Edinburgh Fringe theatre reviews: GO! | The Alchemy of Sadness | Buttalk | Going Soft + more

ZOO Southside (Venue 82) until 24 August

GO! can be highly recommended to families, and anyone with further interests in graphic novels, animation, and gaming. A work for people aged 7+, GO! combines movement, martial arts, and digital technology to create a live one-on-one combat game experience.

Stick fighting is a major theme throughout, and the two performers move stealthily across the white mat that the audience congregates around. We are reminded of what is perhaps the most important ground rule: do not touch the mat. It is soon clear why.

The pair begin with just one stick, which becomes the metaphorical carrot as they follow and fight over it before fighting with it. The stick can be heard moving through the air, its trajectory controlled deftly as it sweeps tauntingly over the audience’s heads.

It is a playful, fun-filled 40 minutes from Corps in Situ, which blends playground humour with balletic grace.

In a show of skill and speed, the performers struggle against one-another. Lifts, falls, and handstands are carefully choreographed, underscored by slow, ambient techno like the sound of a machine blinking.

Sure enough, an overhead projector transforms the mat into a screen, and the pair interact with these projections, becoming trapped in squares of light similar to the shape of an iPhone.

The screen shifts and morphs, blurring into static, the image as grainy as sand in a storm. Black ink billows, chasing the performers across the mat, even tripping them up. Later, when the squares of light return, they could represent panels like those found in a graphic novel.

In this moment, both performers become characters that have broken free from the two-dimensionality of the page, and though they cannot leave, nor approach or encroach on its perimeter, they have leapt up and come to life for a short and wonderful while.

Josephine Balfour-Oatts

The Alchemy of Sadness ★★★

theSpace @ Niddry Street (Venue 9) until 23 August

Playwright Alex Garcia-Laguer’s intimate, contemporary three-hander The Alchemy of Sadness is a work which winds its way through lots of hot-button workplace issues of the 21st century with confidence and ease.

It begins as high-powered New York marketing company Providence accept a reputation management job for a celebrity chef they represent, who’s in the process of being cancelled for unguarded comments.

White, Ivy League boss Liam (Zachary Story) brings Thiago (Oscar Fabela), a working class Hispanic man who’s reached his position on merit, in on the job, and the pair’s worldviews are exposed as they debate whether their client should adopt a position of humility and contrition (Thiago’s view) or just bluff it out and let his acknowledged genius carry him through (Liam’s).

Eating at his restaurant, says Liam, “is like being inside Michaelangelo's David as it's sculpted around you,” a line which cuts through the dry formality of the setting.

The chef’s misdemeanours quickly take a back seat to the sexual tension between Liam and Thiago after a shared moment at an office party, but the suspicion grows that Liam is manipulating Thiago’s feelings for his own professional ends.

Kristen Tarrago adds depth and texture to a thoughtful, analytical piece, both as a work colleague Thiago confides in and a corporate lawyer who outlines his limited options.

David Pollock

Buttalk ★★★

C Arts / C Venues/ C Aurora (Venue 6) until 24 August

Sayit Once provides a surprisingly profound story of culture shock, identity and belonging in Buttalk, an absurdist play that follows Klein and Calvin, two anthropomorphic butt cheeks belonging to an international drama student who has moved from China to the UK.

Philosophical and existential musings encapsulate their joint relationship with acting and their emergent identity as an actor (including but not limited to Bible quotes such as “suffering cannot be compared,” quotes from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and excerpts from books by Simone de Beauvoir).

This is furthered by the introduction of puppets, representing their father (here, a butt wearing wire-framed glasses), and a smaller, childlike puppet to represent themselves.

Lines such as “We’re butt cheeks, not wrecking balls!” and “Who the f**k invented the Meal Deal?” merge randomly with recreated scenes from the film Twilight. In terms of design, a strip of cloth with holes functions as underpants, dividing the cheeks at intervals, granting them some much needed space.

This cloth also doubles as a screen, giving the piece a distressed Punch and Judy aesthetic.

Despite appearances – particularly, the episodic farts and diarrhoea simulated using space hoppers – Buttalk proves itself as a wild yet uplifting meditation on intimacy, closeness and codependency.

Josephine Balfour-Oatts

Going Soft ★★★

Underbelly Cowgate Venue 61 Until 24 August

Having opened Bar L, Scotland’s first prison-themed cocktail bar, James (Jack Byrne) and Martin (LJ Aitken) hope to up the ante by adding Scotland’s first adult-only soft play: “The only place that’s soft on crime”.

In this comedy, written by Byrne, we find them presenting their business plan to a potential investor. What can possibly go wrong?

Lots of things, it turns out. In fact, one gets the sense that Byrne is working hard in the writing to keep the catastrophes coming, until the pair’s working relationship is put under unbearable strain.

Glasgow-based Action Theatre Scotland, who made their Fringe debut last year with Alba, are committed to foregrounding working-class Scottish voices which are rare on the Fringe, and very welcome. But this play feels uneven, ricocheting between moments of pure daftness and attempts to address heavier topics such as toxic masculinity.

While Byrne and Aitken have good comic timing, not all the gags are of equal quality. There is a complicated sub-plot about a letter which never quite delivers the necessary tension, and a tendency to believe that the energy on stage can be maintained by speaking as loudly as possible all the time.

Susan Mansfield

A Small Town Northern Tale ★★★

Underbelly Cowgate Venue 61 Until 24 August

Nathan Jonathan’s Fringe debut as an actor and writer draws on his own experience of growing up as a mixed-race kid in a small, northern and very white town.

When David’s mother takes her sons up north to escape their violent father, David faces endemic racism and bullying both in and out of school, including a random driver who shouts at him to “go back where he came from”. He wishes he could.

As well as a portrait of a town “where even the pigeons look like they’ve given up”, this coming-of-age story is sprinkled with nostalgia for the early noughties: MSN chat rooms, dial-up internet, manual texting on Nokia phones. When David takes his mum’s advice and fights back against the bullies, the consequences go far beyond what anyone expects.

Jonathan is a dynamic performer, particularly physically, though he does have a tendency to rattle through the lines a little too fast. And this is a very likeable, if somewhat predictable, story about overcoming difficulties, finding out who you are and pursuing your dreams.

The trouble is, with such common themes, there is little make it stand out from other, similar “small town tales”.

Susan Mansfield

Prudence Play ★★

Greenside @ Riddles Court (Venue 16) until 23 August

Writer/performer Caroline Dunn makes an entrance all right, in a nun’s wimple and sequinned dress, tap-dancing to Britney Spears’ Gimme More (the “it’s Britney, bitch!” one).

Although the rest of her solo play is well-conceived and performed, it doesn’t quite live up to this initial hype, telling of a Fleabag-obsessed young nun named Prudence who begins to have feelings for her glamorous and vacuous fellow sister Anne Margaret, played by Dunn holding up a Britney-in-a-wimple mask.

Dunn’s monologue storytelling is compelling and the themes of men controlling women’s sexual desires is timely, but the script’s emotional weight and humour feel undercooked, like a work-in-progress that isn’t quite there yet.

David Pollock

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