Fringe theatre reviews: To Be Frank | Sublimation | @Jenna | How Not to Make It In America and more

To Be Frank ★ ★ ★ ★

Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33) until 30 August

The version of the archetypal Frankenstein's Monster seen in this clowning physical comedy by New Zealand actor Michael Hockey is more Herman Munster than Boris Karloff, right down to the comically nonplussed expression he wears as he tries to figure out what's going on in his small but monster-sized world.

Zapped to life by electricity, Frank's first task is to attempt to raise himself off the ground, a feat of gnarled, limb-stretching dexterity whose lengthy execution doesn’t get any less funny for the time it takes. Before long he's found himself a Bride (a member of the audience, their relationship consummated with a polite handshake from the stalls) and even a child. This latter character is played by a balloon, and Frank's efforts to simply get it tied and draw a smiley face on it are hilarious enough.

Beautifully lit under queasy green lamps, it takes a moment to realise that the towering Hockey doesn't appear to be wearing lifts or stilts, but is in fact just a very tall actor, which adds much to the impression of Frank having a cumbersome body which moves with deceptive dexterity and swiftness. As he towers and totters, a wonderful sense of jeopardy is built when it looks like he’s come within inches of crashing on top of the audience.

It’s also a beautifully responsive piece of work, with a live electric guitarist playing a score which acts more like a series of sound effect responses to what’s going on. Meanwhile Hockey, in mask, make-up and acting completely non-verbally, beyond the oft-grunted approximation of a word, comes across perfectly clearly through facial and physical expression alone.

It’s a lovely, all-action, cheekily funny piece of work which will appeal to most of the family, although smaller children might perhaps be freaked out by the opening jumpscare, popping balloons and occasional air of cartoon menace. Then again, I was scared of Herman Munster when I was little, so maybe it’s just me. David Pollock

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Sublimation ★ ★ ★ ★

Braw Venues @ Grand Lodge (Venue 7) until 30 August

Integrity: it’s a tough thing to maintain at the best of times, let alone when your work is drying up, your apartment is falling apart, and your family are struggling with their medical bills. Writer and actor Frank Murdocco’s neat and punchy little thought experiment/solo show inexorably ratchets up the stakes to ask: how far would you compromise your cherished beliefs for an easy life?

And it does so very effectively, credibly (for the most part), and elegantly. Ethan is a one-man independent merch maker whose orders have slowed to barely a trickle, when he gets a call from a mystery client. Could he make and deliver a rush order of T-shirts, by the following day? You bet he could – until he’s informed what wording he’ll be printing on them.

The friction between firmly held beliefs, temptation and pragmatic reality pulses through Murdocco’s play like an exposed nerve, and his Faustian bargain demands more and more of his soul as its rewards grow ever richer. It’s pretty obvious how Murdocco has structured his ever-tenser narrative, but that’s not to say Sublimation feels calculated or formulaic.

Indeed, his Ethan is a believably rounded character whose frustrations, hopes and desires seem so persuasively commonplace that they could relate to any one of us – as Murdocco no doubt intended. As the stakes rise to their highest points, and as loyalty and self-belief come under brutal attack, narrative authenticity might give way slightly to symbolic convenience. By then, however, he and his audience are in too deep to care.

Murdocco’s is a fluid, fluent performance, striding restlessly around his messy apartment/workshop-of-a-stage; and director Noah Eisenberg keeps the pace rapid and the ideas and dilemmas flowing thick and fast.

Sublimation is a single-minded show that wastes neither a word nor a narrative twist in its unforgiving (and often darkly funny) dissection of integrity and loyalty. And despite knowing full well where this is all going, it’s hard not to wonder (and despair) at how we got there. David Kettle

@jenna ★ ★ ★

C aquila at C Venues (Venue 21) until 30 August

“Sometimes, I get obsessed with people,” Winnie Stack shares in her teenage confessional solo show. Drawing on real excerpts from her childhood diaries, she unpacks her first object of queer affection: Pam (Jenna Fischer) from the American remake of The Office, with only an anthropomorphised tree to guide her through it.

We are immediately endeared to Stack and her brand of cringe comedy, adjacent in physicality to fellow Second City alum Hannah Pilkes, and thematically to shows like PEN15. It is brilliantly clever in its depiction of the denial, confusion and eventual catharsis of coming out to oneself. Stack’s comedic timing doesn’t miss – including her deft handling of a presentation pointer – and she keeps us engaged through a satisfying mix of bits and confessionals.

