Fringe theatre reviews: Dregs | Help Me!!!! | The Court 2 + more
Travelling from a fantasy-fuelled evening in Glasgow to the afterlife, here’s another batch of our latest Fringe theatre reviews.
Dregs ★★★★
Scottish Storytelling Centre (Venue 30) until 24 August (even dates)
One Saturday night in Glasgow, a man strays into a club for magical creatures on the banks of the Clyde. Sprites are on the dance floor, gnomes are doing shots at the bar, and out the back, he meets a selkie staring sadly at the water. She has been stranded in the human world after being abandoned by the lover for whom she left the sea. After she saves the man from a fix of his own, they set off together on an odyssey through the city to help her get back to the water.
Co-writers and performers Emery Hunter and Bobby Bradley have created a fresh take on an old myth. Hunter, who is Hard of Hearing, communicates in BSL and Bradley in English, not only making the performance completely bilingual, but embodying the difficulties these two beings have in understanding one another.
Glasgow is splendidly evoked as the pair make their surreal journey through the “symphony of Saturday night” on Sauchiehall Street, a place of drunks and hen parties, to consult the Fates in a wee bar down a side street. Somehow, this mix of magic and the strangeness of everyday life seems to fit the city perfectly.
For those in the audience who don’t use BSL, the success of the piece depends on Bradley communicating through his responses the sense of what the selkie is saying, sometimes in quite long speeches. This doesn’t always happen, and there are times when the non-BSL audience shares his frustration as we struggle to keep up.
But that doesn’t stop it from being an inspired idea, as well as a clever updating of the selkie myth, powerfully rooted in the real.
Susan Mansfield
Help Me!!!! ★★★★
theSpaceTriplex (Venue 38)/theSpace @ Niddry Street (Venue 9) until 23 August
You’ve got to feel for Levi. He’s died with unfinished business and, even though he’s managed to spirit himself back to some semblance of life, being a ghost - as we all know - he’s unable to make a sound. It’s just as well, then, that he’s such a vivid and effective mime that he can deploy his audience to solve his problems, search for objects and solutions, and ultimately put his soul to rest - or, perhaps, turn it in a different direction entirely.
Help Me!!! is perhaps what it might feel like to be trapped in an escape room with an excellent mime performer for company. As creator/performer Leo Lion gets our confidence and sympathy, the demands he makes become increasingly intricate: sit back as a passive observer if you like, but get involved and you’ll find yourself guessing codes, searching for items and piecing together clues from the debris strewn across Lion’s set, all under his wordless (and sometimes exasperated) silent direction.
It’s clever stuff, and he’s very funny in his spontaneous interactions. The audience participation, too, is genuinely welcoming: Lion manages to instil a sense of community remarkably quickly among late-night show-goers. He’s a warm, encouraging presence, with a perpetual hangdog neediness as if he’s constantly about to burst into tears, and a remarkable way of tapping quickly into a universal language of signs that surely anyone would grasp.
His overall game is nicely structured into stages and objectives, so we can easily chart where we’re going, and if some of the tasks ultimately feel a little simplistic, then Lion’s overriding aim, surely, is to break down barriers and encourage connection. In those terms, Help Me!!! is an hour of charm, humour and a small dose of mental gymnastics.
David Kettle
The Court 2 ★★★
Braw Venues a Hill Street (Venue 41) until 24 August
Edinburgh Little Theatre’s interactive courtroom dramas are a very solid template and while this “more-of-the-same-but-different” sequel can sometimes feel rather dry, the audience element still makes this case interesting enough. Clearly inspired by the long-running 1970s ITV series Crown Court (even using its theme tune, Leoš Janáček’s “Sinfonietta”) this recreates a court case, here with seven members of the audience as jurors. The rest of the audience (“the public gallery”) is also given a chance to quiz both the suspect and the plaintiff after their testimonies.
This time out, it’s a private criminal case brought by the widow of a businessman who fell to his death during a walk with his associate in the Cairngorms. The actors cope well, particularly under questioning, which is important as there’s no evidence other than their testimony. It’s – probably very necessarily – simple stuff with no big dramatic moments (Anatomy of a Fall this is not), and the case does seem to boil down to who you choose to believe.
There’s no correct solution, but it’s interesting to witness how many members of the public are willing to find someone guilty of murder on the strength of circumstantial evidence alone.
Rory Ford
The Green Knight (But It's Gay) ★★
Scottish Storytelling Centre (Venue 30) until 24 August
It’s a silly show, Niall Moorjani tells a somewhat reticent audience at the start of this charming but childish one-man-and-his-demoralised-guitar-player “queer version” of the Arthurian legend of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The original poetry is more successful than the direct-to-audience chat and repetitive puns delivered with demands for applause.
A juxtaposition of different kinds of masculinity through time – including a laddish Round Table mob – threatens to turn things into something more sophisticated, but with creative comedy character hats, dousings of double-entendres and the intimate feel of something, at times, made up on the spot, the quest for heartfelt emotion is as challenging as finding the Holy Grail.
Sally Stott
The Brilliance Of Broken Glass: Button ★★
Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33) until 25 August
This solo show from Brooke – known as Brooke Being Brooke on her Instagram – largely involves the one-name NYC-based comedian and storyteller recounting a difficult medical odyssey and contemplating the ways in which it has shaped her identity.
It is a rollercoaster ride of misdiagnoses, surgeries and post-op complications that should offer resonant insights on medical malpractice, on the American healthcare system, and on how to roll with life’s unexpected punches – but none of that can be found amid a scrappy staging, a dense text, a garbled delivery, and glib, self-centred sentiment.
Fergus Morgan
20/20 ★★
theSpace @ Surgeons' Hall (53) until 23 August
This student production of a time travelling Orpheus and Eurydice, who spend most of the play as a 21st-century guitar teacher and pupil, has a lot of charm and, in this baking hot room today, the young cast in their fabric-rich costumes are doing an admirable job of keeping the energy going.
The lofty delivery of some of the dialogue feels overly poised and the circular structure is more of a concept than a fully developed play, but it’s a fun mash-up, the highlight of which is Orpheus, looking like a youthful Jarvis Cocker, singing “Half the World” away “for Oasis”, who are performing elsewhere in town tonight, somewhere presumably more ventilated.
Sally Stott
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