Fringe theatre reviews: Jerk Off! | Get a Grip | 3 Times I Killed | Citizen Otherplace | Launa + more

Dairy Room at Underbelly, Bristo Square (Venue 302) until 30 August

Looking at the set of Nadia P. Manzoor’s Jerk Off!, it’s clear we’re going to get a personal story. Artefacts of her life sit on shelves flagging the stage, and a chair for Manzoor at centre – dressed with a small handmade doll. Her daughter’s, she says, as she inaugurates the next hour and 20 minutes in a tracksuit set.

It’s longer than your standard storytelling offering, but Manzoor commands every minute. In the first five, we learn about her mother’s early death – but this is not a litany of tragedies. She takes us through her upbringing in a British-Pakistani household, a move to Boston, an abusive relationship with a hip-hop dancer and a reckoning with victim narratives with a flow that echoes her abiding love for dance. What’s more – she can really, really dance.

Manzoor rejects clean narratives, finding a nuance that indicates deep grappling with her own story. Those who do bad are not all bad; those who do good can be patronising – take, for instance, Manzoor’s stint at a domestic violence charity, in which her colleague makes pointed assumptions about women’s rights in Pakistan.

Or her abusive ex, who for all his horrifying traits showed Manzoor how to “bring every part of [herself] to the dance” – a phrase that led her to her own kind of freedom. Interjecting anecdotes about her daughter gently point us back to the intergenerational story she is trying to tell.

Praise is also warranted for the way she moves with her props, not only in their clever multi purposing, but also in the way she handles them with reverence.

It’s not a spectacle, and it’s not a show that prioritises an audience desire for something neat and punchy. Instead, it keeps Manzoor’s needs refreshingly at the centre, beckoning viewers to do the same. Mika Morava

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Get a Grip ★★★★

The Saloon Bar at Just the Tonic at Westside Rodeo (25) until 21 August

Is this a dildo I see before me? Benjy England’s semi-autobiographical Fringe debut on his struggles with porn addiction is brave and very brash.

When his mother goes out for the night, he sprays on some aftershave, lays out some flowers, and pulls out an adidas shoebox...full of sex toys. But Benjy’s plans for a quiet night in are disrupted by the sudden animation of his childhood puppet, identical to himself, who we later learn he ejaculated life into.

Benjy number 2’s mission: to reverse his maker’s co-dependency on his left hand.

The show is crude, no doubt. Viewers can expect to learn some pretty unsavoury synonyms for wank. But never at the expense of its genuine wit. Benjy’s scene partner-slash-puppeteer is particularly quick in her put downs of his habit. And her unexpected awakening offers him the opportunity to quit looking at the “hot babes in Blantyre” online and learn how to connect in real life.

Watching Benjy roleplay first dates with a mini version of himself is surreal, but the silliness is channelled into a lesson on the cost of fear of rejection on human intimacy that is important in our disconnected digital age, and that Benjy himself is clearly passionate to impart (hopefully not at the cost of his entire dignity).

It is a boisterously enjoyable debut, and Benjy certainly deserves credit for his ability to temper the taboo subject matter with his bold, absurd comedic style. Lilia Foster

3 Times I Killed ★★★★

ZOO Playground (Venue 186) until 30 August

No, this isn’t Brooklyn attorney Andrea Coleman admitting to three murders, despite what its title implies (no doubt intentionally).

Any killing going on is purely in a figurative sense, and in the courtroom, as apparently mild-mannered Coleman slays opposition solicitors by exposing flaws in their arguments, contradictions in their clients’ accounts, minor infractions of legal protocol. And the inspiration for those legal victories comes from an unlikely source: God himself.

Not that 3 Times I Killed is in any way a preachy show: Coleman admits she’s hardly a card-carrying evangelist, and seems just as bemused as her audience that she should be receiving privileged information from a Divine source. More relevant is the apparently Godly force’s ability to swerve around Coleman’s natural fears and anxieties, asking her to effectively take on a fresh identity to achieve her ends.

On one level, 3 Times I Killed is about self-discovery and self-acceptance. But it’s to Coleman’s credit that her stipped-back solo show - just her, a chair and an all-important scarlet jacket - never dips even a toe in self-indulgence.

Instead, her life lessons come courtesy of a succession of courtroom dramas, each recounted vividly and dramatically, but also with the disarming enthusiasm of a friend relating what happened to them during a particularly eventful day at work.

3 Times I Killed offers fascinating glimpses into behind-the-scenes legal intrigues, larger-than-life characters, and the intricacies of disproving claims and casting doubt over assertions.

But in Coleman’s unforced, expertly paced, clearly heartfelt delivery, it also becomes a story of struggles and victories on a personal level. She’s a performer of disarming eloquence and insight - either that, or her Godly inspiration should be taking all the credit. David Kettle

READ MORE: A woman's place: three playwrights reflect on the Traverse's female-fronted Fringe programme

Citizen Otherplace ★★★

Greenside @ Riddles Court (Venue 16) until 29 August

Citizen Otherplace takes its title from the opening passage of Sontag’s 1978 ‘Illness as Metaphor’ – a promising signal that this solo show might have something to say about how illness gets narrated. It doesn’t, quite, but not for lack of craft.

Stacy Price is an assured, multi-roling, performer, switching between a patient and Mike, a debt collector from I.N. (“Imaginary Numbers”), with costume changes behind a blue hospital curtain. The satire of the American medical system is sharp and specific, and a running gag – throwing soft toy fruit at “it” on cue – ensures the audience’s implication.

But “it,” ostensibly cancer, is staged as a wig-wearing Eastern European woman the patient must defeat with a compass, calculator, and knife, and a bid for surgery becomes a game show the patient has to win. It’s the very metaphor Sontag spent her book dismantling – illness as foreign invader, survival as combat – borrowed for a title that promises the opposite.

This could be read as an implicit case for metaphor’s necessity, that illness resists Sontag’s ideal of purified language, but the production shows no sign of acknowledging this. The institutional satire remains effective; the illness itself is narrated in language Sontag’s epigraph was written to refuse. Josephine Balfour-Oatts

Launa ★★★

theSpace @ Niddry St (Venue 9) until 22 August

The ache at the centre of this production recurs in small, telling images: a red rain jacket, audio of Launa, swimming out to sea, her fists banging against a closed door.

Memory and yearning intrude on the mother, who blames herself for everything, her daughter’s death, even, glancingly, the family cat’s, while the ghost of six-year-old Launa appears as she was and as the young adult she’ll never get to become.

Loss, this production insists, ripples outward – to husbands, siblings, whole families – yet the lens rarely leaves the mother. Her relationship with her husband and sister, particularly the rifts and rhythms of her marriage, which might have given the piece its richest terrain, go largely unexplored. It is closer to a solo show, despite the cast of six.

The performances are engaging throughout, but with classic student-theatre ambition, the staging aims wide: shadow puppetry, torches, movement work, a plastic sheet that doubles as a scrim. The techniques crowd out the story rather than clarifying it, and with barely a beat between lines, action rarely invites reaction.

The production’s core message – respect for the dead doesn’t have to look like despair – is its clearest and most nuanced achievement. Josephine Balfour-Oatts

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