This is the time of year commentators like to weigh in about the big themes on the Edinburgh fringe. The festival is a cultural barometer and, after a few days of back-to-back theatregoing, you seem to get an insight into society’s most pressing concerns. Last year, for example, it was all about colonialism and its connections to misogyny, capitalism and violence.
Things this year, of course, are different, but the Traverse is gamely flying the festival flag with an online programme that captures something of the excitement of plays rubbing up against each other. Being released over the course of this week, its audio-only Breakfast Plays introduce five playwrights whose concerns extend beyond our current Covid preoccupations but can’t quite shake off a sense of apocalyptic doom.
Fascinatingly, three of them respond to the brief to “tackle what happens after an earth-shattering event occurs” by moving into fantasy territory. Uma Nada-Rajah begins The Watercooler in an everyday staff room, but takes a magical-realist turn when Laura Lovemore’s Kai leaves her human form.
Her transformation is a response to the expectations put upon her as a black woman. Previously ignored when she complained of racism in her white workplace, she now finds herself championed in the company’s post-George Floyd rush to make amends. Preferring to set her own agenda, she rejects the system and escapes.
In Rabbit Catcher, Rebecca Martin initially appears to go backwards into a world of ancient myth. Set on Ord Hill, with its views of Inverness, her play is animated by a living landscape and populated by the nameless dead. The haunting sound design by Oğuz Kaplangı adds to the poetic air, but rather than pull us back into fantasy escapism, Martin thrusts us forward to a gender battle full of feminist rage. This is ancient myth repurposed for today.
Amy Rhianne Milton heads in the opposite direction in Matterhorn, taking us to the end of time where a besieged cathedral is the last bastion of human life. As the residents argue over the best way to deal with the lost souls surrounding them, Milton seems to evoke the fears of island Britain in an era of refugees, global pandemic and isolationist politics.
Conor O’Loughlin’s Doomsdays is about a couple who track down their former cult leader nine years after the world failed to end. In form, the play feels like an extended joke, but in substance it hones in on the stubborn nature of belief and the impossibility of changing minds even with empirical evidence.
The best of the bunch turns out to be the closest to home. Written by Jamie Cowan, Contemporary Political Ethics (or How to Cheat) is set in a sleepy polling station where Bhav Joshi’s modern-studies student is reluctantly observing Robbie Jack’s presiding officer and Anna Russell-Martin’s clerk in the closing hour of an election. What begins as a culture-clash comedy evolves into a slippery political drama about power, representation and democracy. Without naming a single political party, it leaves no opinion secure.
Other shows on their way in the expanding Traverse programme include Declan, an adaptation of Kieran Hurley’s excellent Mouthpiece, and Shielders, a new piece of sci-fi Afrofuturism by Matilda Ibini. Online already is Fionnuala Kennedy’s Removed, a moving monologue about a boy in the care system superbly played by Conor O’Donnell and recommended to fans of Jenni Fagan’s The Panopticon.
