Fringe theatre reviews: Sims Holland: Learning to Human | Clive | Wallace | Happiest I've Ever Been | Shamaniac | More Myself Than I Am | Escape from Fairytale Land

Learning to Human | Image: contributed

THEATRE

Sims Holland: Learning to Human ★★★

Gilded Balloon Teviot (Venue 14) until 30 August

Sims Holland’s solo show recounts sixteen years of addiction to alcohol and drugs, alongside bulimia, following a devastating event: her older brother’s car accident and resulting brain injury, which confronted her, suddenly, with life’s fragility. What unfolds is a fragmented, high-energy account of years spent moving between cities, chasing numbness, and slowly losing structure and stability, told through poetry, movement, and dark humour.

Holland is unflinching about the messiness of active addiction, resisting a tidy recovery arc in favour of something closer to her felt experience: chaotic, non-linear, repeatedly derailed. A stint in residential treatment offers containment rather than resolution. The show is arguably at its strongest in these unsettled moments, and in its eventual process of self-reconciliation, including a moving reflection on what her body has since carried and created.

Staged amid child-size chairs, tables, and props, the show makes tangible how small her world had become at the height, or the depth, of her illness. Holland tends to describe behaviour rather than inhabit the internal experience beneath it – understandably, given how difficult that is to stage. What the show does capture, unmistakably, is the long, unglamorous, yet undeniably hopeful work of learning how to live. Josephine Balfour-Oatts

THEATRE

Clive ★★★

Assembly Rooms (Venue 20) until 30 August

Don’t let the gentle waves of calm, personable humour emanating from Paul Keating’s work-from-home drone Thomas fool you, there’s turmoil beneath the surface in this concise piece of new writing from Michael Wynne. Thomas lives in a spotless white house, dances and hoovers when he wants, and strikes up a parasocial relationship with his towering cactus plant Clive (there are shades of Wilson the basketball from the Tom Hanks film Cast Away here), but his carefully controlled environment has been allowed to take messy real life’s place.

Alongside director Lucy Bailey, Wynne and Keating (all three of whom have impressive records in the West End) paint an unsettling portrait of what it is to be detached from human contact by the ubiquity of online communication technology. This sense is exacerbated by the fact someone really is out to get Thomas. His new boss Naomi’s insidious bullying has already taken out his friend ‘Sue from Finance’ using a strategy of consistent undermining, reporting upwards about and then placing on a monitored appraisal programme which inevitably results in firing.

Naomi appears to use this against anyone she takes against, and Keating’s performance effectively guides us through Tomas’s blissful ignorance to her intentions, his doomy paranoia and eventually his futile attempts to avoid his fate. At the root of it all, his disconnection from real people has left him defenceless, a very human example of one of the problems of our age. David Pollock

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THEATRE

Wallace ★★★

Braw Venues @ Hill Street (Venue 41) until 30 August

Regular Scottish theatregoers might want to note this play is unrelated to Rob Drummond and Dave Hook’s recent rap-musical work Wallace, which celebrated the famous Scots rebel in less conventional style. Yet any possible confusion over the name is indicative of the fact the story of William Wallace has been told many times now, not least in Braveheart. This piece, presented by Edinburgh Little Theatre, is a more formally familiar addition to the genre.

Bobby Bulloch is Wallace, held in a jail cell in London, the day before his bloody torture and execution takes place. He looks humbled in a bloody smock, but he’s unbowed as he relates his life story. Bulloch’s performance is taut and angry as he prowls the space, recounting historical events and filling in unknown threads of Wallace’s life to tie together a very human portrait.

