Lexiconeer
Pleasance AceDome, 4 – 29 August 2010
Reviewed for The List (issue 665)
Watching Alderton is like channel-flipping between several different acts and finding that, by a million-to-one fluke, the composite experience makes perfect sense. ‘You can’t please everybody all of the time,’ chides his Gollum-like alter ego; but with observational material, characters, sound effects, impressions and music all vying for the mic, there’s probably a joke here for all tastes.
Cirque de Legume. Image courtesy of the EdFringe Media Office
Gilded Balloon Teviot, 6 – 30 August 2010
Reviewed for The List (issue 665)
The most impressive feat achieved in this send-up of circus performance is training the audience, Pavlov-style, to applaud whenever the phrase ‘How ‘bout that?’ is uttered – whether it follows a ‘levitating’ radish or an onion ‘striptease’. The two red-nosed clowns commit so fully to gross-out, chewed-food spectacle and clumsy sleight of hand that they must be aiming to be ‘so bad it’s good’. Unfortunately they aren’t quite that bad.
C Chambers Street, 5 – 21 August 2010
Reviewed for the British Theatre Guide
Two Dutchmen in shellsuits sending up Asian culture and traditions, armed with mime-katanas and a borderline offensive pidgin Chipanglish semi-nonsense language? This is what the Fringe is for: the shows you just couldn’t get away with anywhere else.
So there’s a prophecy and a destined battle and so on, but that’s not especially important. In fact, the plot is so unimportant that it’s provided nearly in full in a helpful explanatory pre-show pamphlet, so no one gets to grump about not being able to follow what’s going on.
What is important, at least to performers Ian Bok and Maarten Heijmans, is the way it’s told: with conventions lovingly harvested from Noh theatre and kung fu action cinema and equally lovingly processed through the parody mincer.
Dignified, ceremonial chants and processions are undermined by Heijmans’ strained, bulging eyes, or by their application to such banal tasks as eating a banana. The inevitable showdown is a (mimed) splatterfest of horrific (mimed) injuries and implausibly macho (mimed) recoveries. It’s gloriously silly and arguably meaningless; there’s no better place for it than the Fringe.
Devised by Ian Bok and Maarten Heijmans
C too, 5 – 30 August 2010
Reviewed for the British Theatre Guide
The 1947 film noir Lady in the Lake, based on Raymond Chandler’s hardboiled detective novel of the same name, is shot entirely from the detective’s perspective. The camera smokes, gets kissed, punched and shot at, the idea being to translate the iconic first-person viewpoint of the detective novel to the silver screen. The viewer is meant to feel like he (or to a lesser extent she) is the detective.
A similar intention lies behind Suspicious Package, and the technology of today’s audioguided performance is much better equipped to achieve it than that of 40s cinema. With the help of four video iPods loaded with instructions, four participants every hour become a detective, a tough guy, an heiress and a showgirl in a boilerplate noir mystery.
These are instantly recognisable genre archetypes, easy to ham up regardless of the participants’ acting ability. Be aware, however, that cross-gender casting can occur and that all participants are required to wear their identifying costume pieces out and about on the Grassmarket.
As well as cueing actions and dialogue, the iPods supply both the laconic internal monologue (via audio) and flashbacks (via video) that typify noir literature. Reading lines off the screen limits engagement with fellow participant-performers – other similar practitioners deliver dialogue aurally, with more success – but onscreen maps eliminate the problems associated with aurally delivered directions (like people’s different walking speeds) and free up the audio track for more character-establishing internal monologue.
As for the plot, well, it’s at least convoluted enough to sustain interest for the necessary 45 minutes. Whether it’s satisfying or rewarding depends entirely on the level of investment and commitment from the participants, and while it’s hard not to commit to a character whose innermost thoughts are running loud and clear through your head, constantly referring to the screen for lines does make it difficult to remain in character.
Written by Gyda Arber
C Central, 5 – 30 August 2010
Reviewed for The List (issue 664)
Once you’re over the sight of four grown men capering about dressed unconvincingly as babies, this is perfectly adequate family entertainment. A toybox of props provides pretexts for magic, juggling, balloon modelling and a healthy dollop of slapstick. But beware: the cast’s infantile babbling often continues longer than is necessary to set up each stunt; and those in the front row will be humiliated.
