Fringe special: The Edinburgh Culture Edit
Edit is quite a grand word for it - this is what I've seen over the last three days
August is a funny month for culture, in London certainly. Everything feels very much like it stops (the whole of the city’s art world goes on holiday, for one thing) or just sort of trundles on quietly without much fanfare, keeping things ticking over before the ramping up of the autumn season.
What does always happen, though, and this is something we were always very grateful for when I worked in newspapers, desperate to fill the pages while half our colleagues were grimly enduring a week at Centre Parcs, is the Edinburgh Fringe (and the International Festival, obviously, but now the Fringe is such a behemoth that in terms of sheer volume you could argue they’re the other way around).
This year, because I haven’t been able to for the past five years while working at the Standard, I decided to take advantage of my new freelance freedom and come up here for a few days to see a bunch of random stuff. Because I can (and I have friends I can stay with).
I didn’t plan it much more than a week out, and I didn’t pay any attention to reviews, I just sort of guessed, which is as good a way to do it as any, I think. So here, in a special Edinburgh Fringe and Edinburgh Art Festival edition of The London Culture Edit, is what I saw and what I thought of it.
My Mother’s Funeral: The Show
This funny, moving, meta three-hander by Kelly Jones looks at the very particular anguish of organising a funeral. Abigail’s mother died just days ago; the cheapest package on offer for her send-off is four grand, a huge sum for a struggling writer who has just found out that her ‘commission’ from a theatre won’t be honoured, because they weren’t expecting it to be about gay bugs in space - they wanted something a bit ‘grittier’ from ‘a writer like her’.
Desperate, she agrees to write a new play, about a working class girl from a council estate whose mum has just died and who can’t afford the funeral.
Nicole Sawyerr is lovely as Abigail (whom Samuel Armfield’s excruciatingly patronising theatre director insists on calling ‘Abs’, as he tells her that her nuanced depiction of her own mother isn’t ‘what our audiences want to see’), with a goofy physicality that elevates the moments of comedy.
Armfield also plays Abigail’s elder brother, Darren, who had a more complex relationship with their mother, and he flits between the two very different characters with ease. Debra Baker as Mum is an affectionate, playful anchor to the story, as well as hilariously awful as a clueless posh actress reading through the role of ‘mum’ and getting the wrong end of every stick in Abigail’s endlessly rewritten, increasingly bastardised script - though I would have liked just a bit more of her acknowledging her difficulties in relating to her son. It’s finely wrought though, and Charlotte Bennett’s production for the touring company Paines Plough holds you and the players with care. Really lovely.
Roundabout at Summerhall
Amy Annette: Thick Skin
The millennium was a weird time to be a teenager. No social media (thank Christ) but for girls, this was the golden (?) age of the teen magazine. Just 17, More (complete with Position of the Fortnight - bear in mind the readership of More was mostly somewhere between 12 and 14 years old), Mizz, Sugar, Elle if you were fancy.
Amy Annette, a self-professed ‘sweaty girl’, lapped them up at the time, and along with them the doctrine of fat-phobia and fucking insane fashion choices (I’d forgotten about the ‘going-out pencil skirt’).
This is Annette’s debut Edinburgh show as a solo performer (though actually she’s been working for a decade as a writer, producer, director and podcaster), and it promises good things in the future. She’s a warm, winning presence, utterly charming, and her observations are relatable and funny (I particularly liked a note about the absolute sacrilege that is the ballet flat), but they fall short of new or different. Promising ideas are left unexplored; the quotes she’s chosen to draw out from these bonkers publications are a bit meh, and a doctored quiz (mostly As, etc) sort of peters out without a point.
I’d have liked to hear more about her own experience - not necessarily as a teen (teenagers’ lives are actually quite boring) but how this weird indoctrination has affected her, or begun to be unlearned. An aside towards the end about how 13 really is very young to be exposed to this kind of stuff sounds hesitant and a bit tacked on. But it’s an engaging hour and I’m going to be keeping an eye on what she does next.
Pleasance Courtyard Bunker Two
Isobel Rogers: How to be Content
A seemingly autobiographical collection of comedy songs that tells the story of wedding anxiety, getting together with a new man, finding out he’s polyamorous, telling him where to stick it, then getting back together once he’d got over himself and moving in with him and her mum, Isobel Rogers’ show is amusing, but didn’t grab me. I want comedy songs to be really, really clever - to surprise me, catch me off guard, trip up my expectations, to make up for the fact that I’m listening to, well, an hour of comedy songs.
If you’re going to pull out well-worn material like going to weddings, the characters who populate them, your relationship with your therapist and whether or not to have a kid, you need to be doing it with a really unique viewpoint, or just so savagely that it takes the audience’s breath away. This show feels like an undercooked version of what it could be.
Pleasance Courtyard Below
Chloe Petts: How You See Me, How You Don’t
Sometimes, you see someone do something so well, with such finesse and seeming ease, that it makes you want to pledge your allegiance and set up a ferocious elite fighting force just for them. This is kind of how I felt after seeing Chloe Petts’ set on Monday night, which touches on not being bullied for being a lesbian at school (she was six foot by the age of 13, which probably helped), her predilection for ‘professional touching’ (like being searched at the airport, or having her feet measured) and a very funny digression about replacing the hosts of Queer Eye with five straight blokes to sort out her wardrobe.
It’s all woven around her experience with the online trolling about her appearance and gender identity that came her way for appearing on her own, extremely funny and very knowledgeable show about football on Sky Sports News.
Clearly it got upsetting, but she carefully lays aside any suggestion of trauma in favour of, quite rightly, taking the piss. It’s also exquisitely crafted and elegantly performed. I laughed like a drain.
