Fringe theatre reviews: As Far As We Know | Nesting | Surreally Good | Playback | You Come From a Long Line of Shallow People | Thermodrama

As Far As We Know | Mihaela Bodlovic

THEATRE

As Far As We Know ★★★★

Summerhall (Venue 26) until 31 August

As Far As We Know unfolds in a typical three-act structure, but this is the subversive storytelling show’s first and final nod to tradition. Instead, the new work from acclaimed theatre company YESYESNONO’s Sam Ward throws the rulebook entirely out of the window. A first act delivered with the agility and breakneck speed of a tongue twister? Check. A second act entirely without a performer? Check. As Far As We Know is the latest in Ward’s preoccupation with metatheatre, in how the strangeness of form and narrative and genre can be spotlighted in order to reveal something much deeper about how we understand ourselves.

If this sounds frustratingly intellectual, fear not. As Far As We Know is about all these things – it is also a play where a woman goes on a chaotic quest when mysterious humming holes appear in her garden, a play with an extremely silly hardboiled detective delivered with a perfect Humphrey Bogart-esque impression, and a play in which the mystery of the holes reaches a crescendo point reminiscent of Welcome to Nightvale’s eerie absurdism. As Far As We Know is as much an inheritor of these generic traditions as it is of the Adam and Eve story, and the original sin that pushed humans to seek knowledge above anything else. How much of storytelling and narrative is a pursuit of knowing things? What happens when there are things beyond our understanding? In an age of constant information, can not knowing ever be good?

YESYESNONO have long excelled in making theatre that speaks to the big existential questions of our time in surprisingly humorous and tangential ways. This is the best of what storytelling can be – not flat, not passive, and fascinated by the curiosities of the world and its own ability to convey them even at all. Anahit Behrooz

THEATRE

Nesting ★★★★

Summerhall (Venue 26) until 31 August

Francis’s hand begins to fail, a diagnosis of motor neurone disease following soon after. “An inheritance would be nice,” his daughter quips before she knows what’s coming – a line that colours the rest of the play. As his condition worsens, Francis slips away to the park to meet a seagull, played with astonishing physicality: a wheeling, swooping presence with white eyebrows and streaked hair. The bird offers him a bargain – it will nest inside his body, take him over, and free his daughter from the burden of his care.

That daughter, heavily pregnant, teaches full-time, and is now expected to absorb manual handling courses, call buttons and Francis’s swinging moods. A male doctor dismisses her pregnancy symptoms as “to be expected,” while offering no such flexibility for what’s expected of her as a carer. The play is sharpened by its fury about the NHS, which can offer only 2.5 hours of care a day. Throughout, a hospital curtain is wheeled across the stage by unseen hands, as if of its own accord – an effective image for lives moved along by forces they cannot control.

The tonal mix – crossword puzzles and quiet domestic scenes sitting beside a talking seagull and a holdall containing a dog, a nod to Keith Moon’s bucket list – works to effect, though pacing can wane during transitions between realism and the absurd. A scene in which Francis, falling, strikes his daughter’s pregnant stomach highlights the stakes: dying and new life scrambling for purchase in the same room.

The finale erupts into feathers and strobe light, a crescendo that could easily have tipped dark comedy into farce, or grief into melodrama. Remarkably, neither happens: Trolley Problem, following their sold-out Mistero Buffo at the Citizens Theatre, have made a play that is at once funny, absurd and devastating. Josephine Balfour-Oatts

THEATRE

Surreally Good ★★★★

Summerhall (Venue 26) until 31 August

Meet Scott Turnbull, our edutainment director for the evening. He’s the latest in a long line of Turnbulls to own their Stockton-on-Tees family business, but recently financial difficulties have forced him to sell up to the multinational Wilkes-Booth Corporation. So tonight he’s presenting the Tees Valley Projector Club’s popular projector show That’s Edutainment as a franchise-holder only, but with the ghosts of the past looking on he’s still going to give it his best shot.

What this means in practice is that Turnbull (the performer himself, now in his second year at the Fringe, rather than the character version of himself he’s playing) delivers an hour’s worth of quirkily eccentric but very funny off-the-wall comedy, with the aid of some felt-tip pens and an overhead projector of the kind an older generation might remember from school lessons.

