Fringe theatre reviews: Giraffe | Turn Your F*cking Phones Off | A Gay Masseur’s Guide to Happy Endings | The Toe Poke

Giraffe | Photographer: Andrew Perry

THEATRE

Giraffe ★★★★

Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33) until 31 August

Giraffe opens on a flourish, Eliana (Abigail Weinstock) arriving onstage as if by magic. She has grown up believing she is, in her family’s words, a sociopath – “dead behind the eyes,” incapable of normal feeling. Then a restraining order for stalking her neighbour Tabitha (the microphone she planted in her room was, she insists, an innocent research project) sets a clock running: she has just five hours to relocate, and a fortnight before a judge rules on the question she’s been asking herself her whole life.

What unfolds is really a story about autism misdiagnosed as something colder and more sinister, particularly in girls and women still under-considered when the condition is discussed. Weinstock flits between characters and accents with skill, sketching Eliana’s stepmother Tulip, her Jewish father, and her own younger self, who practised smiling in the mirror until her cheeks ached, before drawing one on in Sharpie instead. A childhood terror of Pingu’s blank clay face becomes, retrospectively, a clue nobody read correctly.

Sent to stay with a friend of Tulip’s, Eliana meets Ava, a “selectively mute” child with a menagerie of stuffed animals, each with a smile drawn on, and a giraffe as her favourite. The nod to Giraffes Can’t Dance, a book Eliana loved as a girl, is unforced and moving. Their relationship, drawn with care and tenderness, becomes the show’s emotional centre: Eliana doesn’t overanalyse their connection, and finds in Ava’s quiet company a mirror for her own movements through the world.

A drama therapy sequence, arrived once CBT is exhausted, is among the show’s funniest and most insightful stretches, and the show is at its best when comedy and psychological depth appear this close together. Weinstock is a gifted physical and vocal performer, and the show, described as semi-autobiographical, does not lose its enchanting humour even as it makes a serious case for expanding what autism in women is assumed to look like, and for the grief of a late diagnosis. Giraffe is a bright, big-hearted hour that argues, without preaching, for looking twice at the girls written off as different. Josephine Balfour-Oatts

THEATRE

Turn Your F*cking Phones Off ★★★★

Summerhall (Venue 26) until 31 August

In the half-light a woman makes a call at a payphone (remember them?). She has a message for her Summerhall audience, but time and loose change is running out. This is Hannah Maxwell, and her one-woman show Turn Your F*cking Phones Off (the asterisk is only there for Fringe programme decorum) is about as far-reaching an investigation as can fit into a Fringe hour about how digital society has been weaponised against us.

It’s also very funny, fast and audience-interactive in the most enjoyable and least threatening way possible. Maxwell herself is an “audibly middle-class” theatre kid from Welwyn Garden City whose family have their own repertory theatre company, as detailed in one of her previous Fringe shows I Am Dram (mentioned more than once here; it’s all part of her digital footprint).

She also previously worked in Stratcom (Strategic Communications) after a well-connected friend suggested she apply. These are private organisations offering deep marketing and influence services to multinational companies, billionaires and governments; our own or anyone else’s. Their goal is to shift population-level beliefs and behaviour.

Which is why Maxwell ended up working in the Baltics countering disinformation campaigns. That’s a serious business, yet she presents it as a semi-interactive sketch comedy, engineering games of pass the parcel or Give Us a Clue while she nips outside for her next Bond-themed costume change, or leading the audience through drunken singsongs in a Baltic karaoke bar.

It’s all memorable, entertaining and effortlessly engaging. Random silly TikTok clips flashing onscreen herald scene changes, a dopamine-flaring counterpoint to a play which is urgently instructive about the way your tech spies on and manipulates you for the malign purposes of enemy governments and tech billionaires.

While Maxwell’s right that tech is a problem humanity needs to solve before it can solve any other, this is a show which gets that point across with no small amount of hope, laughter and human connection. It’s the perfect way to cut through the endless scroll. David Pollock

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THEATRE

The Body I Left in Susquehanna National Forest ★★★

theSpace @ Niddry Street (Venue 9) until 22 August

Claire and Patrick just got married. They’re driving at night to their honeymoon at Niagara Falls when Patrick hits a deer, or so he thinks. Marooned in forest miles from anywhere, they quickly discover the body of a young woman. Then, things get a whole lot stranger when the corpse starts to talk.

