The final week of the Fringe is always a trying time: we will all be lamenting disappointments, unpleasant surprises, and seemingly wasted money; trying to trace new zeitgeists (hopeful or despairing) from the patterns we will have observed. Our eyes will feel funny; our other senses dull. But every two years, with the diamond cutting edge of a circular saw, the British Council Edinburgh Showcase sharpens our perspective with the absolute best of British theatre.
Be warned: this is going to be massive.
The Traverse, befittingly for a top-drawer new writing theatre, presents a revival of last year’s awards-sweeping sex-traffic exposé Roadkill, and also three new plays: Futureproof, by Lynda Radley; The Monster in the Hall, by David Grieg (performed by the Citizens Theatre), and I, Malvolio, Tim ‘The Author’ Crouch’s newest Shakespeare monologue for young audiences. Alongside these, the superlative David Hughes Dance reimagines the Sawney Bean legend in Last Orders and, in partnership with the inspiring National Theatre Wales, Told By An Idiot present their take on Gwyn Thomas’ The Dark Philosophers.
The buildings formerly of the Royal Dick Veterinary School (yes...) are now the brand-spanking-new venue Summerhall, and they’ve got quite the haul of Showcase shows. Appropriately for an ex-vet school, there’s visual company imitating the dog with their 2006 hit Hotel Methuselah; less appropriately...well, everything else. Hannah Ringham’s Free Show (Bring Money) is a playful and tricksy look at the value of art, and Curious’ the moment I saw you I knew I could love you is a delicate multimedia performance about ‘gut reactions’. Lots of pieces for individual audience members here as well: Rotating In A Room Of Images plays with shifting perspectives and instructions; Me and the Machine return to the Fringe with their wonderfully calming video-goggle piece When We Meet Again (Introduced As Friends),and so does Melanie Wilson and Abigail Conway’s achingly heartfelt every minute, always – a cinema-headphones piece for couples. Quarantine’s Entitled has been making waves on its journey up to the Fringe, by turns surprising, entrancing and frustrating audiences, and everyone at Biscuit Towers will turn out for Action Hero’s brilliant and worrying Watch Me Fall.
We have already recommended Remarkable Arts’ British Council pieces (Blast Theory’s A Machine To See With, which dominated Sundance Film Festival this year, and surtitled Welsh play Llwyth), and in our Zoo Venues preview we mentioned Idle Motion and Dog Kennel Hill Project’s respective offerings, but we saved two good-looking dance pieces for today: Luca Silvestrini’s LOL, exploring modern relationships at hyperspeed, is at Zoo Southside, and Hetain Patel’s Ten, which confronts racial identity, is at Zoo Roxy.
Also on the dance front is Billy Cowie’s Tango de Soledad, which promises to be the closest thing to a hologram that you’re ever likely to see (apart from an actual hologram, presumably), and Tom Dale Company’s I Infinite, a solo piece for white-box gallery spaces. Both are at Dancebase.
Gryphon Venues and Assembly play host to one show each, but both are from reliably excellent companies. At Gryphon, Proto-type Theatre present Third Person: Bonnie and Clyde (Redux), their postmodern dissection of the American robber-legends; at Assembly, new-writing pioneers Greyscale bring their absurd (and absurdly good) Tonight Sandy Grierson Will Lecture, Dance and Box. The Pleasance takes on some of the more populist fare, with The Wright Brothers (from Oxford Playhouse) and 1927’s magnificent for-all-ages The Animals And Children Took To The Streets. Slightly weirder but no less excellent is Michael Pinchbeck’s The End, which has received great notices on its national tour.
None of the shows on offer can really be described as ‘Fringe’, but to those of us in need of a little picking up at the end of August, the British Council Edinburgh is a happy reminder that, no matter how many things one might perceive as wrong in British theatre, there is always plenty of right.
And although it only comes once every two years, it’s still better than Christmas.
