Edinburgh Fringe theatre reviews: Piskie | Joe Hill: The Man Who Never Died | Galahad Takes a Bath | That’s Not My Name | The Basement Entertainer

Piskie ★★★★

Summerhall – Cairns Lecture Theatre (Venue 26) until 26 August

“Fantasy is one of the first games we learn in childhood,” explains disenchanted lecturer Dr Ouida Burt. “It's a game of belief.” The character delivers an academic lecture on the supernatural to her audience – and a lecture theatre in former academic building Summerhall is the perfect place for this – but does she personally embrace either the rational or the superstitious?

Burt is played by the play’s writer Lucy Roslyn with a down-to-earth affability which recreates the tone of an ordinary university lecture, but other forces are at work here. More than once the lights flicker, which really does appear to be a tech error at first, while it becomes clear that Burt’s investigations into the supposedly supernatural and its potential origins mask a mystery she’s been carrying with her for a long time.

As Burt meanders into discussions of the academic stress she’s feeling and her supposedly fraught relationship with her head of department, the character reveals details of the disappearance of her own father in a sleepwalking incident when she was a child, and the coping mechanism she developed for her grief. On Dartmoor in her native Devon, there are old legends of piskies (pixies) which stalk the moor, and to replace her father she has invited one into her home as an imaginary friend.

Even when an unexpected manifestation occurs later in the play, the sense of eerie otherworldliness may still be accounted for by the character’s mental turmoil and trauma as much as any other unnatural phenomena. Burt’s stress begins to show, and Roslyn paints a compelling portrait of a person who has not yet come to terms with their own unprocessed grief, yet there’s something more subtle going on beneath the layers of her play.

Under cover of an intriguingly presented piece of cosy folk horror, if such a genre exists, Piskie asks what role hope plays in many people’s willingness to believe the unlikely, from ghost story to conspiracy theories. Or, as Roslyn’s text so cleverly puts it, is the house haunted or are you? David Pollock

THEATRE

Joe Hill: The Man Who Never Died ★★★★

C ARTS | C venue | C aurora (Venue 6) until 25 August

Kudos to writer, actor and musician Joseph Shaw, who has chosen to stage his one-man tribute to the life of early 20th century American trade unionist in the courtyard spot outside C’s venue at the Edinburgh Jesuit Church on Lauriston Street. This puts him in competition with passing traffic, as well as the hubbub of people who have just stopped by the courtyard bar for a drink. But the richness of his performance and the clarity of his storytelling still manage to draw the attention of bystanders.

Joe Hill was an immigrant Swedish labourer who worked across the United States, and also a member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) union, for which he created songs and cartoons. Among the former were There is Power in a Union (a title later reused by Billy Bragg) and The Preacher and the Slave, in which Hill first coined the term “pie in the sky”.

Hill was executed in Utah in 1915 for a double murder to which he was only connected by circumstantial evidence, and throughout the 20th century his legend as an activist, artist and alleged martyr framed by company bosses only grew, influencing artists as diverse as Woody Guthrie, Minor Threat and Rage Against the Machine. Shaw recounts all of this, and the apparent affair which caused Hill not to present an alibi and bring a young woman’s name into disrepute, through conversational storytelling and excerpts from his letters.

Meanwhile, with just an electric guitar and a sparse but powerful singing voice, Shaw performs songs about Hill, including Paul Robeson’s The Ballad of Joe Hill, which Shaw first discovered through Joan Baez’s cover; by Hill, including a version of his Rebel Girl fused with the Bikini Kill song of the same name; and unrelated to Hill but useful to the story, like Long Black Veil’s tale of sex and execution. It’s a performance which takes Hill to the streets, where he belongs. David Pollock

THEATRE

Galahad Takes a Bath ★★★

Zoo Southside (Venue 82) until 25 August

In Arthurian legend, Sir Galahad is the purest and most noble of warriors, whose sexual virginity is key to his prowess in combat. In practice, argues playwright Jojo Jones’s comic play, this personal profile might make him a polite do-gooder with a pitiable need to fight off his libido the moment it makes itself known. In reference to the story of Galahad’s mother Elaine of Corbenic, who was trapped in a boiling bath by the sorceress Morgan Le Fay, the knight is giving a press conference to the media here which involves him undressing and stepping in and out of his own bath.

It’s a convoluted scenario, but now Jones and director Carla Troconis have got solo performer Forest Malley’s Galahad here, what the play is really about is revealed. Galahad is some kind of medieval celebrity, and the unheard questions he is responding to are of the sort which a politician, a sports star or a Harry Styles-like pop idol would field at a puff media conference. 

Through the lens of one of the great heroes of legend and the way he’s historically been viewed – and a very enjoyable performance by Malley, who plays against the character’s expected type – our invasive expectation of modern-day heroes and how they carry their own masculinity is subverted in very amusing fashion. David Pollock

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THEATRE

That’s Not My Name ★★★

Zoo Southside (Venue 82) until 25 August

There are many adjectives which can be thrown in the direction of Sammy Trotman’s (almost) one-woman performance about her own mental health history – brave, honest, open-hearted, loud, chaotic – but boring isn’t one of them. She began writing the work in a psychiatric hospital, and what has come out of that process is a different kind of catharsis to most shows about mental health. Here Trotman has a performance style which brings to mind in-yer-face theatre, to mirror the disruptive patterns of her own mind.

It's a free-associative piece which the accompanying text suggests is partly improvised, although in reality very few works as ultimately cohesive as this could come from anything but rigorous rehearsal. In darkly amusing monologues which border on stand-up, she relates her parental abandonment issues and her mistrust of the psychiatric profession, or at least its inability to get to the root of her being. That’s the meaning of the title, to say she’s more than the latest “condition” attached to her like a diagnostic label.

In between these segments, outbursts of frantic, set-trashing physical theatre occur, a number of which stagily rope in long-suffering director Jake Rix for physical and emotional abuse. If any of this sounds abrasive or unsettling, then Trotman has done a good job of recreating one experience of mental illness for the stage. David Pollock

THEATRE

The Basement Entertainer ★★

PBH’s Free Fringe @ Banshee Labyrinth (Venue 156) until 25 August

Trapped in a basement for months, Katelyn Berrios is forced to make her own entertainment — and her own friends. Initial indications are not promising as the diffident American does not appear to be a natural performer. But she does manage to conduct a dialogue with her newest companion, a thermos called Stanley, via a pre-recorded soundtrack without missing a beat. She’s better when she plays to her strengths as in a solid stand-up section about asexuality and even a song  (although Stanley isn’t impressed). There’s a theme to this scrappy little show about self-belief: if Berrios heeds it she could escape that basement yet. Rory Ford