Fringe theatre reviews: QFWFQ | Catching a Cheese Pervert: A Priscilla Patton Mystery + more

Gregory Nussen in QFWFQ | Contributed

QFWFQ ★★★★

Summerhall (Venue 26) until 31 August

It’s a title that Gregory Nussen at one point suggests has been deliberately designed to be inaccessible – and it’s perfectly suited to this sublime and imperfect show. Loosely inspired by metafiction writer Italo Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler, through one elongated set-up, formed of other beginnings of other shows, it gradually reveals what it is – a piece that Nussen has been trying and failing to write for the past ten years.

An authoritarian voice of The Institute, which frames the show, tells us that the stories are “unsuitable for consumption”. However, they’re actually united by the fact that they cover topics that people might – but not at this festival – shy away from discussing: sexuality, gender, Israel and Palestine. But before that, a virtuoso monologue breaks down the Edinburgh Festival and how we all got here, as well as the inner algorithms that we might use to select shows that, surprisingly, we all seem to share.

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It’s a piece that, like a broken mirror, reveals itself in brief flashes, but the minute one shines too brightly, it’s onto the next. At its heart is a story about storytelling, most powerfully evoked by a childhood trip to Israel and the concentration camps of Poland in which Nussen, who’s from a Jewish family, unpicks how a narrative across generations might be constructed in which Israel, a victim of genocidal violence, cannot see itself as a perpetrator of genocide against the Palestinian people. In a strange twist, the unspoken competition of who can “feel it” most leads Nussan to an unlikely romantic encounter – one that here, too, becomes part of a bigger story.

It’s piece that is ever-recycling other pieces and is perhaps most successful at asking the questions: what is true, who wrote it, and why? With the help of the audience and scripts in hand, it moves into its next iteration. Sally Stott

Catching a Cheese Pervert: A Priscilla Patton Mystery ★★★

Just The Tonic at Westside Rodeo (Venue 25) until 27 August

If there’s a prize for most off-putting title of the Fringe, this is a show that could win it. Based, somewhat incongruously, on a true story, it’s also more polished that it sounds – a modern-day Miss Marple meets Avenue Q set on a Canadian milk farm with a not particularly well-veiled message of anti-veganism and the perils of Big Dairy.

The story follows Priscella, a sunny Dairy Queen turned influencer, with a range of lactose-based beauty products to flog online. She’s on the trail of an unknown sex offender/puppet who keeps exposing himself to women with – because that’s not grim enough in itself – strategically placed lumps of cheese. However, this is a thoroughly pasteurised depiction of serious crime that affects huge numbers of women and is, here, turned into a light comedy that, through Priscilla’s non-stop live feed, also lightly touches on online misogyny, police ambivalence and corporate capitalism – although quite what it’s critiquing seems, like the milkshake that it really is, fluid.

Produced by a likeable Canadian company, a dance-off at the ‘Butter Ball’ in which Priscilla reveals her thinking demonstrates that all publicity is good publicity and that, while beauty pageants may well be sexist, there’s always a market for something. Sally Stott

READ MORE: Fringe theatre reviews: I Killed My Father | Larkhill + more

It Couldn't Get Worse; or, The Margarita Boat Tour Incident ★ ★

theSpace @ Venue 45 (Venue 45) until 29 August

It’s every bit as silly a comedy as the unnecessarily long title makes it sound, rocking precariously at sea like many others on the slowly damping waves of the Fringe. In it, a cross-clutching mother and her daughter’s girlfriend are trapped together in a lighthouse following the catastrophic sinking of an unlicensed pleasure boat.

As they compete over who loves the missing Margaret/Maggie the most, the set-up also offers a convenient excuse for homophobic mother Judy to learn that “love is love”. The positive LGBTQI+ message is admirable, but with an uneven tone as wild as the storm on stage, this is not the best advert for the message. Sally Stott

One Million Words ★ ★

Pleasance Dome (Venue 33) until 31 August

In the programme notes, Ivo Müller talks about how anxious Russia’s war in Ukraine has made him, but he fails to reveal what he thinks of the invasion beyond how it affects himself, as a Brazilian theatre maker. In this, his one-man play based around the letters of the equally elusive Prague-based poet Rainer Maria Rilke, he takes us on a trip into the darkness.

“Can poetry be the answer?” he ponders, sitting at a desk surrounded by papers, without revealing what the question is. The ever-circling text talks of finding joy in suffering and the benefits of sadness. “Endure it,” he says as Christmas approaches. Or, perhaps, as they’re doing in Ukraine, don’t. Sally Stott

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