Theatre

Fringe Reviews

Alan Hindle | Wednesday 15 August, 2012 17:39

Self Criticism
“The world has a lot of existentialism, but not much existence.”

A plain woman is trapped in a room a beautiful, vibrant, sexual, reckless woman, and they are two halves of the same woman. Both are waiting for a man. One wants to be The One, the true love of this man, this man who already has a girlfriend, who occasionally swans in to pout seductively or strum a guitar. The other wants to be The Other, the mistress who never has to bear the burden of a relationship. While these roles never change much in Self Criticism there is a power shift as the meek victim slowly realises a way to defeat her imperious sexuality and escape her prison of dependence. It’s not the smart one. Just getting over the guy would be better, but there you go. Men are not entirely the problem.

The performances manage to tread a fine line between stylised and arch. Even when the show descends to Gothic horror it still somehow holds itself together simply through the quality of the actors spilling their terrifying psyches onto the stage. (After the show the cast looked utterly drained.) The ideas being explored are fascinating (if not always coherent) and with the intensity of the characters, the graceful direction, this is one of the more interesting dramas at the Fringe.

Self Criticism will be playing in Edinburgh 21-27 August at The Vault (Annexe)

Four By Four
Four short plays that KUDOS theatre can presumably arrange as they please to present two of an evening. On offer the night I saw it: Marcel Duchamp buys a a urinal and some hicks evade a tornado by hunkering in a cellar with a kidnapped English stormchaser.

In the first play the dadaists, centred around Duchamp, are organising the 1917 Society of Independent Artists exhibition and facing controversy over the now famous urinal signed ‘R. Mutt’. Besides battling their accents and a script smothered in exposition and art jargon, the actors individually come across as believable- and occasionally quite droll- but somehow never gel as a group. There is the same problem in the second play about escaping a storm. While the acting is uneven in quality I think my real problem lies with the director. Sorry, director. You’ve thrown so much potential humour away presenting Duchamp as an unsociable stiff. The man was hilarious! He exhibited a toilet signed by “R Mutt” and a moustachioed Mona Lisa under a title which punned in French as “She Has a Hot Ass.” C’mon!

Several excellent performances but overall some bad choices made in the shaping of the two shows I saw. Still, that means there’s a 50/50 chance another night is better, and the thing about art is that it’s all in the eye of the beholder.

Keep Your Pecker Up!
Ellie Powell is a singer infatuated with the songs of the 40s and 50s. In Keep Your Pecker Up she assumes the identity of her nan who worked at the coat check of the Fox Club in Mayfair. There’s no real plot, just a series of memories and songs, all bundled together with Powell’s bubbly enthusiasm and encylcopedic knowledge of wartime catchphrases and mannerisms. I’m not sure if Powell is an actor who sings or a singer giving acting a go because she really wants to tell these stories. Her version of a woman from that era seems drawn directly from film clips. On the other hand, people must have been like that, or they wouldn’t have come across that way on film. People from a not-so-distant-yet-now-alien time.

Powell is boisterous fun and never stops moving. She has a beautiful voice, a perky demeanour and carries an extremely thin production well. Whether this show would appeal to a younger crowd is academic. Powell would be perfectly happy to perform Keep Your Pecker for every nan who wants to sing along, doling out biscuits and winks for the grandads.

Love and Death and That
Three northern lasses read poetry short stories, sing songs and generally ruminate on how much they love the north, but not so much as not actually having to live there anymore. This was Not The Bronte’s first public performance and they asked the audience to be nice. But they needn’t have. Many of the poems were lovely, and delivered in such an easy, conversational style that it felt more like you were just having a chat. In an oven. The Camden Head needs to strategically place buckets of ice around that sauna.

Apparently Yorkshirites (Yorkshorians? Yorkshorepersons?) still carry a huge bloody chip on their hunched, coal-dusted shoulders over the War of the Roses. And the Catholic Church still sustains and crushes every soul eking a mouthful from the grim moors. Which is probably why folks up there manage to be so miserable and yet so incredibly funny. My favourite part of the show was a short story, written and read by Polly Penter, called A Good Funeral. A horrible, vindictive battleaxe of an aunt has died and passed all her belongings on to the church. Said church is very delighted and tints Father Pete’s elegy the rosiest of pink, much to the bemusement of the family who actually knew her. This was one of the funniest short stories I’ve ever heard, and if Not The Brontes have any sense they’ll rework it and pitch it as a drama to the BBC.

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