Fringe theatre reviews: The Late Utopians | You and Me (and Whoever Comes Next) | Charles Dickens: The Hanged Man’s Bride | The Wetness | Disciples of Anatomy | How to Poop in an Outhouse at -58°C

The Late Utopians | Giulia Ferrando

THEATRE

The Late Utopians ★★★★

Underbelly (Venue 61) until 30 August

We're in New York City immediately after the pandemic, and magazine journalist Emma has been tasked with writing a piece about the spate of illegal raves springing up across the less fashionable parts of Brooklyn and Queens, in the absence of official parties being permitted. Techno isn't her scene (she prefers music with words), but she's a good pro so she throws herself into the job.

What Emma discovers is not just a new form of music and a world where she can lose herself in the noise and the dark in an abandoned warehouse in Bushwick, but also a new type of community where the hard edges of the outside world melt away, even as she memorably describes the experience of clubbing as being like a form of violence she finds welcome.

She also meets a new boyfriend, who’s thoughtful and socially-conscious, opposing gentrification and development in his neighbourhood through the community council he’s on and campaigning against the data centre being built in his hometown of Lansing, Michigan. Yet he’s also prone to depression and to catastrophic thinking, and his solutions to the problems of the world are at odds with those of a comfortable, college-educated liberal like Emma.

Solo performer Lilly Walker performs writer and director Alfie Jones’s script with engaging delicacy and pin-sharp characterisation of the people and places Emma encounters. It all builds an evocative picture of youthful concerns in the 2020s, especially in contemporary New York where everything countercultural, says Emma, gets shut down by the police or co-opted by the white middle class.

It’s interesting to experience this story from Emma’s perspective, because although black, working class Americans invented the music she’s discovered in the 1980s and British clubbers had their own reckoning with attempts to smash illegal raves a decade later, The Late Utopians illustrates just how much the communal escape and “broad politics of care” Emma finds on the dancefloor continues to refresh itself for new generations. David Pollock

THEATRE

You and Me (and Whoever Comes Next) ★★★★

Summerhall (Venue 26) until 29 August

Patch Of Blue Theatre’s last appearance at the Edinburgh Fringe came four years ago with Cassie and the Lights, a moving drama about an unconventional family’s struggle to stay together. This year, the company returns to the festival with a remarkable work examining the knotty, nuanced relationships between a disabled man and his personal assistant.

It is the debut play of Keron Day, a disabled actor from Cornwall, and it is based on his own experiences. Co-written with Alex Howarth and Helen Chong, it focuses on the time Keron – Day playing a version of himself – spent with fictional carer Dani, the latest in a long line of PAs.

After an awkward meeting, they soon become friends, but the situation is derailed by Keron pretending to be someone he isn’t – someone who likes football and parties – to seem more amenable, and by Dani’s circumstances. Their relationship becomes a tangle of contradictions and complications. How can you care for someone when you need care yourself?

A meta framing device involves actors stepping out of character to explain things to the audience. In one transfixing section, Day describes how a lack of care during his complex birth resulted in his condition. Under Howarth’s direction, both he and Lauren Koster deliver heartfelt performances, while Martha Walker and Merle Powell-Smith score the drama with plaintive folk music played live on squeezebox, guitar and fiddle. It is a touching show about a tricky topic. Fergus Morgan

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THEATRE

Charles Dickens: The Hanged Man’s Bride ★★★

theSpace on the Mile (Venue 39) until 28 August

A real deep cut for fans fo Victorian ghost stories; Dickens tale is rarely antholigised as it’s a little on the long side and it does suffer in comparison to his magnificent “The Signalman”. Writer and performer James Nicholas has been doing sterling work adapting classic creepers with Birmingham’s Blue Orange Arts for years (his adaptation of M.R. James “Whistle and I’ll Come To You” a couple of years ago was a treat).

