Fringe theatre reviews: The Love Hungry Farmer | Common Tongue | Sad Bride | Kitty Daddy + more

The Love Hungry Farmer | Anthony Mulvaney

The Love Hungry Farmer ★★★★

Assembly Rooms (Venue 20) until 30 August

Under the moon that has watched over him since he was a boy, a “good sized farmer”, from County Cork in Ireland, with a “good sized car” has been waiting, “advancing” in his “pursuit”, of trying to find “a woman”.

Swaying in his lopsided hat, waistcoat and jacket, teeth gritted, John Bosco McLaine speaks of “sexual hunger” unquenched, desperate to the point of disturbing, steadily ploughing forward like a combine harvester.

Everything he says about how women don’t want him reveals why women don’t want him. As he picks them out like cattle (“good stock”), being in his company initially feels as appealing as spending an hour and a half with a dinosaur, the original incel perhaps, that both ‘townie’ and country women try and avoid.

The skill of writer and performer Seamus O Rourke’s adaptation of John B. Keane’s quietly controversial novel, set in 1950s rural Ireland, is that he manages to take us from being horrified, embarrassed and repulsed by this awkward fumbling man to wanting him to find someone, anyone, who could be an “honest rustic” good match.

With the ‘help’ of his razzle-dazzle townie friend, Silverster Brady, and questionable local matchmaker Dicky Mick Dicky, John goes on a series of unsuccessful but increasingly outlandish adventures in what turns into a ‘Sex in the Country’-style story with a man in wellies rather than Manolo Blahniks: the Carrie Bradshaw of Cork.

Within the beautifully evoked countryside, he feels he’s “prey” but treats women the same way – an aspect of the play that’s underexplored as it remains firmly fixed on his first-person perspective. But it’s nevertheless a strongly constructed monologue about the kind of country character that it’s rare to see on the metropolitan stage of the metropolitan Fringe.

By the end, the room is filled with the prospect of the inevitable disappointment that we, like John, have grown to accept, which makes it all the more pleasing when, in the moonlit fields of hay, there’s a glimmer of hope. Sally Stott

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Common Tongue ★★★★

Scottish Storytelling Centre (Venue 30) until 31 August

Bonnie McKay admits that she loves to speak, and that she has been known to let her mouth run away with her. But she also understands how the way one speaks is loaded, particularly in Scotland, and if she speaks like a working-class Scot, people will assume that she is either “uneducated or angry”.

Fraser Scott’s 2024 play, performed as a tour de force by Olivia Caw, is a love letter to Scots, and a whistle-stop tour of the pitfalls of speaking it.

Bonnie is from Paisley, where she has been raised by her beloved grandfather, a poet and performer of Burns. She gets told off at school for speaking Scots, and gets into a whole other kind of trouble when she uses language a bit too expressively at dinner with the middle-class parents of her first boyfriend.

At St Andrews University, she is confronted anew with issues of language and class, and goes on an exchange year to the United States where she eventually wearies of praise for her exotic accent. She writes her dissertation on The Uses of Scots at Home and Abroad, and gets pulled up for using the word “outwith”.

Scott’s play, which he also directs, is packed with wit and razor-sharp observations about language and identity. It manages to be both one young woman’s story and an everyman (or woman) account of Scotland’s contradictory relationship with its own language. Who knew that, in 1946, Scots was declared to be unsuitable for use in education and culture?

Caw’s performance is immediately likeable and full of authority, sweeping the audience along on the tide of her energy. At the performance I saw, the empathy of the audience was audible. Common Tongue is a must-see, at the Fringe - or at any other time of the year. Susan Mansfield

A Seance Spectacular with the Mystical Medium Wolf Sisters from the Great White North ★★

Just The Tonic at The Mash House (Venue 288) until 30 August

The Séance Starter Kit™ ★★

The Speakeasy at The Royal Scots Club (Venue 241) until 30 August

Although completely discredited, the once popular Victorian parlour trick of communing with the dead can still fascinate. Darkfield’s hit of a few years ago, Séance, became something of a Fringe fixture. This brace of comedy-horror shows can’t really hope to compete with that chilling experience, but they’re unfortunately light on laughs too.

