Fringe theatre review: BABYFLEAREINDEERBAG | David and Katie Get Re-Married + more

Summerhall (Venue 26) until 25 August

There’s no more obvious sign that something has become too unwieldy to function than when it begins to eat itself. Take, for example, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, in which Bringing Shows To the Fringe seems to have become its own increasingly prevalent genre: a metatextual howl against the appalling labour conditions and precarious funding landscape in which the artists who make the festival are forced to work.

Enter Fringe veteran Hannah Maxwell, whose latest show – the wryly titled BABYFLEAREINDEERBAG – deconstructs the cruel optimism of making art within a system which allows a select few to skyrocket to success and everyone else to flounder. Unfolding as a satirically corporate and thoroughly unhinged focus group, audience members are given name tag stickers and large post-it notes and encouraged to give feedback throughout the show, as Maxwell workshops three new ideas that she hopes – somewhat hopelessly – might be her long-awaited breakthrough.

Maxwell’s self-deprecating wit is a fizzy delight, but it cleverly masks a spiral of self-doubt and criticism that begins to creep into the show, as feedback options provided on her middle-management-style PowerPoint go from the mildly constructive to the outright hostile. Is it possible, BABYFLEAREINDEERBAG asks, to maintain a sense of self-belief as an artist amidst the structural disinterest of a failing arts landscape, and the siren call of the Autobiographical Show Industrial Complex that defines the Fringe’s few successes? What does it do to a person to continually have to sell themselves, particularly when no one seems to want to buy? Almost certainly nothing good, but watching Maxwell convey this through her deft and hilarious manipulation of genre and media is an (admittedly somewhat guilt-ridden) giddy ride. The Fringe may be eating itself but BABYFLEAREINDEERBAG is a compellingly delicious refusal to beg for a seat at the table.

Anahit Behrooz

David and Katie Get Re-Married ★★★

Friesian at Underbelly, Bristo Square (Venue 302) until 24 August

David and Katie are star-crossed haters in this toe-curling caricature of a millennial couple remarrying after a tempestuous dating history. The decision is painfully questionable from the moment they set foot on stage, smothering each other in cloying affection. Each saccharine declaration of “I love you” and therapy speak affirmations function as flimsy sticking plasters over cavernous emotional wounds.

The audience are guests at their wedding, taken through their dating history, chance meeting at a college party to their first wedding, breakups, getting back together, all flecked by vinegary arguments and explosive emotions.

It’s a wittily observed send-up of millennial adults lacking in as much emotional intelligence as self-awareness, condemned to circle the same doomed cycle of breakup and reunion. Between sparky songs about failed sex experiments and volleys of petty insults, a grim realisation creeps in: they are hopelessly co-dependent, and neither are capable of escaping the other’s gravitational pull.

The comedy is broad, the tone often hyper-silly. Though it runs out of steam towards the final moments, there’s a tragic edge to the whole thing, a sense that beneath the caricature lies a sadly recognisable truth about love, that letting go is harder than it looks.

Alexander Cohen

King ★★★

Former Gents Locker Room at Summerhall (Venue 26) until 25 August

In King, socially anxious Yen discovers an unexpected liberation through drag performance. She reinvents herself as “Sterling da Silva”, a swaggering crypto-bro parody so pitch-perfect you can smell the protein powder. What starts as a private joke metastasises into a second life, one in which Yen is liberated from patriarchal expectations pinned on her by a clueless boyfriend.

But there are limits to liberation. A rocky relationship with her newfound community of drag queens raises awkward questions about the politics of performance, community boundaries and the thin line between escape and appropriation, fissures which creep into Yen’s personal life.

The satire bites hardest when it skewers the smug banter and bravado of finance bro culture. Performer Jo Tan switches deftly between Yen’s jittery awkwardness and Sterling’s preening machismo. Her elastic performance is the show’s real engine. When it widens its lens to gender roles in modern Singapore, the focus blurs and the sharp commentary dulls: the final moments feels more like tidy conclusion than an organic finale.

The momentum rarely sags under Irfan Kasban’s brisk direction. King isn’t quite a knockout, but it lands its hits with the satisfying thud.

Alexander Cohen

Lovett ★★★

Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33) until 25 August

In most iterations of the Sweeney Todd story, Mrs Lovett plays second fiddle – or should that be second razor? – to the demon barber of Fleet Street. In this one-woman play written and performed by Lucy Roslyn, though, Nelly takes centre stage.

