Edinburgh Fringe theatre reviews: The Bridge | The Last Days of Trump | How to Write a Novel (or Not) + more

The Bridge ★★★★

Assembly Roxy (Venue 139) until 16 August

Anyone who enjoyed last year’s breakout Fringe hit The Horse of Jenin will love The Bridge, also by Palestinian playwright, performer and stand-up comedian Alaa Shehada. Although this solo production is a little less in-your-face, less cruising on madcap energy, it again presents a Palestinian slice of life with warmth, character and humour, while still outlining the shocking realities of life in the West Bank.

Here Shehada (if the piece isn’t at least semi-autobiographical, it feels like it is) recounts a cross-border visit from the West Bank to Jordan, to pay family a visit. He’s been tasked by his mother with delivering her sister a yellow drum of the family’s finest olive oil – the only prop Shehada uses – and a bunch of assorted biscuits and flip-flops demanded by his uncle.

To get there he has to journey on a rickety, overcrowded bus over what the Palestinians call the Karama Bridge, also known to the Jordanians as the King Hussein Bridge and the Israelis as the Allenby Bridge, the latter name applied by the colonial British when it was built in 1919. Each country has a checkpoint along the way, so a journey of 180 metres takes twelve hours. The militarised Israeli checkpoint creates the most fear, and although thousands wait every day to go over for weddings, funerals, family visits or study, the Israelis regularly close the crossing without notice.

Masterfully, Shehada communicates precarity and tension, but also plenty of humour, lapsing into funny skits about the elderly lady sleeping next to him who nevertheless keeps stealing his air-con, or the leering cigarette smuggler who says the best way to carry his cargo across the border is to enlist an unsuspecting European or American, because they have “thee white guilt”. While The Bridge deftly details a very specific place and situation, it also outlines the symptoms of a wider border anxiety in our world. David Pollock

The Last Days of Trump (A Liberal Fantasy) ★★★★

C ARTS | C venues | C aurora (Venue 6) until 16 August

It starts off like many Donald Trump impersonations over the years: the drooling voice, the empty phrases, the deaden lumpiness. Only this time, as played by Connor Cunningham, there’s a touch of Hannibal Lecter as he sits with eyes hidden under the shadow of his ‘Keep America Great’ hat, clinging on to the soft-toy guerilla in which he sees so much of himself.

But it’s also 2028 and, like Lecter, an end-of-days melancholy haunts this fading has-been – a sinister-sad baby at risk of eliciting the sympathy that fictional characterisations like this often support. That is, until a “library without books”, which his aid Morgan (Carly McCann) has organised to keep him occupied, starts to grow alongside what looks like an alarming (re)ascent to evermore power.

Behind the wall of American flags, talented Pittsburgh-based playwright Eoin Carney feels less interested in churning out another Trump caricature, rather a critique of the sycophants and suck-ups – including the seemingly liberal librarian Carla (Kitty Ball) – who knowingly enable authoritarian monsters, of the left and the right, to further their own interests and who, without these people’s support, would be much less.

With Vietnam veteran General Reese (John Smeathers) reporting from the Oval Office and then the trenches with equal aplomb, Carney’s writing does something that many other Trump satirists don’t: it draws a connection between infantile, nonsensical behaviour and its threat to freedom. A depiction of a gradual shift from democracy to autocracy is the most original aspect of the play but also the most hastily delivered – with the US’s well-established rejection of communism quickly glossed over.

A braver exploration of dictatorships and their origins, on the left and right – and those who would gleefully support them in practice while claiming to do otherwise in principle – feels like it’s waiting to burst out of this nevertheless enjoyable and, at its best, surprising and provocative farce. Sally Stott

How to Write a Novel (or Not) ★★★

theSpace @ Surgeons’ Hall (Venue 53) until 15 August

Every year the Fringe plays host to a few remarkable people who’ve come simply in order to tell their own life stories. Marie-Louise Mills is one of these, a lady of a certain age who has lived a remarkable life.

After a childhood on Park Avenue, New York, she has been a champion equestrian, an art historian, a fashion director, a journalist, an artist. She moved to Rome on a whim with her two young children, was on a jet hijacked in Bangkok in 1982, and now lives in Edinburgh.

It’s a story of fragments; in fact it’s an illustration of just how difficult it is to turn a life into a story. Life is messier than fiction, especially when you reinvent yourself more than once, which is perhaps why the “novel” of the title has proved hard to write.

Mills reads from her script and there is a general vagueness around dates, which might be deliberate, but she has some excellent turns of phrase and her confidence grows as her tale gets more gripping. Really, it’s a pleasure to spend 40 minutes in the company of a woman with so many stories to tell and the guts to get up and tell them at the Fringe. Susan Mansfield

Off Script ★★★

Paradise in the Vault (Venue 29) until 14 August

Anna is a Polish-born journalist working in a London television news room, but it’s getting harder to ignore the casual racism she encounters both among her colleagues and on the street. Meanwhile, when she covers right-wing anti-immigration protests, she notices subtle changes made to her scripts: “undocument” immigrants has become “illegal”, “angry men” has turned into “concerned residents”. One day, when the combination of personal and political pressure becomes overwhelming, Anna goes “off script”.

Joanna Orlowska’s first piece of theatre, in which she also performs, explores a powerful flashpoint, and a timely one. Directed by Grace Evangeline Holme, she ably performs the character of Anna, a wife and mother who has worked hard to lose her Polish accent but is left pondering the meaning of “home”.

The shift from realism into the world of Greek myth is ambitious, if not entirely successful, and, after a spacious first half in which the scenario is laid down, the ending feels too abrupt. However, the combination of promising writing and a live and important subject is enough to single out Orlowska as a name to watch out for in the future. Susan Mansfield

READ MORE: Signing the times: Deaf artists centre stage at Edinburgh festivals

The Love Talker ★★★

Greenside @ Riddles Court (Venue 16) until 14 August

Deborah Pryor’s lyrical slice of Appalachian gothic is neatly presented in this free show from Pellissippi State Theatre. Hailing from Knoxville, Tennessee, the company lean into the accents and nicely handle dialogue that could easily come off as cornpone — although some of the physical aspects feel somewhat hesitant.

Orphaned sisters Gowdie and Bun live in a secluded cabin in the woods after the death of their mother. Times are hard — and strange; the cows’ milk is drying up and Gowdie discovers a mysterious house in the woods after straying from the path. Filled with unusual pictures of men and women, the house sparks a fairytale frisson of sexual anxiety after Bun warns her younger sister of the Love Talker — a mythic Pan-like figure.

Director Grechen Lynne Wingerter carefully treads a line between the plausible and the fantastical, successfully maintaining a degree of ambiguity. The Love Talker could well be merely a shabby lecher or a supernatural incubus responsible for the death of the girls’ mother. By employing cast members as doors and furniture, Wagner makes everything feel at least a little askew, which adds to the overall feeling of watching a world where the regular rules don’t apply. As the Love Talker himself taunts the girls: “there’s all kinda possibilities!” Rory Ford

The Man Who Said Too Much ★★

theSpace @ Surgeons’ Hall (Venue 53) until 15 August

A film noir parody about a private eye who can’t stop blurting out his inner monologue might make for a funny five minute sketch but while this piece by Eoin Carney tries hard, it inevitably outstays its welcome. It’s a series of vignettes in search of a story and while its cast are game — and the accents are decent — our endlessly embarrassed protagonist’s shtick gets monotonous rather than building on the joke. It’s never as fast or funny as it needs to be, but the period costumes are serviceable and it does reach an amiable conclusion. Rory Ford

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