Hosts of the Ghosts Are Everywhere podcast, Carly Anna Billings and Cecilia O’Grady play sisters Annie and Lizzie Wolf, two mediums from Canada, as they prepare for what could be their last ever performance in 1888.

This amiably coasts on the likability of its two stars — who also wrote the show — and evident affection for their long-running podcast. Billings and O’Grady have a good rapport but the show has the air of a sketch stretched way beyond its natural limits, as there’s little tension beyond the question as to whether spirits are real or not.

The Wolf sister’s performance raises some smiles with it’s outdated hokery but there’s not enough here for those that aren’t already established fans.

Scottish arts collective’s Get Tae’s Séance Starter Kit™ is a much mored modern affair, taking its cue from the 2023 movie Late Night With The Devil, where a genuine supernatural presence disrupts a live TV broadcast.

Here it’s a desperate shopping channel that inadvertently summons a demon, and while it’s very rough around the edges it’s enthusiastically performed — particularly by Sophie Kenan as the clairvoyant. The script still needs a lot of work (Joshua Gardiner’s amusingly hacked off host would benefit from some character development) but the technical elements are surprisingly sound.

Not that you’d necessarily know it, but filmed inserts with claymation models are actually filmed and broadcast live during the performance; a strange effect which sort of works. It’s ambitious rather than successful but at least it should prove interesting to see where they go next. Rory Ford

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Sad Bride ★★★

Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33) until 31 August

“I am so beautiful,” she hisses, demonic, as she glowers down the aisle: Bride, a woman who’s defined by her role but, in the middle of an all-white set, is also known by her friends to be “nasty”.

Playing all of the characters – including ones in a documentary film that’s being made about her that is projected onto the wall – writer and performer Charlotte Merriam’s critique of what turns out to be compulsive heterosexuality as well as the heteronormative wedding industry and her own experience of it, is surprisingly light.

Primarily performed like a child in bedroom, Bride’s silly-sinister games, biting the other children and colouring her teeth in, contains super contrasts, as she quickly moves from play acting a role to living it.

While it’s a refreshing contrast to some of the heavier shows on sexism and female stereotypes at the Fringe, with lots of sparkly comedy that wouldn’t be out of place on BBC iPlayer, it struggles to sustain an hour of theatre, with character exploration being the primary concern rather than a fully developed story.

The play needs to be pushed further to explore the dark side of its original concept and lesser explored subject matter, which, here are presented as bright and bubbly as a bouquet of flowers. Catch! Sally Stott

Kitty Daddy ★★★

Space 1 at theSpace on the Mile (Venue 39) until 29 August

In this tender exploration of the way that our pets bring out the best in us, Bob Brader takes us on a journey of self-love and acceptance from the perspective of his own (sometimes-reluctant) feline fatherhood.

Starting with Candy, the sickly cat of his childhood crush, and culminating in the aptly-named Miss Kitty, Brader charts the course of his life through these furry friends. At the centre of this storytelling is Jade, a former stray who Brader impulsively saved from a kill shelter in 2005; however, as Kitty Daddy unfolds, it becomes increasingly clear that Jade saved Brader right back.

Brader is an engaging, accomplished storyteller - at times, it feels less like a performance and more like a dinner party, where we’re sitting across from the kind of guest we always secretly hope we’ll get to host.

However, while the show is (correctly) categorised as theatre, not comedy, Brader’s delivery can sometimes feel like we’re waiting for a punchline that doesn’t arrive. This effect is compounded by a script which teeters on the amusing but doesn’t fully commit to the absurd; Brader’s life story and relationship with Jade are more than compelling enough to stand alone without a comedy angle. Ariane Branigan

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