New York-based company, UR Mean Kathleen, are not afraid to let black comedy be properly dark, as it is in this play by Tom Quackenbush, directed by Katie Kunkel. Patrick (Joey D’Amore) insists they hide the body and flee the scene, but Claire (a strong performance by August Kiss Fegley) soon overcomes her hysterics and starts to wonder if her new husband is the good guy she thought he was.

After setting out its promising opening scenario, the play becomes more uneven. There’s a lot of arguing, and repetitive attempts to get the car out of a ditch. But when the plot does start moving along, the surprises arrive thick and fast. The Body I Left is far from flawless, but it’s funny, melodramatic and not quite like anything else. Susan Mansfield

THEATRE

A Gay Masseur’s Guide to Happy Endings ★★★★

Greenside @ George St (Venue 236) until 22 August

Let’s get the content warnings out of the way up front. If detailed descriptions of man-on-man sex aren’t what you’re into, then this probably isn’t the show for you (but you probably got a whiff of that from the title anyway). Actually, scrub that: Austin Jennings Boykin’s funny, tender and actually very moving solo show might just be your thing after all. Okay, sex might figure quite prominently in his hour of brutal honesty and self-interrogation, but A Gay Masseur’s Guide to Happy Endings ends up dealing with far broader themes: identity, confidence, self-worth.

AJ’s story is hardly unfamiliar. A young actor fresh out of studies in New York needs some income to support himself, so… well, what’s a boy to do? He recounts his first, fumbled massage – of a nearby client – with slightly toe-curling but affectionate honesty. The main thrust of his witty, self-aware narration, though, concerns an out-of-town appointment that pushes him further than he’s prepared to go, and has him questioning how he even ended up there.

It’s never entirely clear where AJ stops and Jennings Boykin starts, but there’s a winning sense of authenticity to the show, however autobiographical it is. And it’s to Jennings Boykin’s credit that he never arrives at any simplistic moral judgements on sex work itself: it exists, it’s an income, and AJ gets good at it, as his sensuous descriptions demonstrate. More interestingly, it’s the relationships that AJ develops - notably with a regular client he sees across several years - that ultimately force him to examine his own attitudes towards sex and love, and the extent to which his self-esteem depends on being desired by others.

Jennings Boykin is an engaging raconteur and a brave performer, taking time to flesh out the details on his encounters, but also slicing through any sense of self-importance with acid wit. Whether he gets a happy ending of his own, though, is another question entirely. David Kettle

THEATRE

Breathe: Five Arias That Saved My Life ★★★

St Vincent’s (Venue 197) until 22 August

In many ways, this is just what the Fringe is all about: a deeply personal story, a disarmingly frank and honest testimony, and some extremely good performance too. Katy Lees is a professional soprano, and in 2006 was diagnosed with a rare and probably untreatable form of cancer. Breathe traces her long journey back from the brink, through experimental therapy, alternative medical treatments, support from friends and her young family, and - yes - opera. After all, as Lees explains, cancer is an experience of such emotional extremes that only the glorious excesses of opera can truly convey it.

Interspersed among sometimes harrowing episodes from Lees’s story are the five arias of her show’s title - from Mozart to Bernstein, by way of Bellini, Verdi and Puccini - which effectively communicate the fury, grief and longing she experienced. She’s a fine performer, with a wonderfully focused, bright soprano, and she doesn’t hold back in inhabiting these arias’ emotions - indeed, a renewed belief in the emotional power of song is one of her experience’s outcomes. A live pianist rather than a recording might have added even more passion and authenticity, and Breathe is more of an illustrated lecture than a true piece of theatre. Nonetheless, it’s a show of unflinching honesty and a tribute to the power of music. David Kettle

THEATRE

The Toe Poke ★★

Braw Venues @ Grand Lodge (Venue 7) until 18 August

A good natured but ill-advised slice of football nostalgia, this new play by James Lowman charts the imagined meeting in 1998 of English football commentator Jimmy Hill — the bête noire of the Tartan Army — and former Scotland player David Narey (who’s wonder strike against Brazil in 1982 was unfairly characterised by Hill as the eponymous “toe poke”). Fortunately the men’s initial animosity is moderated by mutual acquaintance, Scottish football commentator Archie Macpherson as all three meet in France for the opening of the 1998 World Cup. Even if you’re more than conversant with the relevant events and the background of the three principals this is pretty dull stuff and if you found yourself within earshot of them at the Parisian cafe where the conversation is set you’d move tables. Rory Ford

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