Fringe theatre reviews: The King of All Birds | Baby Everything | Puttana | The Second Best School Shooting | A&E | The Painted Revolutionary

THEATRE

The King of All Birds ★★★★

Summerhall (Venue 26) until 31 August

Who is the king of all the birds? Not me, says the one on stage from behind her mask – and not us either just in case we were getting our hopes up. Serenely, intriguingly out-of-time with the rhythm of the busy festival elsewhere, theatremaker and composer Marta Knight, as the storyteller behind the strikingly beaked headpiece, carefully chooses her words and drops them like breadcrumbs in this time travelling tale that takes place somewhere between the ground and the sky.

Inspired by the aerial photographs that used to be sold to homeowners in the late 20th-century and structured around the Irish myth of Mad King Sweeney, cursed to wander the world as a bird, its spans the ever-changing landscapes of Ireland over the centuries, and the generations of creatures that have watched over it.

Stripped back electronic music and sounds add to the experiment mood, minimalist narration and aptly architectural perspective which zooms in and out of its site – a family home – and its history, the surrounding farmlands, and the legends buried within the soil. Adjusting its lens onto the strange place where the natural and the artificial collide, it invites a meditation on philosophical questions around life, death and progress, through the history humankind’s relationship with flying – or “complex floating” – the place in-between – and all of the creatures who travel between the two.

Time and technology wait for no man nor bird, and a moving conclusion draws back the frame of the picture on stage to consider the prospect that technology, as well as bringing us forward, might disconnect us from where we are and where we’re been, which, through Knight’s minimalist words and sounds – that bring together the pieces of the story like a jigsaw – is beautifully evoked as a place of bog cotton in fields, starlings splashing, magic, mystery and quiet wonder. Sally Stott

THEATRE

Baby Everything ★★★★

Summerhall (Venue 26) until 31 August

The Edinburgh Fringe is full of Philadelphians this year. Company Lightning Rod Special are back with Lions. Clown Donna Oblongata is here with The Van Gogh Show. And writer, performer and comedian Lee Minora has returned to the festival for the first time since 2018 with this entertaining solo satire about hypochondria, doomscrolling and modern-day despair.

She plays Baby, a young woman determined to enjoy her day off – but her peaceful plans are thrown off by a surge of health anxiety; by a series of argumentative conversations with her fascist-leaning, Florida-based mum; and by the constant lure of her smartphone, with its ceaseless social media stream of inane content, political ire, and global catastrophe.

Developed with and directed by fellow Philly-based theatremaker Rebecca Wright, the show tracks Baby’s day of spiralling stress through a series of skits, frequently enlisting the audiences help. She gets a spectator to check her breasts for lumps using two tiny hands on sticks. She evokes a disorienting scroll through TikTok with lurid exuberance. She transforms into an art museum tour guide in an attempt to soothe our souls with masterpieces. It doesn’t work.

It is both a riotous, relatable portrait of how our hyper-connected world impacts on our day-to-day happiness and a comment on how ludicrous some of our hand-wringing is. In one brilliant dream sequence, Minora transforms into an Italian ancestor, bemoaning the state of her country post-war, and incredulous at how good we have it comparatively. Later, she morphs into a motivational speaker, determined to prove that the world is better than ever. And, by many metrics – “civil rights, coconut margaritas, Facetimes with your grandma” – he’s right.

Minora delivers all this with brio, prancing around the stage with a beaming smile and a glint in her eye, then deflating like a balloon when caught by the sterile glow of her smartphone. It is a winning performance in a show that examines modern life with sharpness and silliness. Fergus Morgan

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THEATRE

Puttana ★★★

Summerhall (Venue 26) until 31 August

This provocative and ambitious show from Trento-based company TeatroE uses binaural audio technology to create a kaleidoscopic portrait of one women’s experience of prostitution.

