Fringe musical reviews: Hot Mess | Hey Stop!!! | This Play Sucks!
Musical talent and impressive choreography abound in the latest round-up of our Fringe musical reviews.
Hot Mess ★★★★
Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 60) until 25 August
It’s not often that you get an earth-shattering new take on a conventionally structured musical. This one, about our changing relationship with the planet we call home, pushes multi-rolling to its extreme with Danielle Steers playing the Earth and Tobias Turley as Humanity, as they get together and fall apart during the evolution of mankind. Having a “glow up” in a pink denim jacket and jeans, she wants someone who can protect her from a meteorite; he’s too “extractive” and getting increasingly obsessive about agriculture, then oil, then Mars.
It’s an ingenious concept that’s constantly operating on at least three levels – classic make-up-break-up story, environmental commentary and witty comedy – in which Ellie Coote’s and Jack Godfrey’s writing and lyrics are defiantly cleverer than the mainstream, musical genre that they’re a part of but, nevertheless, tightly stick within.
There’s a danger that in trying to fit so something so complex into a structure so rigid that the content will be simplified or contrived, but it’s a testament to the writing team’s talent that, as the piece goes on, they’re able to capture the nuance of corporate capitalist greenwashing versus genuine concern for the environment, offering no easy solutions and instead raising pertinent and, ultimately, unanswered questions.
The concept and the song lyrics are more original than the score which, for a piece celebrating the natural world, is contrastingly synthetic with similar-sounding tunes set to varying beats banged out on a Korg keyboard, under the artificial lights of an Ikea-styled set.
Steers and Turley give solid performances as characters whose architeypical human traits are made interesting by the planetary concerns that they represent. When Earth decides to go her own way, things become more interesting only for the piece to end as the real conflict begins and we’re forced to confront a world in which Earth and Humanity consciously or unconsciously uncouple and its consequences for us all.
Sally Stott
Main house at C ARTS | C venues | C aurora (Venue 6) until 22 August
Billed as a meditation on social anxiety, Hey Stop!!! offers little new insight into the condition. Instead, five dancers depict stereotypical scenes of nervousness and panic: The group jerks their muscles to glitchy electronic music, before one dancer runs hysterically around the stage, stumbling and falling as she tries to stop arguments between people around her. Unlike the work of Pina Bausch, the German expressionist choreographer cited as an inspiration, much of the dramatics come off as overdone and inauthentic.
“I have a lot of complex feelings about social interactions and connecting with people,” says a voiceover, restating what’s already obvious from the action onstage. Some moments show potential, such as a performer, engulfed in a white sheet, moving toward and recoiling from the claps and slaps of castmates who appear to taunt her. Yet these are not given enough time to develop. In short, Hey Stop!!! is packed with ideas that would benefit from refinement.
Emily May
This Play Sucks! ★★★
theSpace @ Venue 45 (Venue 45) until 23 August
It doesn’t actually (suck, that is), but calling Sean Tennant’s mash-up of vampirism and tartan tourism a “play” might seem a little grand. It’s more like a relentlessly good-humoured Halloween panto for adults. Cammy (Jordan Monks) and Lee (Aidan Curley) are low-rent Glaswegian gangsters sent to the bonny Highlands to kidnap the reclusive Lord Armstrong (a very impressively undead Alexander Donaldson) in his castle. Although bonding immediately due to Armstrong’s centuries-old anti-English sentiments, things quickly spiral out of control.
There are some novel ideas here; the castle is a labyrinthine maze that’s bigger on the inside than it appears (“Whut, like thae Tardis?” enquires Lee), which means that some residents of the castle haven’t actually seen each other in decades. It even toys with the nature of national identity and reclaims the figure of the Scottish nobleman vampire, first seen in J.R. Planche’s 1820 play The Vampire.
However, this is really an excuse for some high-grade silliness played at 110 miles an hour with surprising physical dexterity (some of the performances are occasionally alarmingly committed) and an unusual vein of gags about Celtic-Rangers rivalry not usually found in gothic literature.
Rory Ford
Letters to Joan ★★★
Greenside @ George Street Venue 236 Until 23 August
When actor and writer Samantha Streit discovered the love letters written by her grandparents in the 1950s, she found herself with more questions than answers. Her grandmother Joan shines out from the pages, a young playwright, full of excitement about her life, deeply in love. She could hardly be more different from the woman Samatha knew, who suffered from paralysing depression.
Directed by Martavius Parrish, the play moves between 1956, when Streit plays the young Joan with great charm and energy, and the present day, when she takes her thorny questions to her grandfather Lenny (Kevin Cahill). Their conversation starts awkwardly, gradually growing more confiding, but when Sam’s questioning about Joan becomes pointed, he simply changes the subject.
Streit is haunted by the fact that her grandmother was a playwright too, but never fulfilled her potential. Is that why she became depressed? If she could fail, could I? She doesn’t really get the clarity she’s looking for, and so neither do we, the audience. This makes for a static and slightly frustrating play, but given the complexities of families and secrets, perhaps a more realistic one.
Susan Mansfield
Ding Dong! Avon Calling! ★★
theSpace @ Surgeons' Hall (53) until 22 August
This fun comedy about a group of “boss ladies” trying to “sell some shit” might not get the endorsement of the beauty brand in the title, which feels somewhat unfairly caught up in the bitching, body shaming and boozing that ‘Queen’ Victoria, hanger-on Naomi, straight-laced Sarah Jane and new recruit Frankie partake in.
There are some striking laugh-out-loud moments in the sitcom-styled script, particularly from Naomi, who’s more interested in selling God than eye shadows, paired with some clunkier lines that stand out like the lipsticks she may have left in the mini quiches. This is a talented company, with polished performances and witty characterful writing that, with a bit more consistency, could have a glossy shine.
Sally Stott
Pain Killer ★★
Greenside @ George Street (Venue 236) until 23 August
This unevenly toned but consistently well-performed tale of a woman’s desire to heal others, following a vision in an Ayahuasca ceremony in the Hollywood Hills, sit somewhere between satire, personal story and, at times, uncomfortable to watch.
Based on Evelyne Tollman’s real-life experiences, it builds towards a concluding message of healing yourself before trying to cure your friend’s cancer and son’s rare leg disease, but using their stories to make a point about self-development, from a stage in Edinburgh in which she’s still channelling main character energy, ends up feeling self-centred in a way that the piece is otherwise attempting to warn against.
Sally Stott
Make sure you keep up to date with Arts and Culture news from across Scotland by signing up to our free newsletter here.
Comments
Want to join the conversation? Please or to comment on this article.