Fringe theatre reviews: Safety | Primal Scream | I’m Mom

THEATRE

Safety ★★★★

Underbelly, Bristo Square (Venue 302) until 30 August

Primal Scream ★★★

Assembly Rooms (Venue 20) until 30 August

I’m Mom ★★★★

Just the Tonic at Subway (Venue 27) until 30 August

Therapists can inevitably get something of a bad rap at the Fringe. Maybe it’s to do with an apparently all-seeing, eye-of-Sauron gaze into their clients’ innermost psyches, and the power that they hold over those patients as a result. Not that you’d necessarily expect any dark intentions from well-meaning, butter-wouldn’t-melt psychotherapist Adam in new theatre company Light Mends Carefully’s potent little thriller Safety. Adam slid into therapy from medicine, driven – it goes without saying – by a desire to help others, even if he struggles with connection and meaning in his own personal relationships. So when a former client, who unaccountably disappeared from Adam’s regular therapy sessions without a word, seems to suddenly haunt his life, Adam becomes more than intrigued.

Glasgow-born writer and actor Michael Reid has come up with a chiselled jewel of a solo play, quite elegant in its nastiness, which ties together the challenges that therapist Adam encounters in his intimate life with the power that his position and expertise allows him to wield. Reid plays him as a slightly fey, slightly put-upon do-gooder with endless levels of angst and resentment festering below the surface, and his play is as much a critique of authority abuse as it is an examination of therapy gone wrong – even if you’re ultimately left wondering how much of it you can really believe. For Light Mends Carefully’s debut Fringe production, it’s a clever and assured piece of work, and one that leaves a deliciously nasty taste in the mouth.

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Just as assured, and far more outspoken in its themes, is writer/director Robin Hawdon’s Primal Scream. Feisty Sugar (her real name, she claims) rocks up to her first therapy session – strictly speaking just an assessment – in a provocative leopard-skin dress and bright pink thong, clearly out to shock and appal dyed-in-the-wool therapist Bernard, who’s frankly seen it all before. What follows is a part-flirtatious, part-confrontational cat-and-mouse game of who can extract more trauma from who. Bernard thinks he holds the trump cards with his prior knowledge of Sugar’s terrible crime, but Sugar has one last shock for him: she’s always wanted to be an opera singer. And she has the voice to prove it.

There’s a strong set-up in Hawdon’s whipcrack, smartly written drama, plus fine performances from soprano and actor Carly Paoli as an aggressively in-your-face Sugar, and Neil Roberts as a well-meaning but bumbling Bernard. There’s one big issue, however, that becomes clear on the programme given out as you enter the room: this is Act One of a planned two-act drama, apparently performed as a self-contained piece, but actually representing all set-up and no pay-off. It has perceptive and valuable things to say about class, privilege, assumptions and expectations, but at the end of the day, Primal Scream is still just half a play.

Audiences and therapy itself get rather better treatment in the tender and somewhat ramshackle solo show I’m Mom from Chicago-born Brookynite Nate Wise. His mother – herself a therapist – died from cancer when he was 18, after saying nothing to anybody about her condition. He’s never quite got over it, and Wise’s own therapist suggests Gestalt empty chair technique to allow him to address his mother in her absence, and to move on with his issues. To Wise, however, that seems just as ridiculous as some of the outlandish exercises he was forced to endure in acting school – though he begins to suspect there may be fruitful connections between the two.

Wise effectively bares his soul and his past trauma in what’s actually a surprisingly funny and really quite moving examination of the roles we all play all the time, and the rules we enforce on ourselves to suppress our vulnerabilities. He’s a thoughtful, often unhurried performer, but always a captivating presence and his final, quietly triumphant embodiment of his own mother is as revelatory as it is hilarious. Don’t go expecting lavish stagecraft, which amounts to little more than a couple of spotlights and a few chairs, nor life lessons on the benefits of finding closure on past trauma. But instead, in its gentle, softly spoken way, I’m Mom not only makes a quietly positive case for therapy, but also suggests that messiness and open wounds are perhaps just part of the human condition.

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