Edinburgh Fringe theatre reviews: Facility 111: A Government Experiment | Edward (in memoriam) | How Not to Fund a Honeymoon | Cardstock | Fill your pockets with Sunshine | Same | Tim Kenneth Kicks the Bucket | Garbanzo | RACKS
Inge-Vera Lipsius’s immersive play about a sinister government experiment is simultaneously serene and disconcerting, and among the best theatre shows you’ll see on the Fringe
THEATRE
Facility 111: A Government Experiment ★★★★
Assembly Rooms (Venue 20) until 17 August
Set in complete darkness and delivered by a disembodied woman’s voice, speaking with the kind of automated tone that is simultaneously reassuring and unsettling, this immersive journey from an empty room across an emptying city, slowly reveals itself, leaving space for the audience to fill in the gaps in a way that creates an intense and unsettlingly alternative reality from its minimalistic imagery.
In the expansive depths of the dark, where the imagination is amplified, what initially seems like a simple description of a broadly rendered built environment becomes a tense first-person journey through the unknown, where we are given the opportunity to experience, through a dream-like state, what it is to flee, to understand only in simple terms that there’s a need to go.
Writer/performer Inge-Vera Lipsius’s script deliberately removes almost all sense of human connection to create the experience of being alone, transported away from the theatre and into an unfamiliar territory, where something is happening far bigger than any individual caught up in it can hope to control. There’s a broken duality to the piece – an invitation to experience the disconnect but within a play that’s also quietly and powerfully asking why, outside of a constructed performance, we should have to.
On a practical level, it’s an opportunity to step away from the noise of the festival, to relax as the ethereal voice tells us at the start. It’s also an approach that enable us to experience something horrific, wrong, uncomfortable in a way that’s entirely comfortable, simultaneously serenely calm and disconcerting. Through an illusion of automated technology, it emphasises the way that we, here in the West, can become detached from what’s going on elsewhere in the world, before bringing us back together as a group of people seeing a show, to appreciate what we have that, in the play, is briefly taken away – the ability to freely live our lives and shape our environment, which we can now go back to.
SALLY STOTT
THEATRE
Edward (in memoriam) ★★
Greenside @ George Street (Venue 236) until 16 August
Bristol University Drama Society’s reimagining of Marlowe’s Edward II at the start of the 21st century is a strong idea with bags of potential – not least questions of homosexuality in the military, one of Edward (in memoriam)’s underlying themes. But the cut-glass restraint of the four-strong cast makes it difficult to believe in the passions and jealousies that would bring writer Noah Robinson’s sometimes elusive text to life, and a crisper, swifter pace from the show’s three credited directors might build up more of a sense of tension and jeopardy. As it stands, a promising concept, but a missed opportunity.
DAVID KETTLE
THEATRE
How Not to Fund a Honeymoon ★★★
theSpace Triplex (Venue 38) until 16 August
It's a light three-hander which comes in substantially under its running time, but what this comedy play by Stephanie Greenwood lacks in duration it makes up for in bite. Gwen and her fiancée Charlotte are seeking to fund their honeymoon in the Maldives by any means necessary – and the means they've chosen is breaking and entering, staging a robbery at posh Aunt Robyn's house while she's on holiday in Corfu, because they know she’s hiding a secret trove of valuables.
Needless to say, things go drastically wrong and these two spoiled rich brats are undone by the even more ghastly – and, we discover, violent and homicidal – Aunt Robyn, who’s played by Greenwood herself. The whole thing is a silly, madcap comedy of manners-come-crime caper, with some funny lines which poke away at the eccentricities and traditions of middle-class Middle England and an amusingly unrealistic police questioning of Robyn which feels straight out of Monty Python.
It's standard, middle of the road fare for the Fringe in August, in other words, but Greenwood’s dialogue is crisp and punchy. The three performances at the heart of the play are filled with energy and comic timing, an effective calling card for all involved.
DAVID POLLOCK
THEATRE
Cardstock ★★★
Greenside @ Riddles Court (Venue 16) until 16 August
There’s a quiet simplicity to the design and structure of this effective psychological drama by Qianyue Ang that examines the internet subculture of online erotic fan fiction. Ching Chen (Jin) plays Mae, a web author about to publish her first “proper” paper book, a gay romance between two young men. However, fear of censorship compels the publisher to demand that she gender-flip one of the protagonists to make the relationship heterosexual. This proves profoundly upsetting to Mae’s most constant online reader, Lily, a young woman played by Xinyue Zhao who has an almost obsessive parasocial relation to Mae and her work.
