Therapy seems to be the defining theme of this year’s Edinburgh festival. Many performers are saddled with personal demons or anxieties which they want to alleviate by yelling about them in front of a paying audience. Professor Tanya Byron puts it like this in the Pleasance brochure: ‘Therapy is where art and story-telling combine.’
This show crashes and burns like the stock market on a bad day. A cheerier ending might help.
At the Pleasance, Joe Sellman-Leava is seeking catharsis through his show It’s The Economy, Stupid! (Jack Dome, until 26 August). He begins by delivering a friendly lecture about credit, interest rates, retail banks, Adam Smith and so on. After 40 minutes, he loses his cool and starts to rant and swear at the crowd about his personal lack of funds. Overwhelmed by financial distress he collapses on the floor in a quivering heap. When he gets back to his feet he explains that despite working for 17 hours a day, he’s stuck in a leaky, rat-infested flat. His difficulties began in childhood, he continues, when he saw his parents lose their small business and the family home at the same time. They responded to bankruptcy and eviction, however, by having a third child. Perhaps he inherited his lack of financial acumen from them. Hard to say. This show crashes and burns like the stock-market on a bad day. A cheerier ending might help.
The Outrun (Church Hill Theatre, until 24 August) examines various cures for alcoholism. Adapted from Amy Liptrot’s memoir of the same name, the show is set in Orkney where Amy battles her day-long craving for booze by working in menial jobs. She escapes to Edinburgh University to study literature and later to London where she leads a wild, rootless, hedonistic life that leaves her unfulfilled. In rehab, she meets an elderly woman from Bristol who keeps relapsing. Amy has little interest in romance or family life and the characters she meets feel like reflections of her self-absorption – yet her journey is good to watch.
Eventually she finds peace in the untamed beauty of nature, and the closing minutes of the show feel like an advert for Visit Orkney. Amy observes corncrakes migrating from central Africa and enjoys daily swims in the freezing Atlantic. At night she dances in stone circles beneath the green haze of the northern lights. And she bonds with a wise old shepherd who just so happens to be her father.
The issue of transphobia is covered in an amateurish biographical drama, TERF (Assembly Rooms Ballroom, until 25 August). It opens in an east-Asian restaurant in Soho where Daniel Radcliffe has convened a summit meeting with Rupert Grint, Emma Watson and J.K. Rowling, whom they call ‘Auntie’ or sometimes ‘Mummy’. Rowling is portrayed as a stylish, combative upper-class diva with a drawling delivery and a vicious line in put-downs. Inspecting the restaurant’s speciality, ant-egg soup, she calls it ‘human vomit.’ She dismisses Radcliffe as a ‘virtue-signalling brat’ and criticises Watson’s botched facelift: ‘It looks a bit Cro-Magnon.’ The four characters attempt to discuss transphobia but the argument descends into a screaming match about compassion and kindness and the statistical probability of women being attacked by bearded men in lavatories.
Then the scene changes to the mid-1990s as Rowling meets her publisher for the first time. He predicts that her books will make no money and he advises her to sanitise her ‘anti-Semitic’ descriptions of goblins. She refuses. Cut to a scene in which her creepy Portuguese husband talks about their failed marriage and tries to intimidate her physically. Rowling refuses to be bullied. This is a puzzling production. Usually, a show with a Harry Potter connection sells out briskly – but TERF appears not to have benefited from the Hogwarts magic. If the producers hoped to disparage Rowling they failed because she comes across as witty, likeable and steely-minded. A warrior queen rather than a miserable bigot.
