Fringe theatre reviews: Bigfoot Ripped My Dog In Half I Saw It | The Jolly Fisherman | Song Unburied + more

Bigfoot Ripped My Dog In Half I Saw It ★★★★★

Summerhall (Venue 26)Until 30 August

Dark winter night in a small town in America’s Appalachian mountains, sometime in the 1990s; and a teenage kid without a driving licence, high as a kite on glue and boredom, drives her uncle’s borrowed truck into something on the road, plunging herself and her friend - in the passenger seat - into deep potential trouble.

So when a policeman arrives on the scene to investigate, distraction becomes the name of the game; and this is the set-up for the latest mind-blowing show from acclaimed New-York-based Fringe theatre makers Xhloe and Natasha, now so widely admired for their sharp-witted and physically dazzling satires on American culture and politics that those interested in the central theme of this year’s Edinburgh International Festival, as it reflects on 250 years of the United States, could well take in Xhloe and Natasha’s new work as a prologue, or perhaps a roaring epilogue.

In Bigfoot Ripped My Dog In Half I Saw It, these two remarkable writer-performers take just an hour to create a community that seems like a near-perfect metaphor for the current state of America, and for much of western world.

Bereft for months of drinkable running water after a traumatic flood, the town is already stressed and on edge when the the two teenagers start to spin their tale of a gigantic creature in the headlights, frightening them off the road. And in no time, almost everyone in town begins to find the idea of a Bigfoot on the loose so useful, either psychologically or politically, that when the kids finally try to come clean, they realise that the truth has become a subversive inconvenience, met with anger and threats.

Around this story, Xhloe and Natasha - in clown face-paint, and using just a few simple props - create an astonishingly vivid gallery of characters, ranging from the subtly differentiated kids themselves, through the drunken town mayor, to the truly sinister spokeswoman for the state Crisis Response Team, who spins comforting half-truths about the safety of the town’s drinking water, while insisting that the authorities must take seriously people’s ‘legitimate fears’ around a monster (and convenient hate figure) that does not exist.

Sound familiar? It should; and if the frenzied pace and intense acrobatic athleticism of Xhloe and Natasha’s performance, backed by a raging fragmented soundtrack of 90s rock and pop, can make the action almost too dazzling to follow at first, the central thrust of this brilliantly-conceived story soon becomes all too clear, in what must be one of the sharpest, most significant, and most breathtakingly executed physical theatre shows of the year, 2026. Joyce McMillan

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The Jolly Fisherman ★★★★

Buttercup at Underbelly, George Square (Venue 300) until 31 August

In the 2010s, Alan and Amir become friends. Alex Hill and Jonny Khan begin their hour in The Jolly Fisherman with a sheepishness as teenage boys meeting on the bus for the first time. As they share headphones and gingerly smiles, it’s hard for them to imagine what shape their lives will take.

This dramatic two-hander spans a decade of friendship and fallout between the two as they weave through each other’s worlds. Hill plays Alan, a white British boy, enjoying the way Khan’s Amir, a British-Pakistani boy, enters his domain – that is, the old Jolly Fisherman pub, where a cast of characters Alan’s known since childhood gather in life’s highs and lows.

Set-wise, it’s easy to imagine hitting one of the pub stools that scatter the stage and seeing a poof of dust; the worn-in upholstery becomes a character in itself as the scenes progress. The stools, along with a dart board hanging upstage create an inviting atmosphere that grounds the audience in the pub – the heart of the play – and the pair’s site of both communion and estrangement.

To which degree their divergence is a result of choice, or the fate of a violent social order, is a question the play approaches with sophistication. The friends are pulled apart by the priorities of their respective worlds – especially the inherited racialised codes that dictate how they must act in times of crisis. While the play certainly wants to say something about both experiences, it is more successful in its explication of whiteness and the far-right.

