Fringe theatre reviews: SLAYERS | Overtone | Prophets | Majenin - A Palestinian Love Story + more

SLAYERS ★ ★ ★ ★

Assembly George Square Studios (Venue 17) until 30 August

“I eat boys like you for breakfast,” goes the track at the start, which initially seems like an odd juxtaposition to the Edinburgh Mum, Liane, doing Pilates in Marchmont in her “magic eye” leggings, before she picks up her daughter Molly from school. However, it’s on a trip back across the Meadows that she has an encounter with a strange man of the kind that many women will be familiar with; he’s creepy but in an opaque way that leaves her wondering if he was just being friendly – that is, until she finds out what he’s been posting about her online.

Corinne Salisbury’s twist-filled script, performed by a mesmerising Zoe Hunter, powerfully captures Liane’s building anger at what she discovers on the internet and beyond and takes her on an empowering but also destructive journey to the heart of hatred and revenge that, it becomes clear, not only consumes strangers in the ‘manosphere’.

It’s a piece that at times risks veering into soap opera territory, with no men immune from its critique. But what Liane goes on to do and inspires her young daughter to do captures both the way that children soak up what adults teach them and the allure of being in gang of likeminded others, for better or worse.

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It’s a furious but also, at times, very funny rebuttal to sexism and misogyny, as well as a beautifully observed unpacking of human nature, the psychology of groups and socialisation of us all that, as her power increases, Liane also eloquently questions. Salisbury constantly strives to avoid an easy ending in which Liane rises above the behaviour of the men in her life.

Why should she “be better” when they can’t do the same? In presenting us with a descent to the bottom that enables Liane to come out on top, it leaves us with the question: if this isn’t the answer, what is? Sally Stott

Overtone ★ ★ ★ ★

Pleasance Dome (Venue 23) until 30 August

Prophets ★ ★ ★

Assembly Roxy (Venue 139) until 31 August

In a fragmenting world, young people can be increasingly vulnerable to charismatic leaders who seem to offer clarity, identity and a sense of purpose, at a crucial moment in their lives; and in Tom Brennan’s Overtone, at the Pleasance Dome, Paul and Maggie – now a couple in their late Thirties – are two people marked for ever by the impact on their lives of a choir leader called Alan, whom they encountered in their late teens.

In this new play for the award-winning North Wall arts centre in Oxford, Paul and Maggie try to explain their prematurely middle-aged suburban way of life to a younger couple they know. This moment of self-examination, though, arouses fierce memories of their relationship’s traumatic beginning – which involved a clearly exploitative sexual interaction between Maggie and Alan – and exposes profound and painful unresolved tensions in the life they have made together.

Scottish actors Claire Dargo and Scott Fletcher – playing Maggie and Paul both now and as teenagers – whip up a rare storm of intense emotion in this sharp and memorable play, directed with impressive pace and energy by John Hoggarth.

And if the damage Paul has suffered at Alan’s hands is more subtle than Maggie’s pain, it is beautifully and hauntingly conveyed in Scott Fletcher’s performance, which ends with his rediscovery – to Maggie’s shock – of the voice that was silenced by their abrupt departure from the choir, 20 years before; in a moment that hints at lives made tragically smaller and less joyful, by the actions of the adult who abused his power over them, so many years ago.

The cult that features in Jack McGregor’s new play Prophets is much stranger than the choir of Overtone, and far distant from everyday 21st century British life. The play begins with the arrival of Kerris, a Scottish climatologist, on the remote (and fictional) South Pacific island of St. John, a British overseas protectorate with a dark history of mutiny and violence.

Kerris’s motives for being there are never quite clear. Supposedly studying the deep history of the island’s plant life, she seems convinced from the outset that the island’s reclusive religious leader, known as The Prophet, is deceiving and abusing his followers, who are preparing for the imminent end of the world.

As she homes in on the truth, we see her challenging an unhelpful archivist in charge of British government files about the island, sharing her doubts and suspicions via a fragile internet connection with her partner back home, and pursuing ever more tense conversations with her increasingly hostile and suspicious Airbnb host, Joe.

Despite intense performances – from Rebecca Wilkie as Kerris, and Xander Cowan as all the male characters – we never learn enough about Kerris for her St. John mission to make full sense to us. And in failing to show how Kerris’s experience there connects with her earlier life, this powerful fragment of a play robs her story of its full resonance; leaving it looking like a strange traveller’s tale, with little context, or wider meaning. Joyce McMillan

Majenin - A Palestinian Love Story ★ ★ ★

Pleasance Dome (Venue 23) until 31 August

A Pebble In The Road 3 stars ★ ★ ★

Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33) until 31 August

Here are two shows about women’s lives buffeted by tides of history far beyond their control. Both have interesting – even vital – stories to tell; yet both seem to struggle to find the right form in which to tell them.

In Majenin - A Palestinian Love Story, the Palestinian-American writer, actor and stand-up comedian Marena Riyad seeks to explore the plight of women from Palestinian families who have grown up in the (relatively) liberated west. On one hand, only Palestinian men fully understand the cultural journey their families have undergone; but on the other, Palestinian men still tend not to marry women who treat men as their social, economic and – crucially – sexual equals.

In Majenin, Marena therefore tells the semi-autobiographical tale of a failed love-affair between a Palestinian woman raised in Texas, and man who romances her passionately in New York and London, but then disappears from her life, without explanation.

Marena tells this story, though, not as the powerful monologue of which she is clearly capable, but as an odd mix of slightly tasteless stand-up comedy and three-handed drama, also featuring two other actors as her lover, and an alternative version of herself.

It’s a device that does not work well, not least because the alternative Marena completely lacks the fire and wit of the original. And in the end, we’re left with the odd impression of a Gen Z American obsessed with her own romantic problems, even in the face of the current Palestinian catastrophe. For Marena, the two are connected, of course; but Majenin is a show that blows its best chance of explaining how, and ends with some sweeping generalisations about the brokenness of Palestinian men that seem as cruel as they are excessive, and not funny at all.

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In A Pebble In The Road, meanwhile, leading Lithuanian actress Ingeborga Dapkunaite describes the lives of three generations of Lithuanian women – through war and more war, five decades of Communism, and Lithuania’s return to independence in 1990 – from the point of view of the child she was in the 1980s, when many of the old wartime generations were still alive to tell their tales, even as great changes were afoot.

Dapkunaite’s focus, in this gentle and vividly-written play, is the celebration of Christmas in Lithuania; the memories it unleashes, the family traditions that surround it, its suppression under Communism.

The child’s-eye view that dominates the play, though, requires so much wide-eyed child-acting from Dapkunaite – and so much youthful racing around the big family flat in Vilnius – that it finally becomes exhausting; in a show that could evolve to show us more of the strong, reflective woman Dapkunaite is today, but that chooses not to, in a way that sadly reduces its impact. Joyce McMillan

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