at once defines who he is in the eyes of lovers and others, and yet will inevitably fail him as he grows older. Essa/Rasho’s coming of age, however, is far from a simple process: it’s more of a perpetual negotiation between his parents’ culture and his own adopted environment, languages learnt, forgotten and disregarded, and of course others’ expectations and perceptions of a young gay Middle Eastern man. 

In some ways, Dummy in Diaspora’s plethora of ideas blurs the focus of its underlying theme, but the show nonetheless embraces the richness and diversity, as well as the joys and frustrations, of queer experience.