There are a series of heartfelt conclusions, any of which could have ended the show with a punch. Stack chooses a softer, more explicative ending, and it is this tendency to spell things out that makes the show land sweetly and safely where it could be more stirring. Ironically, with a little more trust in the audience – perhaps with deeper engagement with them – Stack could push @Jenna from very good to great. Mika Morava

How Not to Make It In America ★ ★ ★

Summerhall (Venue 26) until 31 August

Many actors trying to find themselves a career will no doubt have their own tale of metropolitan struggle in times where it felt like nothing would go right for them. For many, even the ones who arrived in the end, that story will have taken place in Edinburgh during August. For the character played by Jono Darby in this new monologue presented by House of Oz and Theatre Republic, however, the city of his dreams – and nightmares – is New York.

The sense in the early stages of playwright Emily Steel’s piece, inspired by her own experience, is that this might be a fairly typical compendium of audition tales, with Darby’s actor turning up for a Romeo & Juliet audition reading having been misinformed that it’s a gender-swapped production. Wearing an ill-suited pair of angel wings, he struggles on with reading Juliet’s words before the inevitable disappointment.

Smith’s performance and Steel’s words take us within this actor’s experience, to a place where he has an acute ability to subsist at near-starvation levels while greeting his dogsbody job at a video store and precarious lodgings on a friend’s couch with a foolhardy ongoing optimism. Then it goes deeper, reflecting the angst of its immediately post-9/11 setting with revelations of the actor’s deeper delusion. Actors might recognise elements of his experience, but to most it will be a cautionary tale. David Pollock

READ MORE: My Festival: Salty Brine

I Am Going To Reveal Something Personal About Myself ★ ★ ★

Greenside @ Riddles Court (Venue 16) until 29 August

Warning: audience participation. Three words that can cast terror into the hearts of timid Fringegoers. Be assured there is nothing to fear from Sarah Dealy’s one-woman show - if she ever gets going with its titular promise. Except of course the loss of one’s rights, agency, reason and very soul. Because Dealy has come to the Fringe prepared with some serious-not-serious forms for her audience to fill out before she will even consider getting into character as the women of her family who went before her. Women such as her grandmother, who worked in a screw factory and presumably had a profound impact on Dealy.

But first, those forms.

Dealy is fluent in legalese and happily breaks down the jargon for us. Who knew there was such a thing as a Non-Judgement Condition, or an Emerging Writer Partner Agreement? Or a Non-Interpretation Clause, which this reviewer is forced to break right now…

I Am Going to Reveal Something Personal About Myself is a likeable meta-comic comment on the way that red tape can suck all the joy from public artistry, the justifiable fears of artists sticking their heads above the parapet and the general rush to judgement of anyone in the public-facing sphere. Dealy may even be having a mischievous dig at the standard blueprint for solo Fringe shows. Arguably, she doesn’t go far enough with her satire.

In this case, there actually is a contract between performer and audience which may or may not be worth the paper it is printed on. Just remember to read the small print (if you can, it really is very small). Fiona Shepherd

00:45:00 ★ ★ ★

theSpace @ Surgeons’s Hall (Venue 53) until 22 August; theSpace @ Venue 45 (Venue 45) until 28 August

It is very important that you vote at a crucial point in this clever little play written and directed by Katie Gaven. It’s literally a matter of life and death. Five young Americans sign up for a clinical trial, once they take a pill an on-stage digital clock counts down from 45 minutes. Whether it ever reaches 00:00:00 is rather up to you. There are actually quite a few rules and regulations — as well as twists and turns — in this but they’re all very clearly laid out by the cheerfully officious Dr Wilison, played by the excellent Mary Kathryn Brown.

It’s a useful index of the care and attention Gaven has given this production that the programme notes contain potted biographies of all the experimental subjects as well as some background information of Dr Wilison and Wilison Labs Bio. This rings some quite unexpected changes in the ever-popular people-trapped-in-a-room thriller subgenre. The five participants in the experiment, produced by North Carolina’s Thomas S Kenan Institute for the Arts, are clearly a class apart and give this a refreshing sheen of realism — particularly in the scenes of panicked overlapping dialogue. Just don’t forget to vote. Rory Ford

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