Flesh and Blood and Fish and Fowl promo image, courtesy of the EdFringe Media Office
Traverse @ St Stephen’s, 4 – 28 August 2010
Reviewed for The List (issue 663)
When the human race has all but died out, when the Earth has erased almost all evidence of our existence, the last redoubt of our once great civilisation will be … the back office of a microwave meal manufacturer.
As a premise, it sounds half-baked; but like Flesh and Blood and Fish and Fowl itself, the more you stew on it, the more sense it makes. Jerry (Geoff Sobelle) and Rhoda (Charlotte Ford) are the logical conclusion of the typical office environment, where a trip to the watercooler has more to do with marking time than with thirst: they cling to office etiquette even as creepers and critters encroach inexorably on their cubicles.
Sobelle’s considerable clowning skills get a thorough workout, parodying displacement activities from photocopying to fly-swatting. But it’s the bizarre work of the clearly unhinged Jessica Grindstaff and Erik Sanko – puppeteering and remote-controlling stuffed woodland creatures that peek from drawers or erupt from boxes of printer paper – that eventually leaves the audience as hysterical as the characters, laughing uncontrollably with next to no idea why.
Written by Geoff Sobelle and Charlotte Ford
Crew includes Jessica Grindstaff and Erik Sanko (set and puppet designers), James Clotfelter (lighting designer) and Nick Kourtides (sound designer)
Cast includes Charlotte Ford (Rhoda) and Geoff Sobelle (Jerry)
Written for The Collective Review, 7 August 2009
If you can’t make it to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe this year, because a banker vaporised your life savings, or because National Express couldn’t be bothered to drive you up the East Coast, or because you usually live in Edinburgh and have gone on holiday to Inverness for the month, never fear!
You can recreate the experience of battling your way along the Royal Mile, accosted every other step by acts and PRs waggling flyers or props or parts of their anatomy in an effort to get your attention, without even leaving your desk.
Everyone who’s anyone at the Fringe this year is on Twitter, so add this little lot, feed the TweetDeck updates through your screen, smart phone or VirtuSpecs* and enjoy the onslaught in the comforting knowledge that, unlike those of us who actually need to get from one end of the actual Royal Mile to the other in a hurry, you can de-inconvenience yourself at the touch of a button.
Venues
Will incessantly plug their own shows, often providing the Twitter usernames of their acts for you to add to your Fringe Friend Frenzy.
Traverse Theatre – @traversetheatre
Assembly Venues – @Assembly09
Pleasance Courtyard/Dome (comedy programme only) – @PleasanceComedy
Underbelly – @UNDERBELLY09
Gilded Balloon Teviot – @Gildedballoon
Bedlam Theatre – @bedlamfringe
The Hive – @TheHiveFringe09
Reviews
They’re already calling it Twitticism – reviewing shows in 140 characters or less. I’ve tried it. It’s very difficult to do the show justice unless the … tweview … is backed up by a full length piece elsewhere in print on online.
@EdTwinge is, as far as I can tell, endorsed and possibly set up by the Fringe Society (Professor Ed Hegg of @TheFringeThing has certainly been plugging it for a few days now), and promises a “Realtime, Twitter-based, crowd-sourced Edinburgh Fringe review service”. Hashtag your tweets #edtwinge to become part of the crowd they’re sourcing from. Could prove interesting, if only as an experiment; watch this space.
The List (a print listings and reviews magazine, Edinburgh and Glasgow’s equivalent of Time Out, and first to coin the hashtag #twitreview) – @thelistmagazine
Fest (A5 print magazine, festival-only, affiliated with the University of Edinburgh) – @festmag
ThreeWeeks and Broadway Baby (daily or thereabouts A3 freesheets; ThreeWeeks is staffed by students, who are given professional journalism training, then unleashed on the Fringe) – @ThreeWeeks, @broadwaybabycom
FringeGuru (a guide to the festival, and progenitors of the iFringe iPhone app) – @FringeGuru
Official Bodies
Edinburgh Festival itself tweets as @edinburghfest – mostly it just aggregates news about the festivals.
From within the Festival as a whole, the Festival Fringe also tweets at @EdinburghFringe, providing gossip, news and dates for your diary.
And within that, the self-explanatory Five Pound Fringe strand tweets at @fivepoundfringe.
Finally, Professor Ed Hegg tweets all things Fringe along with his attempts to crack the mysterious oviform Fringe Thing, at @TheFringeThing.
*Reference to future technology included to increase article’s long-term relevance, writer’s perceived foresightedness.
