Fringe theatre reviews: Dust | Remember, Remember! | Target Audience | Gathering Stones | Ten Ways to Die Happy | Don't You Forget About Me

Dust | Charlaina Thompson

THEATRE

Dust ★★★★

Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33) until 30 August

In 2020, in Pinderfields Hospital, Wakefield, a former miner fights for breath, and his life begins to flash before his eyes - and ours. The nameless protagonist of Dust, played with fierce energy by Wakefield actor Craig McArdle, is always ready to fight: in the boxing ring, in the pub, and later on the picket lines. He teaches his children to fight too, a little too hard.

This debut play by Charlaina Thompson, who is originally from Yorkshire but now lives in Adelaide, Australia, depicts both a Northern everyman and a character based on a true story. Thompson’s great grandfather was awarded the British Empire Medal for saving a life at Askern Colliery in 1940. McArdle’s grandfather narrowly escaped (as the character does) the Lofthouse Colliery disaster in 1973, in which seven men died.

“I’m not a political man,” he tells us, near the end of the play. “Politics is for the rich, survival is for the poor.” And this is a story of survival in tough times: national service in the army, narrowly missing being sent to Korea; survival down the pit, in conditions which seem scarcely imaginable today. It was a brutal life, and he has been brutalised by it. But there were good times, too: a happy marriage to Dot, a dance hall singer; three children; summers at the seaside.

Dust comes to Edinburgh after two successful seasons on the Adelaide Fringe. It’s a life story performed as a tour de force by McArdle, as our hero transforms from arrogant youth to thoughtful pensioner, half surprised to have survived so long. It’s a story of working-class life, the kind of life which disappeared when the pits did. It does not romanticise that life, but bears witness to it with honour and passion. Susan Mansfield

THEATRE

Remember, Remember! ★★★★

Pleasance Dome (Venue 23) until 30 August

The Gunpowder Plot is the subject of two plays on this year’s Fringe. One is a serious look at the conspiracy and the politics around it. The other one is this show. Remember, Remember!, by emerging company WIT? Theatre, is the winner of this year’s Pleasance Charlie Harthill Fund award, and plays the story entirely for laughs.

Really, it’s a musical, with an original score created by the company with director Alex Pritchett and musical director Isabella Guilar (who plays piano live on stage as accompaniment). They’re more interested in fun than historical accuracy, and the fast-moving script is laced with pop culture references, from Katie Price to Bradley Walsh, Mean Girls to Boy George.

The show focuses on Robert Catesby (Kluane Saunders), one of the lesser known conspirators, who is ousted from his role as group leader by the arrival of the charismatic Guy Fawkes (Lucy Buncombe). Catesby is then assigned the role of spying on King James VI and I (Ross Tomlinson - gloriously petulant in pink pantaloons).

In fact the four-strong cast - the fourth is Tom O’Kelly - all play a range of parts, and carry the load equally. Their energy reserves are enviable and the pace never lets up, each song and dance routine, gag and innuendo delivered with flawless comic timing.

A strong seam of humour comes from portraying the conspirators operating as a kind of committee with its own internal politics. The choice of November 5 as the date for the Houses of Parliament operation emerges only after a hilarious attempt to synchronise everyone’s diaries.

Thus, one of the darker episodes of English history is turned into high-camp, high-energy fun. There might not be much gunpowder in this version of the tale, but it definitely goes with a bang. Susan Mansfield

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THEATRE

Target Audience ★★★

Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33) until 30 August

Acclaimed but still somehow not very wealthy author Tobias (Henry Calcutt) has been tapped up by a top streaming company for a creative meeting about their series Citizen 54, which isn’t like selling his soul to the devil because he’ll still be able to exercise a bit of creative individuality. Right?

Creative executive Angie (James Coward), a dead ringer for Mark Zuckerberg right down to his rapper-like gold chain, and his mousey, clearly ironically-named assistant Bruiser (Molly Windust) indulge Tobias’s arty thoughts, while millennial intern Isobel (RhéAna Kamalu) looks at her phone, despite being the biggest academic prodigy in the room.

