Edinburgh Fringe theatre reviews: Niusia | In The Land Of Eagles | Troubled | Amazons | LEI-LDN | Mind How You Go

THEATRE

Niusia ★★★★

Summerhall (Venue 26) until 24 August

In The Land Of Eagles ★★★★

Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33) until 25 August

Troubled ★★★★

Summerhall (Venue 26) until 25 August

Amazons ★★★

Summerhall (Venue 26) until 25 August.

LEI-LDN ★★★

Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33) until 25 August

Mind How You Go ★★★

Zoo Playground (Venue 186) until 24 August

IN A WORLD IN TURMOIL, it’s perhaps not surprising that the 2025 Fringe is full of young women seeking to reconnect with the past traumas and disruptions experienced by their own families; and none more eloquently than Australian writer and performer Beth Paterson, in her solo show Niusia, at Summerhall.

Beth’s story revolves around her Jewish grandmother Niusia, whom she only knows, in her teens and childhood, as a bad-tempered and permanently angry old lady given to spiteful comments about her own offspring.

Niusia loves Beth’s singing voice, though, when she sings romantic numbers from the mid 20th century, or old Jewish songs; and Beth gradually begins to understand that her grandmother is a holocaust survivor, a woman from the Warsaw ghetto who worked at the notorious hospital in Auschwitz under Josef Mengele, and who somehow survived to begin a new life in Australia, as a formidable businesswoman, mother and grandmother.

On a stage full of family books and albums, Beth begins - over an hour - to unweave her grandmother’s story, and to understand its massive impact on her mother, and then on herself. Bath Paterson is a superbly poised and engaging performer, always sharply focussed on the story, and letting her own emotions emerge from the narrative, on a tide of sharp intelligence and humour. And by the end, she seems almost to blaze with pride in her inheritance, as part of this line of mighty female survivors; not because she doesn’t understand the tragedies violent displacement currently shaking our world, but precisely because she does understand the human meaning of those crises, more clearly than ever before.

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And exactly the same pattern of family silence breached, and greater understanding and compassion flowing through the cracks, helps shape Alex Reynolds’s In The Land Of Eagles, at the Pleasance Courtyard. Possessed by the usual teenage need to be “normal” and fit in, Alex loves her Albanian-born grandpa, but takes little interest in his story until she turns 30, and finds that her grandfather’s health is beginning to fail.

He says that he would like to go home, before he dies; and Alex begins to imagine travelling with him on a journey to the Albania of the 2020’s, now free from the terrible dictatorship of Enver Hoxha, but still often reviled in Europe as a source of unwanted migrants.

As she reaches Albania, her writing begins to soar and glow with rich descriptions of the capital, Tirana, and the mountains to the north, home of the magnificent great-grandmother she is told she resembles; and although the story’s ending is a sad one, the sense she creates of a woman immeasurably enriched by this belated reconnection with her grandfather’s roots is deeply moving, and beautiful.

In Suzy Crothers’s Troubled, at Summerhall, the struggle with the past relates not to one figure in the family, but to the whole society in which she grew up, in 1990’s Belfast. With her parents constantly aware of the danger of bombings and shootings in the city, her otherwise carefree childhood - captured in a poignant school picture in the last moments of the show - is haunted by the fear that the world is not a safe or reliable place.

30 years on, we see a woman of 40 or so living and working in London, but still - despite her warm intelligence and humour, and a steady supply of tea and biscuits - wrestling with poor mental health and acute anxiety; and making her way only slowly towards the calmer waters of middle age.

Gael Le Cornec’s Amazons, also at Summerhall, also tells the tale of a London-based writer-performer haunted by history; in her case, a Brazilian and Amazonian heritage that involves black, white and indigenous ancestors. Le Cornec’s story is expressed through a dizzyingly complex show that features projected videos and photographs, live stop-motion video involving tiny clay sculptures, intense dramatic monologues, a chorus of aunties on the telephone, and some dire satirical caricatures of male colonialists down the ages; in a vivid but hugely uneven vision of an inheritance that is vital not only to Le Cornec, but - in the 21st century struggle to save the Amazon - to us all.

The tone is slightly different in Na’keisha Pebody’s LEI-LDN, at the Pleasance Courtyard. The title reflects the journey of rebellious 17 year old Chardaye from her hometown Leicester to London, as she struggles to make sense of her mixed-race English-Jamaican heritage after a major fall-out with her English mother, and is sent to live instead with her Jamaican auntie, in Peckham.

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Full of wild banter and defensive good-time-girl chat, Chardaye’s story can be a shade exhausting, particularly in early scenes packed with incidents, rows, and super-cool references to the current rap scene. Towards the end, though, the show spirals into a deeply moving reflection on Chardaye’s difficult relationship with a white mother long estranged from Chardaye’s Jamaican dad, and therefore, in some ways, from Chardaye herself; and Pebody’s talent as a writer and performer blazes through these scenes, in a raw and sometimes awkward show absolutely packed with promise and potential.

And finally, Glasgow-based folk singer and theatre-maker Michelle Burke’s show Mind How You Go, at Zoo Playground, reflects on her childhood in County Cork with such a light and genially humorous touch that it leaves very little impression, beyond a strong and welcome sense of benign warmth. It does, though, feature four or five beautiful and haunting songs, that probe a little into the emotional undercurrents of her early life; and help this show, like many others on this theme, to reach out beyond the individual story, to the big currents of history that will always shape our lives, whether we choose to connect with them, or not.

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