Bearing the dry but eager demeanour of a travelling salesperson or a substitute teacher, he frantically draws cartoons on sheets of transparent plastic, moving them around the projector surface and animating them himself like very DIY cartoons. Audience members are drawn in caricature and given silly names and personalities via the medium of silly limericks, and in a tour de force of masterful nonsense, Turnbull performs an extended tale about an emo teen bunny rabbit relocating from LA to Middlesbrough and developing a crush on Sharon, the sexy female rabbit living next door.

Meanwhile his new boss keeps calling him and berating his performance, concerned by reports he’s “going full silly-billy”. A bit of a satire on corporatism, the show is mostly just an excuse for its creator to let some madcap ideas off the leash. By turns warmly twee, like a half-remembered TV entertainer of years gone by, and bitingly, abrasively weird, Turnbull taps in beautifully to a great tradition of surreal Northern English comedy in the style of Vic and Bob, John Shuttleworth and Frank Sidebottom. David Pollock

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THEATRE

Playback ★★★

Summerhall (Venue 26) until 30 August

In 2012, when he was 11, Euan Munro set up a YouTube channel. It started small – 130 subscribers and 8000 views over eight months – but soon exploded. At the height of his adolescent internet fame, over 10,000 subscribers tuned in to watch comedy skits Munro filmed in his suburban Scottish bedroom. There was, though, a more sinister side to his online career: intense pressure, abusive comments, and parasocial relationships with predatory adults.

In this revealing multimedia solo show, Munro – now in his mid-twenties and a recent graduate of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland – reflects on his experiences with wit and charm.

Directed by Katya Searle, the show is set in Munro’s childhood bedroom, complete with Minecraft duvet, with Munro playing his younger self. At first, his YouTube adventure is a laugh. Gradually, though, it grows darker: he falls out with his pal Cammy, he gets an agent that starts dictating his content, he feels beholden to his following, and a creepy older man – handle Billosaurus – messages him incessantly. The internet, Munro makes clear, is a dangerous place.

All this unfolds in a slickly choreographed mix of direct address, video calls, phone conversations, screened chats, and real YouTube videos created by Munro as a kid. It is an entertaining and alarming behind-the-scenes look at what has become a billion-dollar industry. Fergus Morgan

THEATRE

You Come From a Long Line of Shallow People ★★★

Just The Tonic at The Mash House (Venue 288) until 30 August

There’s barely a stage to speak of in the attic space of the Mash House, though Joanne Green barely needs one. She handles the show’s rises, falls and tensions deftly, though the stripped-back staging is as much a limitation as a strength, lending the piece the warmth of a conversation rather than a performance.

This is stand-up as memoir: her mother calling to ask, “how do you look?” rather than “how are you,” a childhood spent playing hide and seek with her own self-esteem. Green plays second fiddle to a sister with thick hair, “a more substantial person,” while her hair thinned from bulimia and a diet pill addiction, with her mother’s love functioning as “the ultimate vitamin.” She recalls a wig worn to fool her GP into another prescription, the moment she realised she was an actor.

The show turns once her mother is diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer, asking Green to pray before a biopsy – the first thing she’d ever asked of her. Green calls her mother an “emotional terrorist,” yet she continues to find joy in discovering her name lingering on the membership lists of shops, proof she remains in the world. Josephine Balfour-Oatts

THEATRE

Thermodrama ★★

Summerhall (Venue 26) until 31 August

This new drama from emerging company Lovelock Productions focuses on four people – two estranged sisters, an optimisation-obsessed man, and a cyclist who has just been hit by a car – stewing in a sauna. It is not, confusingly, being staged in the Sauna Theatre, but director Lydia Free, her design team, and the four-strong cast do a good job of evoking an intense, sweaty atmosphere. Coco Cottam’s play, though is a bit of a mess. It toys with interesting themes of self-improvement, but is tonally odd, sitting uncomfortably between naturalism and uncanniness, and the melodramatic ending feels blunt and silly. Fergus Morgan

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