Fringe theatre reviews: Sanctuary | Mrs Stern Wanders The Prussian State Library | Extra Dry + more

Sanctuary ★★★★

Pleasance Dome (Venue 23) until 31 August

The major plays about Aids, including Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, which was part of the Edinburgh International Festival programme this year, were written during the early, savage years when the disease was a death sentence.

In this, the debut play by Jacob Sparrow, which is the winner of the inaugural Leodis Prize, the perspective of hindsight offers a more nuanced story.

Sanctuary is set in the early 1990s in a Suffolk village where a woman called Wendy, who has lost a nephew to Aids, is trying to open a kind of hospice in her home. So far the only resident is Michael (Matthew Tennyson), a young HIV-positive man who is fleeing London and the funerals of his friends. Against all expectations, including his, Michael doesn’t appear to be dying - yet, but the possibility fills his days. He doesn’t know why he is alive.

He is visited by an older man (Richard Cant), who seems to know something of his story, and is visibly moved as Michael talks about his frustrations and missing his chance with Oscar, the love of his life. The hospice project faces hostility and prejudice on a level we’ve now all but forgotten: the pub landlady collects Michael’s glass wearing rubber gloves. A local farmer worries his cows will get Aids from the water supply.

In contrast to this are the tender, nuanced performances of Tennyson and Cant, sensitively directed by Josh Seymour, and the beauty of some of Sparrow’s writing. The big reveal is heavily signposted, and the play seems to have several shots at an ending when the first would have done very well.

But as a meditation on safety and generosity, it lingers in the mind. As a debut play, it is an incredibly promising piece of theatre. Susan Mansfield

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Mrs Stern Wanders The Prussian State Library ★★★

Traverse Theatre (Venue 25) until 30 August

In Jenny Lynn Bader’s new play, recently acclaimed off Broadway, the Mrs. Stern of the title is none other than Hannah Arendt, one of the great political philosophers of the 20th century, and a leading opponent of Nazism and fascism.

The play captures her, though, at a moment in her 20s when she was still a postgraduate student in Berlin, married to fellow writer Gunther Stern. It’s 1933, the Nazis have just come to power, and like many other Jewish intellectuals, Arendt has been arrested for questioning by the Gestapo; the play follows her through her few days of interrogation in prison, before she is released, to flee the country.

The problem with this scenario, though, is that it inevitably reduces one of the great truth-tellers of the 20th century to the status of beguiling liar, trying to use her youthful charm to persuade the young arresting officer that her visits to the library had nothing to do with researching Nazi crimes, and were entirely either academic or domestic.

Oddly, there’s more space for interesting development in the character of her young interrogating officer, a young Nazi who - in a way now once again sadly familiar - seems vaguely appalled when confronted by the real human consequences of the brutal ideology he has embraced.

As far as Arendt is concerned, though, this brief play mainly represents a colossal missed opportunity; we see her, but never for a moment as her brilliant and challenging self. Joyce McMillan

Extra Dry ★★★

Greenside @ Riddles Court (Venue 16) until 29 August

There’s an honesty at the heart of this solo piece by writer and actor Michelle Renee Johnson which doesn’t just stem from her observational ability.

Although her character in the play is referred to as MJ, allowing distance from herself, the pre-publicity for Extra Dry’s Edinburgh run makes clear there’s a significant autobiographical element to this tale of alcohol abuse and addiction.

Specifically, Johnson characterises a particular kind of alcoholic behaviour which lends itself to the sufferer largely remaining functional (MJ describes living in France, Japan and New York throughout her adult life, and having a job in compliance at a large hedge fund), yet which is marked by alcoholic blackouts at a moment’s notice.

Performing around a home bar, often with martini glass in hand, Johnson and director Lila Rachel Becker portray these episodes as a fast, record needle-scratching snap to blackout.

Johnson relates these episodes with wry comedy (she christens the character who takes her place during them ‘Roxy’), but there’s an understated, everyday horror here too, around the thought of having to be told what she’s said and done, and of the dangerous, vulnerable, hospital-involving situations MJ’s drinking puts her in.

So close to the bone it could file it down, this story’s sharing will doubtless help many people who recognise themselves in it. David Pollock

Forge ★★★

Scottish Storytelling Centre (Venue 30) until 29 August

Multi-instrumentalist Tom Oakes, a nominee in the Scots Trad Awards Musican of the Year 2019, returns to the Scottish Storytelling Centre to expand on the ideas explored in his highly acclaimed solo show The Hearth. And there’s no disputing the quality of musicianship both on flute and guitar, sometimes adding further layers to the soundscape with his loop machine.

He composes a tune every year for his daughter, and shared a number of these, from a gently repetitive melody for a newborn to a sophisticated planxty for her fifth birthday, albeit with a playful title. Then things took a more serious turn, with reflections on the role of Travellers in preserving the English song tradition, his own great-great grandfather, who came from Ireland with his fiddle at the time of the Famine, and music and words which connect to Palestine today.

There was a deep sense of tradition and connection, of music as a thread through time and a cord which links people regardless of borders. However, it felt like there was not enough connective tissue in this show to turn it from an intimate concert into a piece of theatre. Susan Mansfield

READ MORE: Nathan Sibthorpe on putting audiences through a lie detector test in the interactive show Truthmachine

It’s Always Sunny on Olympus ★★

theSpace on the Mile (Venue 39) until 29 August

Unfortunately, there’s only one genuinely funny conceit in this new comedy by Henry Theakston and Aaron Khachaturian, and that’s Poseidon’s deeply inappropriate relationship with an octopus. Apparently “the play just wrote itself from there” according to the authors, but unfortunately it didn’t do a very good job.

A creation myth where the Greek gods are petty narcissists continually trying to one-up each other is a decent idea but everything aside from the cephalopod sensuality struggles to raise a smile. However, Mind Yer Head’s production is well-played by entire cast and some impressive stage lighting ensures that it is at least not visually dull. Rory Ford

Angelshark ★★

theSpace on the Mile (venue 39) until 28 August

Although personably enough played, there really isn’t enough plot or incident in Annie White’s new comedy set at a Shetland summer camp where volunteers work to preserve the island’s returning angelshark population.

There’s a touch of the Scooby-Doos in the slim premise as three young characters try to solve the mystery of a dead squatina with a missing fin, but it’s an index of how mundane things are that the revelation that one of them has a girlfriend is treated as if it’s a hugely exciting development.

White experiments with fourth wall breaks and varying perspectives but it’s not sharply written enough to maintain a full hour. Rory Ford

The Tale of the Original Jekyll and Hyde (Told by a Mad Hatter from Stockport) ★★

Greenside @ Riddles Court (Venue 41) until 29 August

Not actually Stevenson’s story but the inspiration for it; a recounting of the times and misdeeds of Deacon Brodie, Edinburgh cabinet maker turned burglar.

Andy Dickinson reprises his character, Stanley, a mercury-addicted hat-maker drawn into Brodie’s orbit in Edinburgh through a newfound fondness for whisky. Dickinson is a confident performer but there’s something a bit too kids TV about Stanley (a historical sidekick who was last seen in the company of mountaineer George Mallory); he can be a little too broad and never as amusing as he appears to think he is.

This may be historically accurate; unfortunately it is also criminally dull. Rory Ford

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