Pleasance Courtyard Forth
In the Lady Garden
This stage debut by the 72 year-old author Babs Horton is engagingly performed by Julia Faulkner, playing a 69 year-old mother of two who has been arrested for some kind of misdemeanour, but it felt like a bit of a missed opportunity. A monologue following clever, working-class Alice’s life story, as she learns early on that boys can get away with things girls can’t, diligently studies her way to a place at a prestigious convent school only to be expelled (not her fault, of course) and end up married to a brute from the sausage roll section of the pie factory where she works, it’s enjoyable, but could have been so much better knit together and considerably less predictable. The final reveal you can see coming a mile off.
I feel like with another couple of passes, it could have really tapped into the rage and frustration that Horton seems to want to lean towards. It feels like she hasn’t quite got to the point that she can allow a bit of unlikeability in her loveable heroine, which would round her out considerably and make this a punchier, stronger show. And when we eventually learn why she’s in the cell, it’s completely implausible. Still, it’s a nice story, and was a sweet start to the day.
Pleasance Courtyard Bunker 1
Garrett Millerick Needs More Space
How is Garrett Millerick going to inspire his laconic, anarchic three year-old daughter to do anything other than become a comedian? He’s going to take her to the Science Museum, and get her enthused about space. This show revolves around the space race, why it happened (because everyone wants to piss off the US), and why it might happen again (ditto), and why people who smugly tell that story about the Americans spending huge amounts of time and money developing a biro they could use in zero gravity while the Russians used a pencil are complete idiots. I saw it yesterday, I actually remember very little about the content, so face-meltingly rocket-fuelled is Millerick’s delivery (he does not need the microphone, and yet he still uses it). But it was I think quite well crafted, and it was definitely fun.
Monkey Barrel, The Tron
Lewis Major Projects: Lien
I don’t know what possessed me to book into a one-on-one performance of contemporary dance, just me and a dancer, facing off from two chairs in a deserted studio, but I’m absolutely delighted that I did. There is no way of describing it that doesn’t sound deeply earnest, but I left this short (ten minutes), intense show feeling fundamentally happier than I went in.
It’s almost entirely sold out, but I don’t want to spoil it for anyone who can go, so I don’t think there’s a huge amount I can say. Macon, the dancer (Lewis Major is the choreographer), introduced himself, asked me a series of unhurried but gently probing questions, gave me a hug (he asked; I could have said no), and then performed a gorgeous, fluid five minute dance piece, just for me. It doesn’t sound like much. But having made a conscious effort to go into it entirely open, I found it one of the most strikingly affirming experiences I’ve had. Remarkable.
Assembly @ Dance Base
El Anatsui: Scottish Mission Book Depot Keta
When I worked at The Times, and used to come up to Scotland every year around this time, it was actually to report on the Edinburgh Art Festival. And half an hour or more in an exhibition is actually a great way to get out of the fray of the Fringe and reset. You may need a bit more for this one though - the most significant show to date to explore the work of El Anatsui in the UK explores five decades of the great Ghanaian artist’s practice.
He’s known for his large-scale hangings made from reclaimed metal from the bottling industry in Ghana and Nigeria, that provoke questions and reflections on the complex impact of colonialism on those countries (I interviewed him last year when his monumental work Behind the Red Moon was unveiled as the Hyundai Commission in the Tate Modern Turbine Hall). There’s a large selection of those here, alongside some of his stunning earlier wooden sculptures, which I’ve never seen in the flesh and LOVED, and works on paper. It’s a gorgeous show, and don’t miss the gigantic hanging work that is draped over the building’s facade in the university quad. Awesome.
Talbot Rice
Hayley Barker: The Ringing Stone
Inspired by her first visit to this stunning gallery space, a former Glasite Meeting House which accommodates the play of light through a magnificent stained glass cupola in the roof, LA artist Hayley Barker has created a gorgeous cycle of paintings tracking the seasons as they change through the window of her studio. One problem, in LA, they don’t really have seasons like we do, so Barker had to find subtle ways to note their passing - a shift in the plants growing in the garden, migrating birds, different butterflies. These large-scale canvases are both delicate and lush - painted lightly but packed with gorgeous detail, they seem to emit a kind of light and reward long-looking. While you’re there, basking in the calm of the whole thing, check out her painting of the Ringing Stone, a rock found on Tiree (the most westerly island in the Inner Hebrides) that makes a metallic ringing sound when struck (this kind of thing is known as an ‘erratic’ - an item with a completely different geological make up that shouldn’t be where it was found). It’s beautiful.
Ingleby Gallery
Ibrahim Mahama: Songs About Roses
You might have heard the name of the Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama already, because it’s his huge purple hanging artwork that is currently draped over the riverside facade of the Barbican in London. He’s interested in materials and histories, and the way that objects carry meaning - as he says here, “Everything is a living thing. Everything has a story and has the capacity to hold memory.”
For this show, created especially for Fruitmarket (which sits on top of Waverley Station), he looks through the lens of Ghana’s now-defunct colonial-era rail network, of which he has been collecting remnants for a decade. Using materials scavenged from these finds, he honours the people who made and worked on this now disused infrastructure, with large-scale charcoal drawings on seat leather, on waste documentation and on reclaimed wood and mounted on railway tracks, alongside photographs and films (there are two of these, not too long - one showing the making of the works and one of Mahama talking about them, and I found myself absolutely gripped by both of them). Loved it.
Fruitmarket Gallery
I absolutely loved Ibrahim Mahama at Fruitmarket, as well as El Anatsui. The show at Stills on Cockburn Street is also excellent - Home: Ukrainian Photography, UK Words