The hour-long monologue begins with Roslyn’s Nelly – real name Eleanor – solemnly sharpening a knife on a butcher’s block and explaining the finer points of carving up a carcass. From there, she slowly tells the dark and desperate story of her life.

We hear about an early encounter with a beached whale on the banks of the Thames; how Nelly’s French mother sold her body after the death of her husband; how Nelly found security in her marriage to a German businessman; and how her life was injected with erotic excitement when she met a charming young barber called Mr Todd.

Roslyn plays Nelly with a steely glint in her eye and a sly smile, sometimes sliding into other characters – a one-eyed prostitute, an abusive priest – as her story unfolds. She evokes the grittiness and griminess of nineteenth-century London well, too.

It takes a long time for the meat of this monologue to arrive – a lot of religious imagery and animal metaphors get in the way of the narrative – but it is delicious when it does.

Fergus Morgan

How To Kill Your Landlord ★★

Bedlam Theatre (Venue 49) until 25 August

There’s a 1980s punk spirit and a 2020s disclaimer (don’t really kill your landlord) in this surreal comedy in which a group of 20-something tenants decide that the only way to get their skiing, scheming landlord out of their lives and crumbling flat is to kill him.

Within the slapstick is a serious message about housing inequality between the generations in a piece that has the lively tone of an early evening BBC comedy with more big energy than laughable jokes. The younger performers could bring more nuance to their roles – an online yoga teacher, crypto trading tech bro and stressed city worker – in a plot with more variation, but the intentions are strong.

Sally Stott

The Cyclops ★★

theSpace @ Symposium Hall (Venue 43) until 23 August

There’s some great free-flowing comic banter from the talented Scottish cast in this rethinking of the Greek legend, which is transported to a pub get-together where the aftereffects of a modern-day tragedy are slowly revealed.

Anyone looking for a more literal depiction of the single-eyed giant from Odysseus might be confused, but a story that celebrates friendship and raises awareness of men’s mental health offers some pertinent observations on what’s hidden behind acerbic put-downs and pints of beer. A structure that is predominantly a single pub conversation struggles to sustain an hour-long play, but the good energy and intentions help to keep the ship afloat.

Sally Stott

Will You Be Praying the Entire Flight? ★★★

theSpace @ Niddry St (Venue 9) until 16 August

This is a likeable character comedy two-hander, in which two young Jewish women with very different lives and attitudes meet on a plane to London and discover that they have more in common than it at first seems. One is ultra-orthodox, Hasidic and suffering from a severe case of flight sickness. The other, horrified, is a secular software developer, more at home in her pyjamas and oversized headphones.

Playwright Gili Malinsky’s tight script is full of the dry, wry dialogue that, in its comic brevity, seems to be referencing the world of Jim Henson and not just on the latter character’s Animal-themed T-shirt. It’s a dry mood that is accentuated by Rachel Ravel and Marissa Ruben’s stripped back, understated delivery, in which they stare straight ahead under S. Dylan Zwickel’s similarly punchy direction attended by Madeline Rose Parks’ socially inept air hostess.

The conversation covers work, relationships, region and non-religion and, briefly, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, although there’s a clear gap in this part of the conversation – that of a Palestinian voice, which feels particularly absent at a time when unfathomable horrors are being carried out in the region. But within the limited scope of a simple story of two very different Jewish woman meeting on a plane, it’s calling for understanding over conflict and finding the places that unify rather than divide.

Sally Stott

Dream with me... ★★

Greenside @ George Street (Venue 236) until 16 August

There’s a toddler in the audience who’s loving this bold and experimental shape-shifting, self-referential, relatively late-night show about a man’s metamorphosis-filled dreams featuring his father, his former athletics coach, a goblin, a pigeon and a fish.

It’s deliberately esoteric and, with writer/performer Samuel Koppel’s jagged movements intercut with his monologues, the discombobulating feeling of travelling through the depths of the subconscious in sleep is well evoked.

Unless you’re the aforementioned toddler, the difficultly is in sustaining this for an hour-long place. “I hope it’s not too random, too complicated,” he says. It’s not, but it wouldn’t suffer from a bit more structure for the adults.

Sally Stott