So we are officially one week into the fringe and this is how I see it so far. I’ve watched some very good shows, some pretty mediocre ones and a couple of shockers, and I’m still looking for that five-star cracker that creates a real adrenaline rush.
If you are heading to the festival this weekend – or, indeed, have had a terrible run of shows and need a pick-me-up – the following list of tried-and-tested productions all have real merit, although you have to decide if they are going to be to your taste.
At the Traverse, you really can’t go wrong with A Girl is a Half-formed Thing and Vanishing Point’s Tomorrow, although neither are necessarily easy watches. If you want something very funny and cute – but not too cute – then How to Keep an Alien should hit the mark. Gary McNair’s The Gambler’s Guide to Dying is touching and multi-layered and Stef Smith’s Swallow may be misjudged in its final 10 minutes but is a stupendous piece of writing, jaggedly true about the pain of trying to keep going. You might bag a return for the much-lauded Fake It ’Til You Make It, about male depression, but if you can’t and want something on a similar theme, you could head to Assembly Mound where Le Gateau Chocolat is laying his soul bare. The animation element doesn’t really work, but when he opens his mouth to sing, the show sings too.
There’s plenty around about relationships. Pick of the bunch so far is Jack Thorne’s The Solid Life of Sugar Water at Pleasance. Not pleasant at all, but brutally honest and true. In similar but less sophisticated vein is James Fritz’s Ross & Rachel (much darker than anything in Friends) and the wild card would be Lemons, Lemons, Lemons – fresh and exciting work from new company Walrus at Zoo Southside.
If you want fresh and exciting, don’t miss Breach’s The Beanfield at theSpace on the Mile and Barrel Organ’s Some People Talk About Violence at Summerhall. There are loads of intriguing shows at this venue on the edge of the Meadows, including Portraits in Motion, which is one of my favourites of the fringe so far. Thaddeus Philips’s 17 Border Crossings is brilliantly designed and performed; Sue MacLaine’s Can I Start Again Please makes semiotics theatrical in a devastating piece about trauma and language, and to the Roundabout hits Every Brilliant Thing and Lungs, you can add Alexandra Wood’s knotty The Human Ear. The Daniel Kitson show Polyphony is sold out but you may get a return. Also check out Manwatching, the piece about sexual fantasies, written by an anonymous female writer and performed by a man giving it a cold reading. I’m watching James Acaster tomorrow. Daniel Bye’s Going Viral is thoughtful and playful in the Northern Stage season and Key Change has a real ring of authenticity. Women’s Hour by Sh!t Theatre is sharp and funny.
Close Up isn’t Circa’s greatest show, and it isn’t served well by the Underbelly space, but it’s still well worth seeing. At Assembly Roxy, Jamie Wood’s O No! is a slice of sweet absurdity that made me smile from beginning to end, and if you’re going to see just one show in the Jennifer Tremblay trilogy at Roxy, The List is the one to choose.