The details of life during wartime on the British Isles in the 13th century is no picnic, and this Wallace’s motivations and actions reaffirm him as a fighter for freedom from oppression, including killing Sheriff of Lanark as just revenge for the murder of Wallace’s wife Marion and performing guerilla actions in the wake of Edward Longshanks’ brutal sacking of Berwick. It’s a particularly mature and grisly retelling, but through this a sense of plausible danger and enmity in conflict is built. David Pollock

THEATRE

Happiest I've Ever Been ★★★

Just The Tonic at The Caves (Venue 88) until 30 August

This is a warmly performed play by a likeable duo about how to balance a job that pays the bills with finding time to have fun – one in which they play beige businesswoman Fiona and her inner child Skye, who dresses like her name.

It’s a small and sometimes childish story but with an even-handed approach to both sides of the argument that feels refreshingly balanced, although the static set-up – with the two women trapped in Fiona’s head – is restrictive.

A clothes swap enables Fiona and Skye to see one another’s point of view in a script the values both pragmatism and idealism in relation to a work-life balance, but also at one point proposes Fiona move to Russia, which is a strange choice considering it’s carrying out a war in Ukraine.

The overwork versus self-care debate is clearly contrived with the two characters thrown together purely to discuss its themes. But as they take on different aspects of one another’s lives and touch on mental health, an abstract discussion is made physical though theatre. The arguments are familiar, but there’s something cathartic about seeing them played out on stage in a room full of people who have, surely, at some point had them with themselves too. Sally Stott

THEATRE

Shamaniac ★★★

Greenside @ George Street (Venue 236) until 29 August

Her body’s “chemically f*cked”, she’s just woken up in the emergency department and is having an out of body experience – and that’s just the start. An hour of listening to the warm-hearted, hot-headed and steely-eyed Dede Lovejoy talk about her escapades in dating, acting, spirituality and getting her hand stuck in a moving lift is made all the more intense by the fact it takes place in a tiny, packed basement.

“I’m a maniac”, she says, and in this show that’s more a series of short stories, she gives her unique perspective, with the help of a string of shamans, on what this crazy life might be all about. With a slew of ex-husbands, a new younger girlfriend, and the rock ‘n’ roll vibe of Chrissie Hynde, we move quickly from her medical issues to “menopausal madness”, broken hearts, sobriety, ancestral bloodlines and her reoccurring role as a TV gravedigger, and much more.

With a spirit that “reconfigures” from riding a Vesper, she’s a charismatic storyteller able to flick between high-octane delivery and welcoming the audience into her wild world with ease, using her up and down moods to create a structure that, at times, feels like being on a boat ploughing through the waves, but ever moving forward. Sally Stott

THEATRE

More Myself Than I Am ★★

theSpace on the Mile (Venue 39) until 29 August

Told through Charlotte’s narration, this play follows the Brontë siblings’ lives with a lyrical, period-appropriate script and effective staging – a table crowded with writing implements, a wooden trunk, Branwell’s hip flask glinting as he drinks, furtively, with his back to the audience. Small, well-placed lines gain extra poignancy in hindsight: Emily dismissing her writing as “just scribbles,” the sisters insisting “we can’t eat reviews.” But the show shifts between emotional registers rather than layering them and doesn’t take the opportunity to formally innovate beyond existing adaptations of the same story, leaving it feeling less distinctive than it might otherwise. Josephine Balfour-Oatts

THEATRE

Escape from Fairytale Land ★★

Haldane Theatre at theSpace @ Surgeons’ Hall (53) until 28 August

Suspension of disbelief proves difficult in Fib and Fable’s adventure through “Fairytale Land,” a Brothers’ Grimm themed Disneyworld knock-off where the characters are trapped, reliving their fairytale on a loop. In search of a viral inside scoop, two documentarians sneak inside after hours with the help of a mysterious stranger. Together they hatch a plan to free these unknowing prisoners.

A creative concept, but the obscurity of some of the Grimm tales, as well as the choice of incorporating multiple Grimm characters named Gretel, makes for a confusing storyline. The pun-heavy humour falls painfully flat, leaving the wrongly timed entrances from backstage to deliver comedic relief. Lilia Foster

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