Both performances shine – particularly Khan’s slow-build as mellow Amir, culminating in an arresting monologue in the final act. In lieu of perfect answers, The Jolly Fisherman meaningfully illustrates, in Alan’s words, the “good and weird”; the productive discomfort of truly reaching for another. Mika Morava

Song Unburied ★★★

Assembly Roxy (Venue 139) until 16 August

Song Unburied opens with a story recounting Zimbabwe’s colonisation in 1890 and independence in 1980. Incense burns, thick with the smell of heat and earth. The bones of ancestors are still rattling, unsettled, in the soil, we’re told, and the colonisers, the troupe of four warn, will not rest until their bones rest, too.

The play centres on the first Black curator at the British museum, a Rhodes scholar navigating a basement room of historical artefacts during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Her grandmother dies on her first day of work; she attends the funeral over Zoom. A Zimbabwean colleague she calls “auntie,” helps her to reconnect to her language, and encourages her assertive, sarcastic tongue: “why repatriate when you can exhibit?”

Staging moves between the museum and the curator’s London home, and the traditional dance work is at times accompanied by kalimba. Among the most affecting scenes are when the curator and her grandmother’s restless spirit meet.

A participatory dance sequence enacts the show’s spine, that knowledge isn’t wisdom; we can learn the steps, but wisdom requires a depth of experience. Sent back to our seats with “you people don’t know anything,” is appropriately discomforting, a quality which is to be celebrated. Josephine Balfour-Oatts

READ MORE: Irish theatre at the Fringe: three writers explain its appeal

Goodbye Dandelion ★★★

Underbelly Cowgate (Venue 61) until 30 August

A century ago, we’d be lucky to make it past 60. In prehistoric times, we’d rarely live to 40.

Goodbye Dandelion isn’t a show about death, however, as sibling performers Maddie and Marcus Rice are at pains to convince us, but its central question remains one of whether our inevitable mortality is what gives life meaning, or what makes it all ultimately meaningless.

That theme is articulated through the poignant story of 37-year-old Maddie befriending 87-year-old force of nature Darcy O’Shea, whose uncompromising idiosyncrasies - and whose shocking, life-altering decision - force a wholesale rethink of the younger woman’s own journey through life.

With Maddie’s careful but vivid storytelling, and Marcus’s wistful piano accompaniment, there’s much here to enjoy, and it would take a hard heart not to be touched by their tender story of lives half-lived and wishes denied, not to mention their quietly moving reflections on their own relationship.

But the show’s ultimate message provides perhaps a rather anticlimactic conclusion to their colourful tale, and a little more grit might have brought their gently bittersweet but tonally fairly uniform storyline more powerfully alive.

Contemplative and fragile, Goodbye Dandelion feels ultimately as beautiful but insubstantial as the delicate seed head of its title’s flower. David Kettle

The Great Gatsby ★★★

C aquila (Venue 21) until 15 August

F Scott Fitzgerald’s beloved 1925 novel of dreams, desire and disillusionment in the American Jazz Age has proved strangely resistant to dramatic treatment, perhaps in large part because of the dream-like atmosphere evoked by its poetic language.

Writer/director Sophie Key’s ambitious adaptation for Surrey-based Key Players Theatre preserves quite a bit of that language, delivered as narration from several of the show’s ten-strong cast. It serves to heighten the show’s somewhat otherworldly atmosphere - helped by Lydia Caplan and Alice Ryland’s evocative projected backdrops - but it also sometimes slackens the pacing, and even interrupts climactic moments.

Similarly, time-consuming resets between scenes perhaps indicate that a less elaborate staging might have strengthened focus and emotional power.

Nonetheless, there’s a lot to admire in Key’s clear-headed dramatisation of Fitzgerald’s fable of love and money, and some good performances, notably from Ollie Gardner as a convincingly wide-eyed but tragic Gatsby, Dale Barrell as sometimes bewildered narrator Nick Carraway, and Alice Ryland as a nicely ethereal Daisy, object of Gatsby’s unquenchable longing.

Lines might be projected more strongly, and the elaborate, ever-active staging with exits and entrances through the audience sometimes proves distracting. But it’s a tender retelling of a much-cherished story, one that remains largely faithful to the original’s strange magic. David Kettle

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