Bounding into the fringe’s 10.15am slot, Jo Fong brings the manic euphoria you need in place of a morning coffee. Fong is a dancer who performed with the likes of Rosas and DV8 in her youth, and is here partnered with clown and circus director George Orange. Fong is warm, sarky and no nonsense, like your favourite secondary school teacher; Orange is just adorably silly – a ridiculous skit on ballet star Sergei Polunin’s Take Me to Church video sets the tone.
The Rest of Our Lives is an hour of the two fiftysomethings facing up to middle age with a string of observations, actions and questions: Will I be remembered? Will it hurt? “The struggle is real”, it says on the wall, as they wrestle with a pair of chairs. There’s a choice soundtrack, from Booker T and the MGs to Leonard Cohen, and they let the music do a lot of the work: the simple act of Orange passing his body through the frame of a chair is given pathos by a Purcell aria; the genius moment when Rage Against the Machine plays and, at the “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me” chorus, they silently eye each audience member in turn, in amused defiance.
Through choice looks, wry asides and hoiking about sometimes ungainly bodies, Fong and Orange masterfully flick the mood from absurd to tender to life-affirming, and when they throw in some joyful audience participation it’s impossible not to be on board with them. If middle age and beyond can be this – play, invention, moving our bodies, connecting with other people and larking about with friends – then Fong and Orange have found a blueprint for happily living the rest of our lives.
The Rest of Our Lives is at Summerhall, Edinburgh, until 28 August.
