Edinburgh Fringe theatre reviews: Hamlet - Wakefulness | Love Me Like a Chai Tea Latte | Rose + Bud + more

Summerhall (Venue 26) Until 15 August

It’s more than ten years since Polish theatre company Song of the Goat brought their ground-breaking Songs of Lear to the Fringe. Somehow it managed both to be true to the spirit of Shakespeare’s play and to be completely original, drawing out elements of the story through the company’s medium of polyphonic song.

In their version of Hamlet, director Grzegorz Bral has taken a play commonly regarded as cerebral, ideas-driven and text-focused and transformed it into something which feels primal and ancient.

The polyphonic voices conjure big themes: death, grief, madness, sacrifice. Their Elsinore is a bed frame, a half-circle ornate metal chairs and two long silvery tables.

The ten performers, six men and four women, embody moods and emotions through song, movement and dance with an intensity which is rare on the British stage. A handful of Shakespearean lines are retained, but with varying degrees of success; the bar is high for speaking the words of such a well-known, well-loved play.

Here, we begin with the death of Old Hamlet, the prince’s father, and the character remains on stage haunting everything that follows. Intriguingly, the actor playing Hamlet is given comparatively little to do, despite having a wonderful singing voice. This is not the tragedy of an individual; it’s about the fate of a community which has imploded with the old King’s untimely death.

That wrong must be cleansed, the evil must be exorcised. Near the end of the play, a female singer atop a table chants the word “sacrifice” over and over. Nothing less will do.

Song of the Goat have taken a play many of us think we know and made it strange, compelling, musically bewitching. It’s a melancholy tour de force, and not like any other Hamlet you’ll ever see.

Susan Mansfield

Love Me Like a Chai Tea Latte ★★★

Assembly Roxy (Venue 139) until 25 August

With the Edinburgh International Book Festival right around the corner, the Fringe may seem like a strange place to have a book launch, but Love Me Like a Chai Tea Latte by Sanjay Lago is no ordinary book.

For one thing, it’s not really a book – as we see pretty quickly, it’s a notebook bound with a cover and author photo on the back. For another thing, it’s not really a book launch – instead, Lago’s solo hour is a by turns funny, by turns moving one-man show exploring love, dating, South Asian identity, and racism through storytelling, song and dance.

If this sounds like a lot, it is – yet while Love Me Like a Chai Tea Latte has a bit of a focus problem, there’s also something quite endearing about the intimate, confessional way Lago’s many anecdotes, tangents and recollections play out.

And while some of the ground feels a little well-trodden – searching for love in all forms is a tender if typical throughline – there’s moments of real heartfelt incisiveness, particularly in Lago's examination of racism within the queer community.

Love Me Like a Chai Tea Latte goes down like its eponymous drink: sweet, comforting, and with an underlying bite.

Anahit Behrooz

A Mad, Mad Wonderland! ★★★

Greenside @ George St (Venue 236) until 23 August

Jason Woods is a one-man Wonderland in A Mad, Mad Wonderland, a production that reimagines Carroll’s beloved universe from the point of view of an older, wiser Alice.

When the Queen of Hearts loses her sheet music and song lyrics ahead of a very important tea party, Alice is called on for support by the White Rabbit – a call she begrudgingly accepts.

Core characters such as the Cheshire Cat, Tweedle Dee and Mad Hatter are brought to life through a series of impressive and well-judged celebrity impressions, including Jeff Goldblum, Jack Nicholson, and Alan Rickman.

Woods’s portrayal of Tweedle Dum is suspiciously like that of Steve Martin in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988), however, and while this provides a helpful contrast with twin Tweedle Dee, it seems a questionable, even insensitive choice, and becomes a noticeable outlier in an otherwise carefully curated storytelling experience.

Lines like: “You make coffee nervous” and “When the wit hits the fan”, and a closing number that combines Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star and I’m A Little Teapot, confirm A Mad, Mad Wonderland as an enchanting 40-minutes, performed with a tangible and contagious sense of joy that emulates the nonsense, wonder, and wordplay of the original.

Josephine Balfour-Oatts

Rose + Bud ★★★

Bunker One at Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33) until 25 August

A bittersweet coming-of-age melodrama, this Northern Irish two-hander follows Bud, a closeted teenager who flees an overbearing mother for university and, in the process, begins to emerge not just from his shell, but into life as a trans woman.

The familiar rites of passage, new friends, the slow severing of home ties are refracted through the often-fraught prism of trans identity.

Bud’s sense of self is split, with the dramatic reins handed back and forth between Bud and Rose, who step fluidly in and out of the role of narrator. The former is puckish but shy, the latter exudes diva like confidence, cloaked in an elegant red gown to match, all a mask to bury her growing inner vulnerability.

Rose Coogan’s writing is at its strongest when tightly fixed on the small, intimate negotiations of love and family: a mother taking her trans daughter shopping for new clothes captures an awkward affection that warms the soul.

The narrative may run out of steam towards the close, but there’s strong promise that this could evolve into something that truly tugs at the heart.

It’s all the more vital in a climate where trans lives are fair game for the political soapbox. To focus squarely on tender beauty is quietly defiant.

Alexander Cohen

Goodness Me ★★★

Snug at Paradise in Augustines (Venue 152) until 24 August

In Goodness Me, Ioana Goga poses the same question as Joan Osbourne did in her 1995 hit - what if God was one of us? It’s a genuinely charming concept - Celeste, a disillusioned millennial, suddenly wakes up as God - that just takes a little too long to get going.

The first half treads predictable ground in establishing the character’s general malaise, before her Furby reveals itself as an all-knowing celestial guide here to help her take control of her life (and, by extension, improve the world).

Once the Furby becomes sentient - a bizarre sentence even for the Fringe - the show undergoes a welcome shift to the philosophical, as the pair muse on the best way to do good and lead a meaningful existence when filled with such existential despair.

Otherwise irrelevant events from earlier suddenly fall into place and the Furby dispenses disarmingly cathartic pearls of wisdom (do good in your community, give yourself permission to rest).

Goodness Me wisely chooses not to waste precious minutes detailing why exactly Celeste was chosen to fulfil these heavenly duties, which makes the slightly tedious exposition of the first 30 minutes feel even more misplaced. Fundamentally, though, humanity would be in good hands if Celeste was at the wheel.

Ariane Branigan

Alice ★★

Greenside @ George St (Venue 236) until 23 August

Exploring the relationship between childhood sexual abuse and voice-hearing, Slow Theatre’s Alice is an original performance informed by research and testimonials by lived experience experts.

Given its evidence base and awareness-raising elements, the Edinburgh Fringe’s Cabaret of Dangerous Ideas seems a more appropriate forum to communicate the complexities of the subject.

Headphones are provided, so that audiences can appreciate how voice-hearing influences even the most basic of interactions. However, other technologies such as a live feed confuses proceedings, and when a series of video testimonials is played twice, the effect is more reductive than it is poignant.

Josephine Balfour-Oatts

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