Fringe theatre reviews: Copycat | My Life is a Sonnet | In Other Words | Jellyfish | The Tao of Lloyd + more

Copycat | Andzrej Szymanksi

Copycat ★ ★ ★ ★

Pleasance Dome (Venue 23) until 31 August

Understanding generative AI and what it means for us is one of the hot topics of this Fringe. Joe Sellman-Leava, who is a scriptwriter for children’s television as well as a theatre maker, began to investigate it because he believes it is already impacting his livelihood. But what is a large language model, when you gets right down to it? Imitation.

Sellman-Leave has worked with director Katharina Reinthaller and designer Dylan Howells to build this fiercly clever show around his talent for impressions. He does various politicians with aplomb, big tech bosses, Arnold Schwartznegger, Kermit the Frog, all the main characters in The Lord of the Rings films. In between, he delves into etymology, how children learn language (partly imitation, again) and the relationship between art and imitation.

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The emotional backbone of the show is his relationship with his high school drama teacher, Mr Swift, the first person he ever impersonated. He was the best kind of teacher, the kind who departs from the script and invites you to think for yourself, both things which AI models struggle to do.

Sellman-Leava’s fast-paced delivery packs in bucket loads of research, and Howells’ design includes multimedia elements like a screen and cameras for close-ups. The show is information-heavy and, at times, feels more like a documentary or an in-depth piece of journalism, but it’s never dull.

Things take a darker turn in the second half when he delves into the connections between AI and the rise of right-wing politics. As an experiment, he tries out AI research tools on the subject of Oswald Mosley and finds the results play down Mosley’s anti-semitism and the violence of the Black Shirts.

This perspective on AI might seem too close to a conspiracy theory for some, but one leaves Copycat feeling affirmed about the positives about being human and the value of independent thought. Susan Mansfield

My Life is a Sonnet ★ ★ ★

theSpace on the Mile (Venue 39) until 29 August

This ultimately moving romantic but also melancholic comedy benefits from an understated performance by writer Eric Daniel Weiner, who plays a man called Charlie Katz who we see at different points in his life – from young man at school to older divorcee – as he tries to communicate better than his father and find a resolution to his affections for a woman called Sally.

A sweet story of love through time, it’s initially unfortunately dated by Charlie’s objectification of Sally, staring at her from across a room and getting lost in her “forgiving eyes”. Having developed the popular children’s television series Dora the Explorer, Weiner’s style of delivery and presentation of his character as an unlucky-in-love geek, at the start in school uniform, give the piece the feel of a Woody Allen film, a genre that – not least because of sexual abuse allegations against that particular director – has fallen out of fashion.

However, Katz is consummate storyteller, and by the time Charlie’s into adulthood, the play’s become a moving meditation on the passing of time even if, by the ending, a resolution is squashed into the show’s overriding structure of a Shakespearian sonnet. “One minute he was a schoolboy, the next he was 53,” comments an audience member afterwards. “It happens to us all,” is the reply. Sally Stott

In Other Words ★ ★ ★

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

Maya Shoham’s premise is deceptively simple: unable to articulate a particular feeling, she invites the audience to help her invent new words for it – word invention, like theatre, being an art form that requires witnesses.

What follows is a genre-hopping, formally inventive hour, staged among pages of script, that pulls in translation, linguistics, and a game-show pastiche (hitting a wall each time she declares “there’s no word in English for that”) as Maya the performer and Shoham the playwright repeatedly interrupt one another.

The show’s intellectual range is impressive – grounded in the gap between the limits of English and the richness of Hebrew, Shoham’s first language, and in questions of whether a word only has meaning once it’s heard. It would benefit from engaging one obvious counterargument more directly: if naming gives a feeling life, could it also diminish it?

A scenario involving invented words replacing “unwanted” ones lands somewhere between playful and unsettling, hinting at the creation-and-destruction tension underlying the piece. It’s a whirlwind, often one that outpaces its audience, throwing so many ideas and devices that some inevitably slip past. But that excess reads less as a flaw than as evidence of ambition. Shoham is a dazzling writer-performer, clearly only getting started. Josephine Balfour-Oatts

Jellyfish ★ ★ ★

Underbelly, George Square (Venue 300) until 31 August

Blah Blah Productions have had a trying Fringe, to say the least, forced to pull the shutters down on their new show after only a few performances due to cast illness. Two precious weeks later, Jellyfish has been recast and re-opened, allowing us to gawp at 100-year-old twins Nova and T, who don’t look a day over 38.

On their birthday, brother and sister have allowed online access to their cloistered existence, their controlled home, their stringent health regimen of supplements, therapies, exercise and ascetic food choices as well as a glimpse at the tragedy in their past which might have pushed them towards this grotesque quest for immortality. Because, as Freddie Mercury once sang, who wants to live forever?

Writer/actor Jess Coppen-Gardner’s play asks not simply what are the costs of pursuing immortality but who pays for other’s outrageous fortune (or misfortune). Making his debut as T, Felix Le Freak does a sterling job of playing catch-up, capturing the brother’s brittle mix of nerdish knowledge, coercive control and involuntary vulnerability. As the secret of their exploitative success is exposed, the sibling bond starts to fracture in this darkly comic exploration of the survival of the fittest. Fiona Shepherd

READ MORE: Fringe theatre reviews: Steak Out | Sobremesa | The Understudy + more

The Tao of Lloyd ★ ★ ★

Assembly Rooms (Venue 20) until 30 August

Dennis Trainor Jr revives Lloyd Dobler – the boombox-holding romantic from Say Anything – as a Zen-punk dissident leading something between a guided meditation and a political sermon, directed by Olivier winner Guy Masterson. Deepak Chopra “was unable to be here” – a wry sign of what’s to come.

Staged more as talk than play, the show moves through American decline, the seduction of proximity to power, and a running parable about a farmer whose punchline, “you never know,” recurs like a mantra.

Trainor is an elegant writer, capable of incisive, memorable lines – smartphones as a “dopamine slot machine,” theatres as “rehearsal rooms for the future we deserve” – and the show is unafraid to sit inside contradiction rather than resolve it, shifting between individual reckoning and collective possibility.

A darker subplot involving a traumatised, rage-driven figure adds weight, though it never quite integrates with the show’s broader, more meditative ambitions. The delivery, meanwhile, doesn’t always match the quality of the writing – on account of its form, the performance feels less charged than the script demands, and insightful moments stray into diatribe.

However, a fitting closing singalong of Woody Guthrie’s This Land Is Your Land marks an earnest, ambitious, often moving production, even where it doesn’t fully cohere. Josephine Balfour-Oatts

We Are All Florida Man ★ ★

theSpace @ Niddry Street (Venue 9) until 29 August

Inspired by the internet meme around news reporting of bizarre incidents and crimes in the state of Florida, We Are All Florida Man imagines a support group for individuals who have fallen foul of the law in peculiar ways. Sadly, this fiction is not stranger than truth, only more incoherent and anticlimactic with attendees confessing to fairly banal transgressions. There is a lot of bustle from the cast of eight, required to look busy in lieu of any meaning or purpose to the play, which falls apart as surely as the meeting it depicts descends into farce. Fiona Shepherd

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