This tale within a tale is slightly hokier fare — as if to acknowledge that, there’s a sly Wilkie Collins reference —with it’s feverish writer encountering a local legend while stopped at an inn but these tropes were still pretty new when Dickens was working. Nicholas is careful to open this as plainly as possible, gradually introducing subtle lighting and sound cues that increases the atmosphere as the story progresses. Nicholas’s clever adaptation sticks to the real meat of the tale without ever feeling truncated and, for a one-man performance, this is pleasingly visual and has a nice eye for detail. Dickens’ story may be a little too predictable to be really scary but Nicholas manages to imbue the room with a genuine chill — no mean feat during a heat wave. Rory Ford

THEATRE

The Wetness ★★★

Just the Tonic @ The Caves (Venue 88) until 30 August

The Wetness is undoubtedly among the ‘fringiest’ Fringe shows this year. Staged by Australian performance company Mummy’s Plastic, the show’s premise is strange, unpalatable for anyone squeamish to nonsense. But it grows, granting permission for a group of strangers to sink into something other and play.

The piece is styled as a devotional offering to ‘wetness’, led by Wetness Influencer Rose KB. She drips water from somewhere below her waist. She mists the audience with spray, erects an altar to Volvic, and motions for strangers to pour water into her mouth. She gasps when she’s parched, and she returns the favour: “The wetness in me is the wetness in you.”

There’s something close to guided meditation here, dressed as theatrical ceremony, and plenty of innuendo throughout. The show asks its audience to imagine themselves into a kind of wetness of their choosing – a prosecco bubble, a bead of sweat – and to take handfuls of water and pass them on. What begins as unsettling turns into something intimate; the stone floor of the venue is glistening by the end. When we leave, it is with a sense that something special has taken place without quite knowing why. Josephine Balfour-Oatts

THEATRE

Disciples of Anatomy ★★★

Greenside @ George Square

Set in 1848, Disciples of Anatomy gathers three wives of eminent medical men – Cassandra Thwaite, Adelaide Hall and Maud Flemming – for an afternoon tea in a morning room the sickly blue of, as one line has it, a drowned victim.

The play’s boldest ambition is Maud, billed as the first neurodivergent heroine in a period drama, though positioning an autistic character before the language or awareness existed for it is a hard task, and the production doesn’t always avoid the stereotypes it’s trying to shake. Maud collects bottles of medicine and holds vast anatomical knowledge, socially derided for both, but her behaviour is read differently depending on her class as much as her nature. More persuasive is the atmosphere: blood glimpsed in the hallway, and a dying man unseen upstairs, which uses the offstage cleverly.

A letter from Maud’s mother, read at the outset, contains clues to what follows – a neat structural touch that elsewhere is largely missing. The cast have undeniable chemistry, and the script has good instincts, but the story itself requires tightening. A late argument between the three women takes its time building only to end abruptly, and a surprise twist makes little sense. Josephine Balfour-Oatts

THEATRE

How to Poop in an Outhouse at -58°C ★★★

Greenside @ George Street (Venue 236) until 29 August

As the title of her autobiographical show suggests, writer and storyteller Kona Morris doesn’t spare any details in relating the challenges of the five winters she spent in Alaska in her early 20s. Morris relocated to Fort Yukon, above the Arctic Circle, for love not anthropology but she has a barrage of travelogue insights to share as an interloper navigating family dynamics, quirky marriage traditions and pregnancy without the safety net of any local maternity services.

With twinkly enthusiasm, she builds a portrait of culture and community among the Gwich’in people, where you have no choice but to respect the elements year round. Alongside evocative descriptions of the changing Alaskan light, there are hairy bear encounters and the sort of dicey expeditions on land and water you won’t see on Race Across the World. Morris contrasts this austere but fulfilling way of life with the reverse culture shock when she makes a trip back to San Francisco and even though her Alaskan adventure is now more than twenty years in the rear mirror, its lessons in tenacity, teamwork and creativity still clearly resonate. Fiona Shepherd

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