Edinburgh Fringe theatre reviews: The Last Audition | Lear's Fool | Julius Caesar Variety Show and more

The Last Audition ★ ★ ★ ★

theSpace on the Mile (Venue 39) until 29 August

Lear's Fool ★ ★ ★

Greenside @ George Street (Venue 236) until 22 August

JULIUS CAESAR VARIETY SHOW ★ ★ ★ ★

Summerhall (Venue 26) until 24 August

Macbeth: Blood and Bluegrass ★ ★ ★

theSpace @ Surgeons' Hall (Venue 53) until 29 August

Mother, Maiden and Crone ★ ★ ★ ★

Bedlam Theatre (Venue 49) until 30 August

A Shakespeare play at the Edinburgh Festival: famed for being the place where all the Americans go. And if you want to see a classic example of a Shakespearian actor in full flow, you can’t get much better that Paul Shearman, who is also American, in his one-man King Lear adaptation, The Last Audition. In a chapel of “fools and kings”, he gives a moving performance, as an actor called Sebastian, with all the bittersweet emotions that come from taking on a role that is known for being both the pinnacle of an actor’s career but, with its depiction of aging Lear descending into madness and death, also signifies its inevitable end.

It begins with a masterclass in Shakespeare’s tricks, which will prove useful if going to see any others, in which Shearman expertly smooths the gaps between the play’s original dialogue and his own, so that he and we can see what it tells us about ourselves – one of the key points of many modern-day reworkings. The trick is to speak the lines like they’re real, he says. “You pretend I’m Lear; I pretend you believe it.” It’s very successful.

But Sebastian’s tragedy is that he’s trying to do a perfect Lear in order to avoid getting “locked up” in a home for senior actors, but the only place Lear is heading is his infamous collapse. Underneath the light of the ghost lamp, looming sadness builds before the crown falls and, with a shepherd’s pie in hand, his loving daughter Emily, a modern-day Cordelia, becomes the new ruler of the kingdom.

By the end, he’s in tears and we’re in tears, before a final “uplifting thought” on staying active, using our brains and doing things like following a dream to put on this show, as he’s done, written specially for Edinburgh – the culmination of what sounds like a trully Shakespearian journey.

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Also using Shakespeare’s words to say something new through the original play is Lear's Fool, which focuses on the friendship between the King and his Fool, playfully played by Jill Riddiford. Set in a part of the story that occurs off-stage in the original, with Lear and Cordelia (Finlay McLean and Kirsty McDuff) joining the Fool in jail, it imagines a mini tragedy inside the more familiar one of the original and does what may seem the impossible – makes the story of King Lear even more sad.

After setting up the key points about the Fool, in that he’s not really a fool, writer/adapter David Henry Wilson delves deeper into the tragedy of a brave and outspoken individual, wiser than all others, who, instead of being a leader, is doomed to be seen as lesser. It’s a familiar tale and, like a lot of Shakespeare, one that can be still seen today, both on stage and in the world the stage reflects.

Through a rich mix of songs and comic and poetic dialogue that integrates with the original, an inevitable but shocking end arrives via a previously unseen sequence that fully reveals the Fool’s fate.

While ascending star Joy Nesbitt’s role as the writer and director of JULIUS CAESAR VARIETY SHOW is well advertised, it requires some digging to find out the names of the cast – Daniel Mahon, Loré Adewusi and Pattie Maguire – which is ironic for a play that is partly about the erasure of actors’ identities.

However, it’s also about power: that of a director with “unorthodox methods”, played by Ultan Pringle. A softly spoken sadist who knows everyone’s pronouns but nothing about how to create a productive, let alone safe, space, it’s a tragedy inside a comedy, with Nesbitt the truth-telling ‘fool’ behind the Director’s empty words championing “immigrants” and “working class people” while simultaneously undermining a cast selected to be racially and sexually diverse.

However, when the Director asks Sydney to do a Nigerian accent and Sydney asks “why?” the mood changes – and so begins a masterclass in appropriating victimhood to silence those who may have experienced it, underscored by an equally out of kilter keyboardist (Conrad Jones Brangan). As stage violence becomes real violence, pertinent questions dissolve into the final bloodbath, which Nesbitt could better manage. But elsewhere the play successfully nails powerful people – in acting and beyond – whose ethics are more aligned to their egos than their actions, and who deflect criticism with cries for self-care.

The macabre becomes melodious in Macbeth: Blood and Bluegrass, where the classic Scottish Play is given an American twist with the audience whooping, cheering and singing along to songs by Mumford and Sons, Dolly Parton and The Steeldrivers, accompanied by something that both Scottish folk and American pop have in common: the rhythmic thud of a drum.

The unfussy gender-blind casting, with a powerful performance from the company’s artistic director Laura Irish, as Macbeth, adds an extra dimension to what becomes a domestic dinner party, with Ollie Howlett’s “Lady” of the house neutered as a long-suffering husband. With Scottish hospitality and its warrior queen legends as key to the plot as daggers and blood, plus a bit of help from the fascinatingly named Weird Brothers, this wife-husband duo flit with ease between the façade of hosts and relish of killers. And as this Macbeth takes her crown, it’s hard not to think of other flame-haired warrior queens of the time: Mary and Elizabeth.

READ MORE: 'It's more important than ever.' The enduring influence of Angels in America

In Mother, Maiden and Crone, cross-dressing, diamante-dealing party people run the ‘McBooth’ of the ‘McBar’ in Club Limbo – an old-school Edinburgh nightime destination where a gender swap isn’t a twist on an existing norm; it is the norm. In this “loose adaptation” of Macbeth, the three witches are a middle-aged drag queen, an ageing DJ into leather, and a sultry twink. “I’m bored,” says their drunken ‘gatekeeper’ as they wander around the audience. But not for long, as McBride is in da house with her Maids of (Dis)Honour, led by the “Glamasaurus Rex” (Mc)Duffy, and they’re ready to get hammered.

Conjuring up the world of the club from the dance floor to the stage of Pound, the rival club across the road (where drag queens go to die drowning in lube), this is a critique of queer made cool made commercial through the consumerist capitalist appropriation of gay culture by people who like the glitter but without the politics. While the storytelling, like Duffy’s pants, could be tightened up at times, this highly creative interpretation of one of Shakespeare’s stories – which charts the passing of time through the changing of fabulous outfits – shows just how relevant, alive and versatile the writing is today, nearly half a millennium after it was first written.

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