Fringe theatre reviews: Alright Sunshine | Managed Approach | Funny Though

Pleasance Dome (Venue 23) until 24 August

Nicky is an Edinburgh cop who knows the city’s pulse as intimately as her own, the early morning dog walkers, the loitering students, the Meadows at its laziest and its most combustible. She wears the uniform with pride, but the mask it demands has moulded with her skin and seeped into her private life with quietly devastating consequences.

Isla Cowan’s one-woman play brims with an uneasy vigour, peeling Nicky back layer by layer with surgical precision. The structure is deftly non-linear, dropping its clues with care. We learn of a gruff father, “don’t let them think you are weak”, who bequeaths both his dedication to protecting the public and his psychological brittleness. His refusal to show pain transmits itself into a daughter who suppresses her femininity until it ferments into private trauma. Nicky is blind to her own suffering, burying it deep in her work. We can sense that something is going to break.

The narrative drifts into murkier territory, where questions of sexual assault and performing gender take centre stage. Cowan doesn’t sermonise; instead, she lets the weight of Nicky’s unspoken fester accumulate just beneath the surface. In the shadow of Sarah Everard’s murder, and the national conversation it ignited about women’s safety, the play finds an uncomfortable resonance.

Molly Geddes’ performance is perfectly pitched. With muscles knotted and a gaze that flickers between kind warmth and menace, it’s the kind of performance where you can’t tell if she’s about to put a comforting arm around you or close a hand around your throat.

Alexander Cohen

Managed Approach ★★★

Gilded Balloon Patter House (Venue 24) until 24 August

In 2014, Leeds introduced a localised trial of legalised prostitution in its inner-city Holbeck district - the euphemistically named ‘managed approach’ referenced in the title of this powerful new play from the city’s Open Aire Theatre. Mixing together verbatim accounts from some of Holbeck’s sex workers with a written story of a hard-partying teenager and her worried mother, it attempts to place the project within its sombre historical context - Holbeck was among the areas where ‘Yorkshire ripper’ Peter Sutcliffe carried out his killings - as well as examining the scheme’s impacts, both positive and negative, on both Holbeck residents and sex workers.

And it’s Managed Approach’s very ambition that somewhat lets the show down, as its various strands - compelling though they are - are left largely unwoven, and connections and contrasts remain implicit rather than being spelt out. The mix of real-life and made-up material, too, leaves a slightly unsettled feeling, as though the written storyline of mother and daughter is simply there to illustrate and amplify some of the verbatim text’s stronger, more authentic themes. Performances are strong and focused - particularly in the verbatim sections - and direction is slick and pacey. But Managed Approach may simply have set its ambitions too high, with the result that too many themes and ideas are raised for the show to deal with them all convincingly.

David Kettle

Funny Though ★★★

Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33) until 25 August

The subject matter is familiar territory: untangling love from sex, the black void that is dating in London, and the bittersweet business of trying to be an adult in your twenties. Clare Noy doesn’t reinvent the wheel with her standup show, but she has a sparky charm that keeps it turning.

An alumna of The Play That Goes Wrong, Noy carries even the unrefined moments with poise and confidence. The easy jabs at Clapham finance bros might be overplayed, but she delivers them with enough bite to draw laughs. Meditations of the perils of dirty talk, and weaponising declarations of love are handled with sharp timing.

There’s a thread about bisexuality and its relationship within the queer community, though it’s more gestured at than unpacked. The show’s one real surprise is a dark twist that comes out of nowhere — a sharp tonal swerve that pulls the show off track before she pulls it back.

Self-aware but not especially insightful, the show is clumsy at points, but Noy has an undeniably charming presence. Like the dating stories it riffs on, it’s imperfect, a little messy, but worth the time.

Alexander Cohen

Oh Plagues ★★★

C Arts | C venues | C aurora (Venue 6) until 24 August

Fans of Bridgerton might enjoy this wholly inaccurate portrayal of a moderately debauched drawing-room party set amidst the tail end of the smallpox epidemic in 1810 England. It’s a very curious affair, mixing as it does vibrant period dresses with an entirely successful atmospheric soundtrack that never detracts from the dialogue. It benefits from genuinely funny performances from an unusually large cast, yet there are no obviously funny lines.

It marks the Fringe debut of MEBE, a Los Angeles-based production company run by women of colour who aim to create projects for young talent to work on in the film industry, and there’s a reassuringly polished naturalism to all the cast’s work here. Written, directed and produced by Bitota Mpolo, who also takes one of the roles, it slides nicely from genteel vulgarity to full-blown pandemic paranoia without ever falling over itself, but you do feel that the script would benefit from another draft (it certainly deserves a better punchline). Even so, it’s never less than enjoyable to watch as there’s an almost effortless sense of pace imparted by movement director Yohana Bayekula,who may be the MVP in this production.

Rory Ford

The Sound Of My Own Voice ★★★

Scottish Storytelling Centre (Venue 30) until 25 August

The sound of Morna Burdon’s voice is soft but authoritative, while the tone of her writing is impish yet compassionate. This gentle hour in her company is an opportunity for her to share her poems in Scots and English, sing a cappella folk songs from across the last century and offer her own gentle, intelligent and measured observations on politics, culture and empathetic living.

Burdon first arrived in Edinburgh in the Seventies and shuttles between here and Dundee with vignettes on bus travel. Her memories elicit murmurs of assent and some laughter of recognition as she delivers pithy poems on subjects as diverse as AI, Stormzy, the winter fuel payment and the karma of bacon rolls. She demonstrates that you don’t need to shout loud to express your socio-political views with Radical, a micro-story about small acts of solidarity. She chooses old songs with timeless resonance to render in a spindly soprano, from Hamish Henderson’s socialist ode The John Maclean March to Tom Paxton’s environmental lament Whose Garden Was This.

And with immigration as hot a topic as it ever was, she expands on the spirit of Woody Guthrie’s Deportees, inspired by a 1948 plane crash, by listing the Mexican migrant workers who perished and whose names were routinely missing from contemporary news reports.

Fiona Shepherd

Me and My Year of Casual Monasticism ★★

Greenside @ Riddles Court (Venue 16) until 23 August

A promised hour, Mary’s year of casual monasticism just about reaches 30 minutes. In her stand-up style performance, Emily Knutsson plays Mary, but I’m sure, draws on her personal experiences as a postgraduate Creative Writing student at Cambridge University.

An intelligent attempt to critique the traditional, outdated styles of teaching prevalent in UK universities, particularly at Oxbridge, and subsequently highlight their inherent exclusion of women, Me and My Year of Casual Monasticism does not quite achieve

its goal. Knutsson's experiences are taught in a lecture that drones on, her performance is quiet, and not fervently engaged, and as an audience, we’re never quite sure where we stand. Nevertheless, with merely a curtain separating us from the noisy chaos of the Royal Mile, Knutsson does well to remain focused throughout.

Róisin McMullan