Although the company is ostensibly run as a vanity project by about-to-be-cancelled movie star Jackson Turner, its real owners are a shadowy multinational corporation with interests in everything from Korean fermented bean paste to arms. With a new government in place, an edict comes through from them mid-meeting that more ‘pro-weapons’ content is expected in the company’s programming – is skint pacifist Tobias conflicted enough to toe the line and write a series which gets across the message that guns are good?

Dan Bishop’s latest play has the light bite of the BBC’s W1A or a Radio 4 sitcom, with the right targets chosen (human creativity reduced to data points, art for profiteering’s sake, the relentless conglomeration of everything as individuality is ground away) for a well-acted and funny piece whose warm, knockabout tone nevertheless maybe lets Angie and his kind off a bit too easily. David Pollock

THEATRE

Gathering Stones ★★★

Braw Venues @ Grand Lodge (Venue 7) until 30 August

Stones are stories, explains Heather Stringer. Some weigh us down. Others ambush us when we’re going about our ordinary lives. Still others are barely known to us and never spoken of. Stringer is an artist, psychotherapist and ritual maker based in Seattle, and this show, directed by Yvette Gonzalez-Nacer, is part ritual, part performance art, part storytelling theatre.

Stringer tells stories from her own life to exemplify four themes: shame, mockery, envy and accusation, suggesting that within each one there is a positive quality which points towards greater wholeness: play, innocence, beauty and longing. Her teasing out of accusation/longing was particularly effective. The storytelling sections are interwoven with a song (she sings well), a dance and a poem.

Being an audience is often passive: one watches a performance and waits to see if one is moved or amused or outraged. Stringer explicitly invites her audience to notice what memories are stirred for us, though the participation element of the show is actually minimal and unthreatening. It’s a different vibe to most Fringe shows, but if one is prepared to receive it on the terms on which it is offered, it is rather beautiful. Susan Mansfield

THEATRE

Ten Ways to Die Happy ★★★

Underbelly Bristo Square (Venue 302) until 31 August

What a strange, unusual, unexpectedly precise piece of work this is, especially considering it essentially involves inviting ten willing members of the audience onto the stage and allowing them some freedom to direct where things go.

It’s a kind of celestial gameshow, with each volunteer taking their place at a throne-like seat on either side of the reassuring host (Perla Ambrosini). Each picks their own character name and attribute, things like ‘wealthy’, ‘intelligent’ or ‘creative’; although some have no choice about how they turn out, and others are afforded no positive attributes at all, being born into poverty and disadvantage.

In front of each player is a small set of white bars indicating their level of happiness and a pile of white feathers representing their life force. When the feathers are gone, they're dead; in other words, out of the game. As a clock counts up through the years of a lifetime, Ambrosini warmly invites them to make decisions about key experiences like sex, career and family, the simple objectives being to stay alive and happy.

The beauty of Italian co-creators Emanuele Aldrovandi and Jacopo Giacomoni’s design is that the whole thing appears loose and freeform while being structurally utterly tightly controlled. The resulting experience is largely dependent on the participants, on how thoughtful or gregarious they are, but the end, like life, is always the same. David Pollock

THEATRE

Don’t You Forget About Me ★★

Assembly Roxy (Venue 139) until 31 August

Writer/actor David Shopland indulges in nostalgia for an era he didn’t live through with his florid anxiety dream tribute to quintessentially 1980s teen movie The Breakfast Club and its cool (for the time) exploration of adolescent identity, casting himself in the passive role of “the new kid” lurking at the back of detention class. Don’t You Forget About Me, named for its Simple Minds theme song, is his self-declared mid-life crisis, which fills the gap where he might say something more trenchant about the fallibility of nostalgia or the need for escapism with quick-fire references to contemporary films before descending into a 1990s and 00s pop culture Pinterest board. Fiona Shepherd

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