Although structured much like a thriller, this doesn’t necessarily go where you might expect. Ang — who is from China and currently studying at Edinburgh University — uses her characters to examine the reasons why so many young women are attracted to erotic fiction that omits their bodies. There’s a nice distinction in the performances between the older, confident Mae and the girlish, diffident Lily - both isolated in their own online space but coming together, both disguised by masks, as the characters from Mae’s fiction. Much like the elegant production design — which is ingeniously fashioned entirely from card — there’s a simple clarity to Ang’s storytelling that resonates nicely.
RORY FORD
THEATRE
Fill your pockets with Sunshine ★★
Olive Studio at Greenside @ George Street (236) until 16 August
Kezia Norton’s one-woman show feels less like theatre and more like an extended therapy session. In a series of confessional meanders she charts her passage from a troubled childhood, a mother who suffers from a breakdown and emotionally distant father, to competitive figure skating, suffering from an disordered eating and, eventually, a flight to New York to train as an actor.
The problem is not a lack of material, but rather a surfeit: so many crises jostle for attention that no single thread is allowed to breathe. Beneath it all lies a commendable message about hope wrested from darkness, but it does not appear as an organic revelation. There is talent here, and a story worth telling, but the piece needs rigorous pruning before it can become a living, breathing work of theatre.
ALEXANDER COHEN
THEATRE
Same ★★
Olive Studio at Greenside @ George Street (236) until 16 August
This timely show tells the story of Lewis and James, two young men struggling with their mental health. Brandon Kimaryo and Jason Avlonitis play their respective roles with great conviction and skill - but because Same compresses two stories into such a tight runtime, we struggle to become emotionally involved in either. Similarly, the presence of so many competing themes (parental death, alcoholism and parentification, to name a few) only serve to detract from what is already a compelling topic on its own. The issue of male suicide is such a prescient one, and Same is well-positioned to tackle it - with a more focused script.
ARIANE BRANIGAN
THEATRE
Tim Kenneth Kicks the Bucket ★★
theSpace @ Surgeons’ Hall (Venue 53) until 16 August
A polished cast can’t save this oddly misshapen American tragicomedy from Brandon Kiziloz. New York Philosophy professor Tim Kenneth (Brian Olsen) suffers an apparent mental breakdown after a stupid prank by Scooter (Mackay Mumford). Worried about his mental health Scooter enlists the considerably brighter Pencil (Connor Bullock) in an increasingly convoluted bid to rescue their teacher. Kiziloz’s writing is strong on some early individual scenes and Mumford and Bullock (both excellent) are a treat to watch but the plot spirals as it becomes ever more unlikely and the whole thing eventually grinds to an unsatisfying conclusion.
RORY FORD
THEATRE
Garbanzo ★★
Greenside @ George Street (Venue 236) until 16 August
Theatre is so easy, Scottish writer/performer Emily Briggs observes several times across the course of her 45-minute solo show - with, admittedly, a hefty dose of irony. If only it were - then this rather baffling, unconvincing mix of stand-up, song, movement and wry observation might make more of a mark. Briggs is a warm, engaging performer with an enjoyable way of interacting with her audience. But amid its vegan rethink of Tess of the d'Urbervilles and on-stage oat milk preparation, its oblique connections and bathetic ending, Garbanzo struggles to achieve much that’s memorable.
DAVID KETTLE
THEATRE
RACKS ★★
theSpace @ Niddry Street (Venue 9) until 16 August
Although competently performed, if there are any laughs in this flat backstage-set “dark comedy” they have yet to be found by writer-director Oli Keene. Three principal actors of a school production of Guys and Dolls find themselves locked in the costume cupboard among the clothing racks. Amusing themselves with a spot of dress-up, the characters all seem eminently agreeable and admirably supportive of each other’s ambitions which is all very nice but there’s no conflict, drama, tension or noticeable humour. The “dark” part is saved for the end which seems to come from another show entirely. Puzzling.
RORY FORD
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