Edinburgh Fringe theatre reviews: The Burns Project | Elysium | Wild Thing! | Buzz | House Party | Crime of Pass-ee-on
A Burns Supper with a difference is the best among our critics’ latest round-up of theatre shows from across the Fringe
THEATRE
The Burns Project ★★★★
The Georgian House (Venue 343) until 16 August
The trend for site specific Fringe theatre has waned a little in recent years but there’s nothing like landing in some private or privileged space to stimulate the senses before a word has been uttered by any performer. The makers of the Burns Project have their audience from the moment they are escorted up the stairs of The Georgian House, a beautifully preserved period townhouse owned by the National Trust of Scotland, and into an opulent room set for dinner. The title is clinical but their purpose is clear - to find a new way to approach the life, work and legacy of Robert Burns.
This is a Burns Supper with a difference as the Bard is the guest of honour, here to give us a potted but irresistibly lyrical life story carved from the pages of his own writing - poems, love letters, sundry correspondence. Other voices offer different biographical perspectives, with opinions on his writing, politics and affairs drawn from countervailing contemporary reports, the words of friends and lovers and 21st century contributors to the NTS Love Scotland podcast coalescing to address the complexities of his character. Meanwhile, musician Lisa Rigby plays and sings, rising from her corner seat to pace the room like a Greek chorus and siren in one.
The Burns Project cannot really hope to offer new information on such a storied individual but it does bring a fresh, fair and immediate slant with writer and actor James Clements up close and eloquent, delivering Burns’ exquisite language with natural flair, writing notes to the lassies in the room, addressing a model mouse. His magnetic performance is almost overshadowed by the ravishing staging. Props are spirited from under the table, sauceboats and cloches deployed in witty ways. There is a lot to capture in an hour but, under Cora Bissett’s assured direction, The Burns Project feels rich, not rushed.
FIONA SHEPHERD
THEATRE
Elysium ★★★
Gilded Balloon at Appleton Tower (Venue 140) until 24 August
Welcome to Elysium Court, where the sturdy gates keep out undesirables, and perpetual surveillance ensures safety and security for all. But when a newcomer couple of young professionals rip up the astroturf to tend their very own veg, they also unearth the sinister community’s grisly past.
Part old-fashioned folk horror, part musical, part satire on the emptiness of first-world obsessions, Elysium is a sly but rather slight creation, and one that’s quite a bit stronger in build-up and suggestion than it is in ultimate pay-off. But it’s a gleefully entertaining ride in storytelling and song all the same from musical duo Ghouls Aloud. Milly Blue has a brilliant knack for convincing accents and for capturing character in just a glance or a turn of phrase, plus a soaring voice too, and she’s more than ably supported by Jessie Maryon Davies on keyboards. Their characters are horrifyingly believable, and deftly described, though their plot stays somewhat on the simple side. Nonetheless, Elysium’s closing moments take the show in rather an unexpected direction, one that adds shockingly immediate resonances to its apparently safely distant and fictitious story, but which also raises more questions than it answers.
DAVID KETTLE
THEATRE
Wild Thing! ★★★
Summerhall (Venue 26) until 25 August
Is that a delicate skin salamander we see before us? Of course not - it’s Tom Bailey of Mechanimal giving his best imagined impersonation of said amphibian as the audience files into the venue. As different exotic/ridiculous species names flash up on the screen, he has a bash at inhabiting all of them, from white footed sportive lemur to polymorphic robber frog and a few which sound like they could be fantastical creatures from the Star Wars saga, keeping it up for just long enough to remain funny.
Turns out these names to conjure anthropomorphic anarchy with are a tiny fraction of the 48,000 on the newly endangered species list. Somehow Bailey has managed to resist looking up any images of these beasts online. The audience are invited to choose their own spirit animal while Bailey manifests as some pagan witch doctor wrapped in a sheet bearing the list. He has carried this sheet on a long green walking tour to Denmark and has the artful holiday snaps to prove it.
It feels like there might be more to add to enrich the show; instead it ends rather abruptly as this clowning parable on how to steward our planet becomes a prayer for its precious ecosystem.
FIONA SHEPHERD
THEATRE
Buzz ★★★
Assembly Rooms (Venue 20) until 24 August
In Buzz, Trish Lyons details her personal experience of stalking, literally unpacking the adverse psychological impacts she incurred. “Do not enter your home alone,” she was advised by police at the time, after a series of break-ins at her studio where photographs were stolen, lingerie was planted in her underwear drawer, and the intruder gratified himself in her bedroom. Understandably, paranoia set in. She no longer felt comfortable in the presence of men, and sleeplessness, anxiety and suicidality emerged, for which she sought expert support through an admission to an unnamed psychiatric facility.
From a bag, Lyons produces a glass of gin, hair clippers (which she used previously to buzz her head, to be unattractive to men), and a magnifying glass, among other surprising props. She quotes Emily Dickinson, recounting how books made her feel safe when nothing else did. She didn’t need to read them, just be around or surrounded by them, especially when she slept. Regarding books, she quotes the wisdom of her niece: “You can see them, but they can’t see you.” Certainly, Buzz is notable for its attention to language as a form of witness – the very things, Lyons says, that saved her.
JOSEPHINE BALFOUR-OATTS
THEATRE
House Party ★★★
Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 60) until 25 August
“No one has house parties anymore,” says Skip, an aspiring actress and regular at the Job Centre. This, she explains, is because no-one has houses – at least not in Hackney, where she grew up, unless they’re a wealthy hipster. It sounds snappy, but parties clearly can take place in rented London flats. However, this victim mentality is also something that writer Chakira Alin satirises in a script, based on her real life.
There are some killer lines fuelled by anger at the aspirations of sons and daughters of bankers and marketing executives, roaming around East London talking about trips to Cambodia. But the cartoonist characterisation of ‘the rich’ and Skip struggling to get auditions is less interesting than the smart observations on wider housing crisis, gentrification and arts that come through the monologues. If Oscar Wilde had lived in a council house with his mum in 2025, maybe he’d have sounded something like this.
The piece never quite manages to reconcile whether Skip is a voice-of-a-generation revolutionary party planner or a “lazy workshy layout”. Her ambition to buy back her family home sets up a promising storyline that is underdeveloped and concludes with a party that feels hastily planned. “I hate you,” Skip screams a new homeowner, the blame simultaneously misdirected but also entirely understandable.
Sally Stott
THEATRE
Crime of Pass-ee-on ★★
Greenside @ Riddles Court (Venue 16) until 16 August
This Parisian murder-mystery comedy by Valerie Creasy, set in an interrogation room, makes for heavy going due to huge tracts of exposition-heavy dialogue. Credit, however, is due to Lexie Dykes as Detective John-Paul John who, even though saddled with a pencilled-on moustache and outrageous French accent manages to impart some semblance of pace while tasked with grilling three suspects. The cast are fine, even though their characters are thinly sketched, the plot is baroquely convoluted and there’s a good chance that you’ll have forgotten whodunnit half an hour after it ends.
RORY FORD
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