Nurse Georgie’s hour of scathing comedy is delivered with the full assent of healthcare professionals
Eric Morecambe was known by his mother as ‘skiffle-arse’ because he refused to sit still. Was his craving for attention the motive for his comedy career? Morecambe puts this question to Bob Monkhouse as they chat with Tommy Cooper in a heavenly dressing-room after their deaths, spending an amusing 70 minutes discussing the highs and lows of their starry careers. The Last Laugh (Assembly George Square Studios, Studio One, until 25 August) is a goldmine for comedy fans and it feels like a family sitcom with Monkhouse as the knowing paterfamilias, Morecambe as the cuddly mother figure and Cooper as the sulky baby who refuses to admit that his rivals have any talent whatsoever. ‘Him?’ he says of Arthur Askey: ‘He never made me laugh.’
Cooper admits that he steals jokes without acknowledgement because his sole concern is getting a chuckle. Monkhouse and Morecambe discuss the interchangeability of gags. ‘Des O’Connor is a hard man to ignore but it’s worth making the effort.’ They agree that either of them could use that anodyne quip, but Morecambe rejects Monkhouse’s suggestive material about his love life. ‘I’m still enjoying sex at 58 which is handy because she lives at 56.’ Such an explicit reference wouldn’t suit Morecambe’s family-friendly image. The show is distinguished by superb costumes, wigs and make-up, and by three impersonations that could scarcely be bettered. A must for students of comedy.
Nurse Georgie Carroll spent several decades working in healthcare and she’s on a mission to expose the cant and humbug of the medical profession (Assembly George Square Studios, Studio Two, until August 25). Allergies are often imaginary, she says. The work of physiotherapists is largely ornamental. When mature nurses complain that the NHS is going downhill they mean that the drugs cabinet is harder to ransack. She likens newly qualified nurses to dolphins who move quickly and look attractive ‘but they can’t save anyone – all they know is how to squeak for help’. The public are convinced that nurses are ‘angelic Baywatch virgins’ but in reality they’re more like ‘small woodland creatures throwing things out of drawers and screaming’. It’s unwise to report a trainee nurse for being drunk on duty because ‘she’ll probably be promoted to bed manager’.
Nurse Georgie’s hour of scathing comedy is delivered with the full assent of healthcare professionals in the crowd. The biggest laughs come from nurses who understand exactly what she means. Her family observations are just as sharp, and she describes her 16-year-old son with affectionate bemusement. ‘He has enough self-confidence to question David Attenborough’s commentary during a wildlife film and yet he once Googled “what was Hitler’s surname?”’
5 Mistakes That Changed History (Assembly George Square Studios, Studio Three, until 25 August) has a catchy title and a stylish poster that shows a young Napoleon on horseback. But the production doesn’t quite deliver on its intriguing premise. The host is a blandly charming type who delivers a series of random anecdotes rather than a list of epoch-making blunders. He opens by observing that Alexander the Great died without appointing a successor, which led to extensive wars between his lieutenants as they fought for control of his empire. After this, we hear stories about the use of toxic metals in dinnerware and the Victorian habit of excluding women from male-dominated professions. The longest section dwells on Churchill’s escape from a PoW camp during the Boer war. The inmates of the jail were treated with notable leniency and Churchill was able to amass £75 in cash and a large supply of chocolate before he hopped over the wall. His absence was noticed only after he failed to appear for his 8 a.m. appointment at the prison hair salon. This show is aimed at inquisitive children rather than at students of history but it seems to be hugely popular thanks to its well-chosen title.
The fringe is a great place for accidental discoveries. Low Effort Sketches (Just The Tonic at the Caves, until 25 August) is tucked away in a musty pub just off Cowgate. The performers, Alice and Andy, look like nerdy yuppies and their knowing, cynical sketches feel tailor-made for Radio 4. That’s the bad news. The good news is that they have lots of charm and a fantastic sense of surreal mischief. They perform a spoof gameshow, Who Wants to be a Millionaire for Etonians, in which the contestant has to ‘phone a friend’ with lots of inherited money. ‘Can you give me a million pounds?’ asks the contestant. The answer is ‘yes’. The contestant wins. Frivolous gags like that work wonders. The venue was packed.
The Edinburgh Fringe Festival and Edinburgh International Festival continue until 26 August.
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