Edinburgh Fringe theatre reviews: CADEL: Lungs on Legs | Ma Name is Isabelle | Woman in the Arena + more

Underbelly (Venue 61) until 24 August

Since the summer of the London 2012 Olympics, when Gary McNair's Born to Run saw actress Shauna Macdonald perform the entire text while running on a treadmill, plays involving actors completing feats of physical endurance have been a recurring Fringe sight.

Now CADEL: Lungs on Legs takes the genre to a new level with the addition of a static racing bike. Born to Run proved such a gimmick can elevate and bring visceral realism to a play that’s well-written, and that's also the case here.

A performance of vivid, compelling energy by New York-based Australian actor Connor Delves is powerfully backed up by Delves’ and Edinburgh writer Steve McMahon’s script, alongside Mark Barford’s seamlessly complex direction.

Cadel Evans was the real-life first Australian winner of the Tour de France, and Delves tells his story from childhood to triumph, detailing the injuries, crashes and moments of hopelessness and determination along the way.

Working up an authentic sweat, he switches seamlessly between racing tops and headgear (provided by an uncredited female actor-stagehand, whose silent expressions populate the play), and sells moments of dangerous action with visceral believability.

Through it all, we feel physically invested in Evans’ compulsion to do the seemingly impossible while the clock of age and physical capacity tensely counts down.

David Pollock

Ma Name is Isabelle ★★★

Scottish Storytelling Centre (venue 30) until 24 August

A powerful reimagining of the famous Isabelle from the bothy ballad Bogie’s Bonnie Belle. In the original ballad, Isabelle is voiceless but here, the storyteller allows her to finally tell her own story.

Isabelle is impregnated by a man her father disapproves of. She is forced to give up the child, and eventually falls in love again, running off with another man. Lucy Beth performs the piece in Doric, a traditional Scottish dialect, which adds texture and authenticity.

Her storytelling is animated, and she often pushes her physicality to underscore the emotional weight of her words, showing clear commitment throughout this spoken word performance. The anger and pain she conveys feel real, particularly during the harrowing scenes where she describes being separated from her baby.

We witness a full emotional journey from the rosy cheeks and sparkling eyes of young love to the hinted trauma of rape, the reality of childbirth, and the hurt at being cast aside.

It’s a lot to take in, and while the emotional ambition is admirable, there are moments where the intensity and pacing risk overshadowing the narrative.

The stage is empty, with no props or visual aids. It’s just Lucy Beth, as Isabelle, prepared to bare her heart.

Suzanne O’Brien

Woman in the Arena ★★★

Greenside @ George Street (Venue 236) until 23 August

For much of her life, Jen DiGiacomo was good at keeping secrets. It became her default survival mode. But she also likes to talk, so now it’s time to share those secrets, packing a heck of a lot of autobiographical action into an engaging hour.

She eases us in with the verbal aggression of her father and violent nightmares of her childhood before moving on to her stutter, one of many challenges she has learned to navigate with grace. Her trip words flash up on a screen so she doesn’t need to utter them.

But the dominant strand of her story is her decades-long journey as a trans woman, from clandestine childhood dress-up sessions to the nasty micro and macro-aggressions she has been subjected to along the way and the nerve-wracking process of coming out to her ex-wife, children and parents.

Some of this is eye-watering stuff yet DiGiacomo displays no bitterness. She reserves her anger for the murder of trans girls such as Brianna Ghey while her own experiences are related with black humour, presumably because she knows that she is now who and where she is meant to be, revelling in her newfound gender euphoria.

Fiona Shepherd

Medium Dead ★★★

ZOO Playground (Venue 186) until 24 August

To criticise this dark one-woman show by Eleanor Shaw as tasteless would be to miss the point but, to be fair, the point can be sometimes hard to discern.

Bennie (Shaw) works in the afterlife taking calls from people who need help composing their suicide notes. The fantasy setting may initially strike you as a failure of nerve but it does provide an important remove from the terrible reality. This, however, is lost when Bennie takes a call from a famous real-life figure who has taken their own life.

There’s no doubting Shaw’s sincerity in using dark humour to confront awful events but it can be tough to fully appreciate.

Firstly, by using an actual, almost universally well-liked personality (at the risk of entering spoiler territory, it’s Anthony Bourdain) this can seem more than a little exploitative.

Secondly, the vast majority of the play is only Bennie’s side of phone conversations. This is an incredibly difficult thing to pull off unless you’re Bob Newhart and while Shaw acquits herself well you do feel that she’s made a rod for her own back.

However, a defiant laugh in the face of despair is still a laugh and against the odds this does manage to deliver a life-affirming coda.

Rory Ford

People We Bury Alive ★★★

ZOO Playground (Venue 186) until 24 August

When Rita sets up an online forum for people who have been buried alive, she does not mean it literally.

In People We Bury Alive, the burial is emotional – Rita was first buried alive aged three by her father, after he went to the shop for cigarettes and never came back. She was buried alive again by her ex-boyfriend recently. They fell out of love, and he ghosted her. Ghosting is a kind of burial, we find.

Images of death abound. Rita works in a funeral home: sometimes, she stages poetry readings for the bodies in the mortuary (or as she calls them, morts). She reads the instructions for a blow-up doll to a doll that she now owns, and this also becomes a kind of poetry.

A metaphor for the ideal woman, the doll has no needs or voice of her own, and she is willing to do whatever one wants whenever one wishes.

It is hard not to feel cheated by the metaphors at play – the literal meanings promise such strangeness and complexity – but it is a thoughtful piece nonetheless, as with Rita’s guidance, we question what we bury, how we bury, and who buries us.

Josephine Balfour-Oatts

Our Brothers in Cloth ★★

Assembly George Square Studios (Venue 17) until 25 August

A man named Mark (Kieran Kelliher) returns to the Irish village of Bunderr, to inform his old friend Alan (Jake Douglas) that Alan's late brother Chris was abused by their former priest.

The hard-drinking Alan is thrown into turmoil, lashing out at new priest Father O’Donovan (Kevin Glynn) and alienated his disbelieving mother (Emily Swain), but while Ronan Colfer’s play gives an evocative account of the smalltown, patriarchal trust networks which allow abuse to fester, there’s a gap between the intended emotional intensity and the cast’s abilities.

The capable Douglas, for example, is regularly required to launch into jarring De Niro-esque barks of impotent rage, although Scottish actor Oil Fyne is a real touch of underused class as family friend Siobhan.

David Pollock

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