Edinburgh Fringe Theatre reviews: James Rowland Dies at the End of the Show | Gamble | Ginger Johnson Blows Off! | M R James: Whistle and I’ll Come to You | Jobsworth | Modern Love is Not a Dream

James Rowland Dies at the End of the Show ★★★★

Summerhall (Venue 26) until 26 August

James Rowland has carved out his own Rowland-shaped niche at the Fringe: bearded exuberance, confessional storytelling, a ladleful of joy, a dash of sadness, something a little bit profound. In this – the last play in a loose trilogy that began with 2022’s Learning to Fly – he seems to be gunning for mortality, with a clock counting down for the duration of the show and the fact that he’s wearing a hospital gown. (Spoiler alert: we never find out the reason for the hospital gown.)

Rowland has a knack not only for telling stories but for finding stories which resonate deeply, like the Golden Disc, the “mixtape for the universe” compiled by Carl Sagan to be sent on the Voyager spacecraft launched in 1977, the first bound for outer space. While making the CD, Sagan fell in love with one of his colleagues on the project, Ann Druyan.

That story forms a spine to the narrative, but much of the show (perhaps too much) is given over to a swashbuckling retelling of Robin Hood and the Quest for the Golden Arrow. In a way, it is a perfect story: the good guys triumph, the bad guys lose, everyone has fun and no one really gets hurt. But is it possible that a good story might get in the way of the truth?

Perhaps this show does ramble more widely than some of Rowland’s other work, and it doesn’t quite deliver the personal confrontation with mortality that the title implies (though that’s hardly a complaint). It is still a pleasurable hour in the hands of a master storyteller, and beneath and through it is a rambling soundtrack, from Mozart to Frightened Rabbit: Rowland’s personal Golden Disc. Susan Mansfield

THEATRE

Gamble ★★

Summerhall (Venue 26) until 26 August

Few industries are as ethically bankrupt and enraging as the gambling industry and few topics are more challenging and emotive than gambling addiction. It seems an ideal subject, then, for a fierce and uncompromising show. That is not what we get here. Hannah Walker’s Gamble has some imaginative ideas and a moving central story, but it is just too scatty and shapeless to make a serious impact. Walker herself provides an amusingly, ironically glitzy performance and she is ably assisted by Rosa Postlethwaite, but its bitty structure – skit after skit after skit – amounts to less than the sum of its parts. The gambling industry deserves something so much stronger. Fergus Morgan

THEATRE

Ginger Johnson Blows Off! ★★★

Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33) until 24 August

Like any self-respecting winner of RuPaul’s Drag Race UK (Season 5), Ginger Johnson knows how to make an entrance. To the sound of a revving engine and rock power chords, she zips onstage in her Honda mobility scooter kitted out like a super sequinned Evel Knievel, while claiming to be “Taylor Swift without all the philanthropy” in a raspy singing voice which is closer to her namesake Brian Johnson of AC/DC.

The aim of her latest show is to realise her childhood ambition to be a professional daredevil. There is nothing she won’t do – caffeine after 6pm, the works – and what follows are a series of cunning stunts and scenes of mild peril, observed and assisted by impassive health and safety operative Jen.

Ginger relishes the odds when playing her camp iteration of Russian roulette, is positively giddy in the vicinity of micro pyrotechnic effects and wants us to admire her big cannon the way she admires her stuffed stunt double. The wig comes off for the triumphant finale but her quest has not been without its casualties. Only a closing torch song of regret will do in such bittersweet circumstances. Fiona Shepherd

THEATRE

M R James: Whistle and I’ll Come to You ★★★

theSpace @ Symposium Hall (Venue 43) until 24 August

A necessarily bare-bones but gratifyingly sensitive new version of the classic ghost story from Birmingham’s Blue Orange Arts company, this manages to achieve quite a bit with very little. It helps that with James, the menace is often unseen but this is a very careful adaptation by James Nicholas that effectively contextualises the story in the period immediately after the First World War and the subsequent burgeoning interest in spiritualism.

Israel Hands makes for a convincingly gruff protagonist as the arch-rationalist widowed scholar Professor Parkins who unearths a bronze whistle while investigating ancient Templar ruins on holiday on the east coast of England. After blowing the whistle, Parkins finds himself sharing his hotel room with a most unwelcome guest. Nicholas’ script is swift and economical while careful to maintain a flavour of James prose. 

Parkins’ aggressive rationality is a carapace, hardened by bereavement. Confronted with the uncanny, it sloughs away revealing the grief left behind. The sound design goes a long way to provide the atmosphere here, from near constant whistling winds to things making some VERY LOUD bumps in the night which strongly suggest that this would also work well as an audio adaptation. Rory Ford

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THEATRE

Jobsworth ★★★

Pleasance (Venue 33) until 26 August

Juggling three full-time jobs to service a vicious cycle of debt, it quickly becomes apparent why Bea is looking so frantic and shouting so loudly. She’s simply trying to find the energy hold it all together. But what if she didn’t have to? What if she, like her various bosses, could get paid more than she deserves for doing less than expected? A shock discovery that connects one of her workplaces with another leads to an opportunity to do just that.

Writer Isley Lynn and writer/ performer Libby Rodliffe’s upbeat comedy, based upon their own workplace experiences, captures the crappy corporate worlds of rowdy birthday messages, tapas after work and mid-level office semi-sheen, with its endless “check-ins”, buzzing text messages and Zoom calls – a multimedia assault on the senses that is accentuated by Bea’s multitude of roles. 

Light commentary on the ineffectiveness of capitalism when confronted by those who know how to “play the system” slowly emerges through Rodliffe’s high-intensity delivery. The focus is one individual’s warp-speed personal journey rather than delving too deeply into the bigger issues of intergenerational inequality that it raises along the way. Family reconciliation is its final destination, along with hopefully, for Bea, a well-earned rest. Sally Stott

THEATRE

Modern Love is Not a Dream ★★★

theSpace on the Mile (Venue 39) until 24 August

There are certainly echoes of David Mamet’s Sexual Perversity in Chicago in Laura Turner’s new play but they’re given a refreshing contemporary spin. Shaarai Spriggs plays Liv, a post-doctoral student writing a thesis on the psychology of love. If this is a bit on the nose then so is her supervising professor’s suggestion that she needs to relate more to her work, which she takes as a sign to conduct Tinder dates as part of her research. 

However, there is more here than initially meets the eye; a deeper reason for Liv’s academic interest exists and the play skips around in time investigating the trauma of a past relationship. It’s not really love that Liv is investigating but herself. This is confident, breezy stuff — a sophisticated romcom, essentially —that benefits from three very strong performances. 

Peter Morrison takes the rather more imposing authoritarian male roles of Liv’s professor and former partner while George Cooperwaite swiftly essays a series of potential paramours with neat dexterity. Romcoms flourish or fail according to their protagonists and Spriggs is a real asset as Liv; bruised but businesslike, vulnerable yet assertive. This is charming production from Edinburgh Napier University’s Looking Glass Theatre, staged and played with a fine sense of style. Rory Ford