Fringe theatre reviews: I Killed My Father | Larkhill | Monster Made | The Last Drop | BearGirl
Sally Stott finds herself questioning the purpose of a group of Fringe shows where some decisions seem like missed opportunities
I Killed My Father ★ ★ ★
theSpace @ Surgeons' Hall (Venue 53) until 29 August
Larkhill ★ ★ ★
theSpace on the Mile (Venue 39) until 29 August
Monster Made ★ ★
Paradise in The Vault (Venue 29) until 30 August
The Last Drop ★ ★
ZOO Playground (Venue 186) until 30 August
BearGirl ★ ★ ★
Assembly Roxy (Venue 20) until 31 August
Why put on a show at the Edinburgh Fringe? It’s a question you might find yourself asking after you’ve seen a few. In I Killed My Father, Mexican writer and actor Irving Diptera attempts to resolve his troubled relationship with his dad by killing him. Whether he means literally or metaphorically in what is described as a “mostly true” story is initially ambiguous. He tells us he enjoys pain and destruction, and there’s something sinister about him. “I’ll just tell you how I did it,” he says.
However, what comes next is a monologue that’s not so much an insight into the mind of a murderer, but a struggling actor and the multiple roles he plays, from his coastal home in Veracruz to trawling the busy streets of Mexico City. It’s about the frustration of auditioning for nameless bit parts, but also being part of a complex family, who might be understanding of him being gay but are also largely absent in other ways.
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A critique of paternalism and male role models is a theme that’s underexplored in favour of a collage-like roam around an unusually bleak depiction of a city usually characterised by its vibrancy. It’s a minimalist production that, with Diptera playing all the roles, could be developed into a showcase to demonstrate his acting range to help get more and better jobs but, under Ryman Sneed’s loose and leisurely direction, it instead starts to feel more like theatre as therapy.
Languishing in the warm glow of its own nostalgia is Larkhill, a World War II drama by a group of likeable, well-spoken young women and their male friend about a group of female Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) drivers who decide to start a band. With the thinnest of plots, it’s more a concept than a story, on which the company – who are between 16 and 20 years old – hang songs. Don’t Sit under the Apple Tree (With Anyone Else But Me) and Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy inevitably feature, while four-part sort-of harmonies divert from clunkier dialogue about giving “Jerry a good hiding” and being “a whizz” on the piano.
A young man on a trumpet, stoically straight-faced throughout, is a surreal scene stealer but one that doesn’t really add to the gravitas. Despite being based on real-life stories, the piece posits a view of the War full of jolly japes, of “girls” deferring to men and, as the song goes, On the Sunny Side of the Street, rather than a more realistic description of the brave men and women who did serious jobs in the armed forces in 1940s Britain and were often described as growing up faster as a result.
Monster Made is a heavier piece that attempts to find out, as the title suggests, what makes a monster. In it, writer/director Alex van Ric gives an increasingly animated performance as a fictional Anglo-American, Thomas Duncan, responsible for a mass shooting in a Jewish community centre. In a play that takes the form of a debate over a table, Duncan’s lawyer, Amanda Crowley – played by a more nuanced Astrid Gutscher – probes him until he reveals his childhood with a violent father and singular mother, the implications being that intergenerational trauma is at least partly to blame for his heinous act.
It’s a familiar conclusion that is in danger of excusing or minimising Duncan’s crimes, particularly as a friendship develops between him and Crowley before they jointly conclude that aggression leads to more aggression in a way that doesn’t take us any closer to how such a cycle might be stopped.
“No-one ever asked ‘why do you hate so much?’,” Duncan says at the end. It’s a good question, but one that this increasing caricature of a killer is ill-equipped to answer. “There’s no wrong side,” he ultimately concludes, which is clearly a lie, but also that, unlike in previous times, perpetrators no longer have skinheads and so are harder to spot, which feels closer to the truth.
The mystery continues in The Last Drop, which is an absurdist, esoteric piece about a “mercenary approach to housing”. However, when you learn that, in 2025, the Brazilian company – Manás Theatre Lab – performed it in Russia during its continuing war in Ukraine and illegal occupation of parts of Ukraine’s southern and eastern territory, the story takes on a new and more direct meaning.
Not that the story is ever stated literally in this intensely heightened piece of theatre. In contrast, the characters speak more candidly about their feelings, as they sweep on and off stage. A self-consciously gothic melodrama, it homes in on a patch of mould, damp, a stain or god knows what that grows on the ceiling of a couple’s apartment as they speculate, through surtitled dialogue, what it could be. Putin perhaps?
To add to the uncomfortable mood, it’s hotter than Chernobyl in the venue. “There are things that don’t have to make sense,” says Gilberto, the man of the crumbling house, after his partner, Cynthia, has dissolved into her ever-spiralling, self-centred emotions. Yes, but there are also some things that do – such as this play and its context. “We dismantle the story until we find it,” the dialogue helpfully suggests in what might be its most insightful moment.
In a classic looping narrative, it’s back to navel gazing narcissism with BearGirl by Emery Schaffer, in which a young woman is haunted by the death of her abusive partner and decides to start wearing a bear costume to escape her grief. Based on a Russian short play, Chekhov’s ‘The Bear’, it is a kooky character-based comedy that benefits from the polish of an American TV farce but fails to look critically at what is happening in the country where it draws its primary reference from.
“Bears don’t think, they do,” BearGirl says. Played convincingly by Rachel De Fontes, she oscillates between being melancholic and a “feral disgusting monster” who can’t stop romanticising the problematic Jake. Things come to a head when she’s let down by her gay best friend, Andy the dog therapist, who’s moving to Malaysia to “make a difference in the world” in a way that, for a company that advertises itself as queer-led, isn’t particularly sympathetic.
A story, apparently, about “what happens when we lose control of how we ‘should’ behave and give into our primal instincts”, it feels like a missed opportunity to draw more interesting parallels between the original text and why the decision was made to stage a new version of it here, today, at the Edinburgh Fringe.
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