The audience wears headphones. Performer Beatric Elena Festi sits on a stool, surrounded by a forest of microphones, delivering a fractured, repetitive text. Effects warp her voice into different perspectives: the icy tones of a young woman who sells her body; the howling of the same woman’s inner thoughts; the bass growl of the married man who pays her to play act as a girl. Gradually, a narrative of sorts emerges: one of a daughter neglected by her father, a nihilistic sex worker in a spiralling crisis, and a domineering man driven to obsession, anger, and violence.

In a committed performance, Festi prowls around the space, strips into a negligee, rolls condoms onto mics, wolfs down a bag of crisps, and stares down audience members balefully. Michele Callà’s score is an inchoate cocktail of scratching strings and thundering drums. Director Mirko Corr keeps the audience on its toes with sudden, stark changes of lighting.

It could distil its ideas more coherently and make more imaginative use of its technology, but this is an intense and unsettling deep dive into the psyche of a sex worker nonetheless. Fergus Morgan

THEATRE

The Second Best School Shooting ★★★

Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33) until 30 August

School shootings in the US are alarmingly familiar events. In this two-handed dark comedy from LA-based writer Alice Stanley Jr, two have occurred on the same day in St Louis, Missouri. In one, fifteen students were killed. In the other, no-one died, and the shooter was apprehended.

Teenage friends Ava and Parker were involved in the latter and aren’t sure how to feel about it. The play unfolds in Parker’s bedroom, where the two pals are hanging out. Parker would rather forget about it all and study for a physics exam. Ava, though, is obsessed with the social media storm that has erupted around the fatal shooting. Why should they get all the attention? How can she piggyback on their grief? What could she do to insert herself into the story?

Unfolding over an hour of amusing and authentic adolescent chatter, Stanley Jr’s play is an indictment of gun violence, a portrait of how social media has pressure-cooked young people’s priorities, and, ultimately, a study of how true friendship can survive through it all.

Under Riley Rose Critchlow’s direction, Rachael DeBoer and Shaylaren Hilton provide two impressive performances, the former as the endearingly awkward Parker, the latter as the melodramatic motormouth Ava. They may not be on the news, but they are certainly victims. Fergus Morgan

THEATRE

A&E ★★★

theSpace @Symposium Hall (Venue 43) until 15 August

theSpace on the Mile (venue 39) until 22 August

Theres an effective mix of performances in this surprising new comedy set in the waiting room of the Accident and Emergency department a hospital in Woolwich (“it’s in London,” the opening titles helpfully tell us). Written and directed by Orla Wyatt, it begins with a chaotic blast of energy and almost desperate try-anything gags but improves as it the two-hour wait to be seen draws on (and lengthens). The play bravely flirts with boredom by convincingly portraying it. That it never becomes as enervating as the actual experience is down to the cast; predominantly Maisie Lambert as Evie, a prematurely aged meth addict and regular hospital visitor. Agressive, yobbish and twitching for a fix, Evie initally appears a boorish stereotype but Lambert’s skilful portrayal of her collection of tics, twitches, itches and wired chattiness is very well-drawn. Evie chats with the magnificently bored receptionist (Ice Dob), the nice middle-class lady who’s hurt her hand making a sandwich (Trixie Smith) but is particularly drawn to Adam (Ezana Betru) a prisoner injured after a fight with the police. Not all that much happens, really — which lends it a quiet realism — but the play’s amiably measured pace, Wyatt’s ear for dialogue and Lambert’s skilful performance make it worthwhile. Rory Ford

THEATRE

The Painted Revolutionary ★★

theSpace @ Surgeons’ Hall (Venue 53) until 15 August

This metaphorically dense play by Fionnuala Donnelly follows Struggle (Ellie Atkins) as she tries to bring change to her bookshop — a library of ideas. Her efforts are mostly frustrated by characters such as Order, Love, Class, Revolution, Injustice etc. It’s the sort of political satire that you might happen upon watching the Open University on BBC2 in the mid-80s and is almost entirely impenetrable. It’s made almost tolerable by Atkins, who is very good, and a cast who — even though they’re abstract concepts discussing abstract concepts — don’t put a foot wrong. You may, however — uh — struggle to take anything worthwhile from it. Rory Ford

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