Edinburgh Fringe theatre reviews: Chemo Savvy | Suitcase Show | Chatterbox | The Edinburgh Seven | Leni’s Last Lament

Chemo Savvy ★★★★

Gilded Balloon at the Museum  (Venue 64) until 24 August

The death of Andy Gray, three years ago, robbed Scottish theatre and comedy of one of its brightest stars. His death – at 61, from complications of Covid – was made doubly tragic by the fact that he had recently recovered from a complex form of leukaemia, diagnosed in 2018. 

In typical style, Andy Gray joked and laughed his way through many aspects of that experience. At the time of his death, he was working with Grant Stott on a comedy that would reflect his encounter with life-threatening illness.  

In many ways, Chemo Savvy – playing a brief run at the Gilded Balloon during this Fringe – is that play. It is a lively comedy written by Gray’s fellow panto star Alan McHugh, starring Grant Stott as the main character Rab, diagnosed with leukaemia soon after returning to Scotland from decades down south. It also features long-time friends and fellow actors Jordan Young and Gail Watson in a variety of supporting roles, from Rab’s long-dead mother, his former fiancee and his brilliant cancer nurse Betty, to his posh hospital consultant and his long-estranged brother.  

McHugh’s 60-minute play is essentially a lightweight structure, with a predictable narrative arc, an upbeat ending, and a touch of cheesy romance. The detail that completes that structure, though, is Scottish comedy gold from start to finish, packed with cheeky one-liners, and brilliant performances that flip in seconds from broad satirical comedy and pure fantasy (induced by Rab’s cancer drugs) to perfectly-captured family drama.

This is one of those shows where – when the company take their bows at the end – it’s difficult to believe that there have only been three of  them, delivering the whole story with such style. Chemo Savvy is met with a roar of applause and approval by an Edinburgh audience that knows and loves these performers almost as much as they loved the man they honour and remember through this exhilarating show. Joyce McMillan

THEATRE

Suitcase Show ★★★★

Summerhall (Venue 26) until 25 August

A traveller with a collection of old, battered suitcases is stopped by border control. In response to demands from security, a suitcase is opened revealing a gorgeous tableau of a little town under snow. A story is told: cloven hoofprints on roofs; a preacher ripped limb from limb; a child who freezes to death. Then the suitcase is shut and goes through the scanner, revealing nothing more than a collection of ordinary objects.

This tone of magic and menace in the midst of the everyday is sustained through much of the new show by New Zealand company Trick of the Light, makers of the acclaimed The Bookbinder. In a similar vein to that, writer and performer Ralph McCubbin Howell and director/designer Hannah Smith tap into the darkness of original fairy tales. But here they push the darkness rather further.

More suitcases are opened, more stories told. There are shadow puppets; a scroll of hand-drawn pictures displayed on an overhead projector; a story of two whole lives, from cradle to grave, told by a paid of hands. McCubbin Howell’s ability to command atmosphere, the beautifully made props, astute use of lighting and the soundscape by Emmy award-winning composer Tane Upjohn-Beatson weave a bright, dark magic. Meanwhile, the ordinary world of the airport continues with demands for papers and announcements about cocktails in the business class lounge.

If they had only left it there, it would linger, mysterious, in the memory. If they had left it there and not swerved into a story about climate disaster, then attempted a grand reveal which quickly descends into gruesome melodrama. This clever storytelling show has at least three endings, and none of them fulfils the magic of the original premise. Susan Mansfield

THEATRE 

Chatterbox ★★★

Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33) until 25 August 

When Lubna Kerr’s father is offered a PhD place at the University of Strathclyde, her family must relocate from their native Pakistan to the city of Glasgow. The Urdu-English language barrier meant that she was often ridiculed at school, with the “blue-blooded Mrs MacDonald”, her middle-class teacher from the outer Hebrides, dismissing her as ‘stupid’. 

Barriers to living and learning in 1970’s Scotland, however, proved far-reaching and numerous, and Kerr reflects on how her childhood experiences of casual racism have since informed her relationship with wider cultural traditions in the West. She developed a stutter at a young age, which required a course of speech and language therapy, but her designs to become an actor and playwright see her go from timid to talkative. 

Chatterbox is full of good humour and heart. We learn how Kerr’s love of ginger cake gave her a taste for rebellion, laugh when she attempts to apply mascara for the first time, and share her distress as she struggles to find the right words after her father’s heart attack. The piece notes, optimistically, the powerful uses of language and labels. Josephine Balfour-Oatts

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THEATRE

The Edinburgh Seven ★★★

Greenside @ Riddles Court (Venue 16) until 24 August

The obstacles faced by the first seven women to study medicine at Edinburgh University are laid bare in this play written and directed by Alice Banks. The company of seven young women from St Andrews University do solid work, led by Poppy Kimitris as Sophia Jex-Blake, the groups unofficial leader.

Having banded together, the seven were admitted in 1869, but faced further barriers including demands that they be taught in separate classes and pay fees four times higher than the male students. Animosity from fellow students and staff increased, and in 1870, rioters hurling sticks and stones tried to prevent them from sitting their anatomy exam.

The text draws heavily on historical documents, perhaps too heavily. Imagined monologues for Isabel Thorne, partly inspired to study medicine after losing a child, and Edith Pechey, who topped the class in Chemistry though the prize was given to one of the men, are strong, but the mix of styles isn’t always comfortable. 

The seven women are now celebrated as pioneers – most recently with the unveiling of a new tapestry commission by Christine Borland – but this careful and important play reminds us just how tough things were for them. Susan Mansfield

THEATRE

Leni’s Last Lament ★★

Assembly Rooms (Venue 20) until 25 August

The story of Leni Riefenstahl, the gifted and beautiful young film-maker who directed powerful propaganda films for the Nazi regime in 1930s Germany, is a famously complex one, full of moral ambiguities and unanswered questions about the extent of her complicity with the horrors of Nazism.

Of all the strategies for telling this story, though, one that should never have occurred to anyone is the weird merger attempted, in this play by Gil Kofman, between the figure of Leni Riefenstahl, and that of a wholly different German woman of the 1930s, the great Marlene Dietrich, whose lifelong opposition to the Nazis and their creed was never in doubt.   

The use of archive film and newsreel in the show, and of the music that accompanied the rise of the Nazis, is never less than interesting. The central performance, though – a heavily bewigged Dietrich impression by Jodie Markell – could hardly be in worse taste, or less appropriate to the story told. It is a story that – as the show acknowledges – matters now more than ever, as far right politics once again stalks our world. It deserves to be told without the profound misjudgments and confusions that mar this effort. Joyce McMillan