Edinburgh Fringe theatre reviews: Clean Slate | Where Were You? | Note of Concern | Once Upon a Time | Waiting in Love | Casino?

THEATRE

Clean Slate ★★★★★

Former Gents Locker Room at Summerhall (26) until 24 August

Overplayed to oblivion, the one-woman show genre could do with a shot of adrenaline. Clean Slate might just be that.

Louisa Marshall and Amber Charlie Conroy’s anarchic show treads the well-worn arc of a romance: the giddy fizz of first attraction, the slow bleed into domestic drudgery, and the inevitable point where something, or someone, is bound to blow. Marshall’s unnamed boyfriend is perennially useless. He can’t open the jar of olives. The concept of washing up is alien to him.

Don’t be deceived by its familiarity. The delicious twist is in the staging: the audience are not passive observers but recruited as stand-ins for the narrator’s hopeless boyfriend. Marshall flirts, snarls, and toys with us, drawing us into complicity until we’re nodding along as though it really were our responsibility to assemble the IKEA drawers that remain on stage as a totemic reminder of our incompetence.

Marshall herself fizzes with puppyish energy, coaxing us deeper into the relationship. She lands every beat even when off the cuff: the petty humiliations, the silent resentments. By the final scene we feel the weight of every unwashed plate piling up in the sink. The cosy venue’s intimacy only works in its favour. We could be front row in their living room, which is precisely the point.

On a deeper level, there is something quietly poetic about being marooned in the purgatory of one’s early twenties, the liminal stretch between adolescence and adulthood, playing at being grown-up but everyone around you is still learning their lines. It’s charming, sharply funny and painfully recognisable, especially for anyone who has, or has ever been, a useless boyfriend.

ALEXANDER COHEN

THEATRE

Where Were You? ★★★

theSpace @ Niddry St (Venue 9) until 16 August

Where Were You? is a profound and transportive piece of theatre, performed with extraordinary energy, contrary to its 9:30am time slot. Following a group of high school friends as they reunite for the first time in 8 years, their boozing and bravado slowly unravels, becoming a candid exploration of contemporary masculinity.

Created by Balancing Act Theatre, the script is by turns outrageous and sensitive, replete with cancer jokes, ‘your mom’ jokes, penis jokes, dad humour, and misogynistic and homophobic slurs. Despite appearances, jokes and slurs are intentional, accruing cleverly. This is a work that deftly refuses its own ego, as it oscillates between displays of camaraderie and pack culture with increasing self-reflection and awareness.

Questions such as: “What kind of man do you want to be?” and “What does it mean to be a man?” provoke spirited debates and disagreements, while tender hugs, acts of care, and apologies cut through the noise as the group veers from picking fights to keeping the peace. The action declines half-way through, after a sobering piece of news – the prospect of which is planted early on. But while this story fruits with a certain predictability, it does so with an unexpected, and touching, vulnerability.

JOSEPHINE BALFOUR-OATTS

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THEATRE

Note of Concern ★★★

theSpace on the Mile (Venue 39) until 16 August

Twentysomethings Alec and Scott are at the school reunion from purgatory. While everyone else visiting their old school is indulging in a nostalgic game of hide and seek, Alec (Jordan Monks) is taking a look in his former teacher Ms Cruikshank's classroom. He relives the endless punishments she dished out to him and the entire class, earning the little-liked old teacher the nickname Ms Cruelshank.

Meanwhile Scott (Will Evans) has chosen this room to hide in, and the pair discover a broken handle has trapped them in there together just as the audience finds out they were former friends who went their separate ways when Scott started seeing Alec’s high school sweetheart as soon as they broke up. Together the men work through their history, as the discovery of a trove of their former teacher’s documents give them new insight into her life and struggle.

If that all sounds a bit Good Will Hunting, co-writers Monks and Evans and director Stephanie Austin have come up with anything but. Instead Note of Concern (the name of the pink punishment slips which Cruikshank dished out like confetti) is a whipcrack smart and hilarious character comedy with a poignant, nostalgic edge, and if some plot elements are trite and convenient, the chemistry and comic timing of both leads will soon wipe that from your mind.

DAVID POLLOCK

THEATRE

Once Upon a Time ★★★

Greenside @ Riddles Court (Venue 16) until 16 August

Real life is the stuff of fairytales in this brief but gently compelling solo monologue from performer Sasha Elizabeth Parker, who appears before us in a red dress and a magical-looking pair of glittery red heels, like Dorothy ready to be swept up for Oz. With no props or set, she conjures a story of kings and princes, although it soon becomes apparent that beneath the text the former is the abusive father her character Ella and her mother escape from, while the latter are all revealed as Frog Princes whom she dates and has to get rid of – a literal Tom, Dick and Harry of STDs and pre-existing relationships.

None of this is as abrasive or as gritty as it sounds, and perhaps Parker could have written in a bit more emotional texture, like the moment where her own shoes shout back at her or Rapunzel’s mother has a sweaty outburst. She is, however, a very compelling storyteller, with a soft, hypnotic, beautifully controlled tone of voice, and a very lyrical delivery which involves her hands shifting through the air and marking out the rhythm of her text with their movements. What the piece might lack in depth, it makes up for in thoughtful and effective presentation.

DAVID POLLOCK

THEATRE

Waiting in Love ★★

Paradise in the Vault (Venue 29) until 16 August

Breaking up is hard to do for Alan. When he and Sam split awkwardly on the day of the family dog’s funeral, he reacts like the faithful hound at the graveside, unable to let go. The next time he meets Sam, she’s literally a different person, Sammi, getting on with her life while Alan stagnates on the sofa, failing to navigate the uncertain territory of the amicable split. And so on across a succession of snapshot scenes which string out the non-drama with different actresses portraying Sam as she moves on and same old Alan going to refusenik lengths to keep everything as it was.

FIONA SHEPHERD

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THEATRE

Casino? ★★★

theSpace @ Surgeons’ Hall (Venue 53) until 16 August

A raucous — and VERY Scottish — workplace sitcom template is the Buckfast-sweet syrup that smuggles a wee pin-sharp prick against capitalism in this new play by Ben Martin. Following the lives of four service industry workers at a Glaswegian steak house — and their cartoonishly awful boss — this roughly resembles something John McGrath’s 7:84 Theatre Company might have vomited up with after a coke-fuelled weekend spent on Tennents Lager and a selection of half-price cocktails.

The title references a standard question posed by the workers after shutting up shop but it’s also a reflection on the seemingly arbitrary attribution of wealth. Those who have it take it for granted and those who don’t work for minimum wage. The characters are as broad as the jokes but the cast trade insults like old friends (or co-workers) and director Eilidh Macdonald gives this State ae That Theatre Company a good sense of movement. It’s like a rough-hewn take on early Scorsese — if Marty hailed from the mean streets of Maryhill. Everyone is clearly enjoying themselves too much to worry much about the plot but when it does eventually emerge you can just make out a glint of anger amidst all the workplace bantz.

RORY FORD

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