Edinburgh Fringe theatre reviews – Man: A One Woman Show | Polishing Shakespeare | Plotters | Doped | Stuffed

MAN: A One Woman Show ★★★★

Underbelly Bristo Square (Venue 302) until 25 August

Toxic masculinity - and its profound impact on the lives of those it touches - is a major theme on this year’s Fringe; but nowhere will you see it analysed and expressed more succinctly than in this fine 55-minute solo show by Emma Taylor, running briefly at the Underbelly in Bristol Square.

MAN: A One Woman Show offers a brief theatrical autobiography of a woman raised by an aggressively macho father, and a mother who blatantly favours her son over her daughter; and subjected throughout her life to crushing assumptions about what a woman can and cannot do, from becoming a teenage Hell’s Angel - rider, not passenger - to playing certain roles in theatre.

Taylor’s style, in this show, is boldly abstract, involving empowering and rebalancing forms of movement as well as spoken language, and constantly switching between time-frames, characters and narrative strands.

Yet her impressive control over the material, and the sheer quality and intensity of her performance across half a dozen roles, ensure that we never lose track of the underlying story she tells; one of a woman gradually finding herself, and her voice in the world, despite a thousand patriarchal pressures that might have prevented her from doing any such thing.

Joyce McMillan

Polishing Shakespeare ★★★

Plotters ★★★

Both at Assembly Rooms (Venue 20) util 25 August

If you fancy an hour (or two) of fast-talking New York satire and irony, presented with an old-school professional flourish, then Twilight Theatre’s twin world premieres - playing in the beer garden Front Room at the Assembly Rooms - may well be the shows for you.

Brian Dykstra’s Polishing Shakespeare is a satire on the perils of arts funding in an age, and a culture, where private philanthropy “trumps” public subsidy. A Trump-like billionaire (but a little sharper of wit, and smoother of manner) wants to pay a respected theatre company large amounts of cash to get Shakespeare rewritten in words that everyone can understand; the play perhaps reflects a similar offer made to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival back in 2015.

The theatre boss is keen, but needs to bring on board a gifted young writer who is willing to do the job. Cue an intense hour of three-way debate about the ethics of dumbing down Shakespeare, the importance of poetry and beauty in art and theatre, and the irritating truth - at least so far as global plutocrats are concerned - that artists retain a mysterious ability to imagine and reinvent their way out of apparently impossible situations, penury and chronic insecurity notwithstanding.

“Everything they touch, they degrade,” says the theatre director of the billionaire class, as the play draws to an end; and with playwright Brian Dykstra, Kate Levy and Kate Siahaan-Rigg all in fine form as plutocrat, director and student, Polishing Shakespeare delivers that message briskly and wittily, in a world where the truth of it seems more evident, every day.

Brian Parks’s Plotters, from the same company, abandons the world of contemporary satire for a delightfully well-written piece of New York gothic hokum, like Arsenic And Old Lace with a touch of The Godfather. Some time in the late 19th century, a team of three grave robbers set about raiding the largest and most elegant tomb in a New York cemetery; while wrestling with demons of fear and superstition, and the deadly attractions of Gin Lane.

The tale that ensues is silly enough, if truth be told. As always with Brian Parks, though, there is both quick-fire wit and dream-like poetry along the way, as he delves into the history and the soul of the city he loves, and comes up with a quirky and gleaming little artefact of a comedy, as black as a piece of jet jewellery at a funeral-goer’s throat.

Joyce McMillan

Doped ★★★★

Hill Street Theatre (Venue 41) until 25 August

Tinny and Faolan share a flat somewhere in urban Scotland, and while neither are strangers to taking drugs, it’s Tinny (Sam Stuart Fraser) who fully buys into the turned-on, dropped-out lifestyle of sitting around the house all day skinning up joints. Faolan (Kieran Lee-Hamilton) has a job and a preference for alcohol, and he looks down his nose as Tinny’s waster lifestyle, even as he indulges in the fringes of it.

Into this life of slow-motion chaos drops their dealer Buzz (Xander Cowan), a whirlwind of angry paranoia who gets his information from Alex Jones and Joe Rogan, and who believes there’s a nasty conspiracy at the heart of society and the only way he and his pals can deal with it is by storming the Houses of Parliament. With a stack of drug cash in his dad’s shed and a fierce love of the mind-altering potential of LSD, Buzz is also a recovering alcoholic whose wild-eyed, borderline violent persona covers up his deep need for companionship and connection, not least from his mismatched customers.

Navel-gazing drug comedies have been old hat since Trainspotting was released, but don’t let the fact that Doped (produced by West Lothian-based theatre charity Reconnect Theatres) comes with an all-male ensemble and a heavy dose of drug-related humour put you off. Fraser and Sean Fullwood’s script, as directed for maximum comic energy by Pete Sneddon, is extremely funny, with blunt, sarcastic, clever punchlines flying here and there, potentially a fresh new shared voice in a lineage of Scots situation comedy writers which includes Ian Pattison and Kiernan and Hemphill.

Yet the drugs are largely just plot-driving window-dressing, and as outlandishly fierce as Buzz is, Fraser and Fullwood’s treatment of him also finds a lot of room for sympathy. It’s a play which understands that whether a young man loses themselves in a cloud of dope smoke or a messy trap of conspiratorial thinking, these are often surrogate activities for otherwise feeling dismissed and worthless in society.

David Pollock

Stuffed ★★★

Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33) until 26 August

Almost alone on the year’s Fringe, Ugly Bucket Theatre of Liverpool’s latest show Stuffed tackles the scandal of hunger in the UK, in the third decade of the 21st century. Based on verbatim interviews with food bank volunteers (which we both hear, and see as projected text), the show is devised by the company, and directed by Grace Gallagher and Rachael Smart; and its method, roughly speaking, is to play short sequences from the interviews, and to illustrate them in the most vivid and obvious way possible, via half-jokey visual images and interludes often repeated at length, usually at ear-splitting volume.

The result is a raging hot mess of a show, in which the cast run around for an hour in firefighters’ uniforms because one of the interviewees refers to their food bank effort as “firefighting”. There’s a five-minute fight sequence between two actors playing farmyard birds, to illustrate the idea that the working class has been left “fighting over scraps that fall from the table”; and a long elaborate satire in which a series of politicians attempt to put a “sticking plaster” on the belly of a man whose guts are hanging out.

There’s clowning, and a deft use of British Sign Language. There are speeches sung or shouted from the top of a ladder, smoke, explosions, and deafening music, all d-j’d live on stage. And at the end, there’s a cumulative roar of rage about how all this has been done deliberately, to keep the once-proud British working class in its place; all delivered by a young, passionate company who, in their furious need to be heard, shout so loudly, and perform so frantically, that their message is almost drowned out by their own thundering barrage of illustrative sound and fury.

Joyce McMillan