Edinburgh (Scotland)

Subterms

    Latest story

    113 Shares109 Views

    Is This the Edinburgh Fringe, or a Wellness Convention?

    by

    Grief narratives were in vogue, and psychological maladies, too, at the annual Scottish arts showcase.As I made my way to Scotland for this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the three-week arts showcase that finished on Monday, I felt a little apprehensive. A conspicuous number of shows were themed around psychological maladies. These included plays about grief, anxiety, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder and gambling addiction. I had thought I was going to a festival, but this sounded more like a wellness convention.Theater geared toward raising awareness can often be underwhelming, because the message gets in the way of a good time. But “300 Paintings,” by the Australian performer Sam Kissajukian, was a pleasing exception. Kissajukian, who has bipolar disorder, quit comedy a couple of years ago, when he was in his mid-30s, to become an artist — a frying-pan-to-fire trajectory if ever there was one. In this one-man show, he recounts, with the help of a slide show, a six-month manic streak during which he fast-tracked his way onto the art circuit through prolific productivity and business chutzpah: the delusional confidence of the unwell. Then he crashed, sought psychiatric help and got diagnosed. Kissajukian’s monologue is a whimsical delight, and the paintings aren’t bad either.Sam Kissajukian in “300 Paintings.”Tal GoldhamerGrief narratives have been much in vogue onstage since the success of “Fleabag,” which was performed at the Fringe in 2013. “So Young,” a sentimental comedy written by the Scottish playwright Douglas Maxwell, was one of several shows about bereavement at this year’s festival. Set in Glasgow, it centers on the conflict between two grieving people: a middle-aged widower who has just found a new, much younger girlfriend; and his dead wife’s best friend, who is affronted at how quickly he has moved on. The play foregrounds an often overlooked truth: that grief, though primarily personal, has an inherently social dimension.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    More stories

    • 88 Shares129 Views

      in Theater

      At Edinburgh Festival, Sometimes Simpler is Better

      by

      The event’s best theater production avoided the gimmicks of other shows in favor of well-drawn characters and well-written dialogue.If you say “Edinburgh Festival” to most people, they’ll probably think of the Fringe. But the Fringe — primarily a showcase of up-and-coming acts from English-speaking countries — is actually an offshoot of the more global, highbrow and judiciously curated Edinburgh International Festival, and the two events run side-by-side.The theater offerings in this year’s International Festival showcase the brightest Scottish talent alongside shows from around the world and fall into two categories: While the international plays are overtly political, encompassing disability rights, antiracism and ecology, the homegrown works explored the more personal terrain of addiction, recovery and self-care.One of the most eye-catching items on the bill was a metafictional spin on “Hamlet” by the Peruvian company Teatro La Plaza, which ran at the Royal Lyceum Theater Edinburgh earlier this month. This production, performed by eight young actors with Down syndrome, charts the journey of a similar, but fictional, group as it prepares to put on a production of Shakespeare’s famous tragedy. The actors perform snatches of “Hamlet” — there’s a murdered father, a ghost, a play within a play — and try to connect its story line to disability: Polonius’s protectiveness toward Ophelia, we are told, echoes society’s tendency to infantilize people with Down syndrome.But there isn’t much thematic overlap, and this “Hamlet” is mainly a cipher for the power of storytelling. In a key scene, Álvaro (Álvaro Toledo) sees Jaime (Jaime Cruz) trying to replicate Laurence Olivier’s famous performance in the 1948 film adaptation, which plays on the screen behind him. Álvaro upbraids Jamie for trying to play the part “like a statue.” The message, that people with Down’s must carve out their own paths rather than assimilating to normative expectations, is later reiterated in a defiant punk rock routine.Jaime Cruz in Teatro La Plaza’s “Hamlet.”Jess ShurteThe cast appears in casual rehearsal attire, but a dazzling selection of spotlights (by Jesús Reyes) injects a sense of magic. The actors are capable and immensely charismatic, and there are a number of funny moments including a fake Skype chat with Ian McKellen. But Chela De Ferrari’s script fades toward the end as the concept drowns out the story and the play lapses into a cloying mushiness that sits uneasily with its anti-condescension message.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Theater

      What’s the Next ‘Baby Reindeer’? Maybe Francesca Moody Has the Script.

      by

      Francesca Moody has put on some of the Edinburgh Fringe’s biggest breakout hits. This year, she has three shows that she’s hoping will go global.One day in fall 2018, the British theater producer Francesca Moody was rummaging around in her bag for something to read during a train ride when she found a script she’d been meaning to look at for weeks.Glancing at its first page, she read a scene in which a man logs onto his voice mail. “You have 50 new messages,” the cellphone’s robotic voice says. The messages are all from a woman named Martha.For the rest of the train journey, Moody couldn’t take her eyes off the script of “Baby Reindeer,” a one-man play about a comedian’s struggles with a female stalker who he occasionally, with self-destructive results, encourages.“It was just a thriller,” Moody recalled in a recent interview. “And what was amazing was it wasn’t a normal victim-perpetrator narrative. It was about all the gray areas in between.”When the train reached its destination about an hour later, Moody didn’t get up. She stayed in the empty carriage to devour the script’s final pages. By then, Moody recalled, she’d already decided two things: That she had to produce this play, and it had to be at Edinburgh Festival Fringe — the best place in Britain to generate buzz for new plays and musicals by lesser-known writers.Success there, she knew, could propel the show to success in London. Maybe in New York, too. Although at that moment, she couldn’t predict that “Baby Reindeer” would also secure a Netflix deal and 11 Emmy nominations.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      A Play About J.K. Rowling Stirred Outrage. Until It Opened.

      by

      The muted reaction to the Edinburgh Fringe show “TERF” suggests that when activists engage with potentially inflammatory art, offense can quickly vanish.There are more than 3,600 shows in this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe and most will struggle to get even a single newspaper review. Yet for months before the festival opened on Friday, one play was the subject of intense global media attention: “TERF,” an 80-minute drama about J.K. Rowling, the “Harry Potter” author, and her views on transgender women.Before anybody had even read the script, a Scottish newspaper called the play, which imagines Rowling debating her views with the stars of the “Harry Potter” movies, a “foul-mouthed” attack on the author. An article in The Daily Telegraph said that “scores of actresses” had turned down the opportunity to play Rowling. And The Daily Mail, a tabloid, reported that the production had encountered trouble securing a venue.On social media and women’s web forums, too, “TERF” stirred outraged discussion.The uproar raised the specter of pro-Rowling protesters outside the show and prompted debate in Edinburgh, the city that Rowling has called home for more than 30 years. But when “TERF” opened last week, it barely provoked a whimper. The only disturbance to a performance on Monday in the ballroom of Edinburgh’s Assembly Rooms came from a group of latecomers using a cellphone flashlight to find their seats. About 55 theatergoers watched the play in silence from the front few rows of the 350-seat capacity venue.The play imagines a showdown in a restaurant between Rowling and the stars of the “Harry Potter” movies.Andy Buchanan/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesGiven the regular disagreements between some feminists and transgender rights supporters, the uproar around “TERF” was not unexpected.But the muted response to the show itself suggests that fewer British people are riled by the debate than the media coverage implies — or at least that when activists engage with potentially inflammatory art, outrage can quickly vanish.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 100 Shares149 Views

      in Theater

      Edinburgh Fringe: Out and About at the Festival

      by

      It’s summer in Edinburgh and visitors from around the world have arrived for the 77th edition of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the chaotic, scrappy, sprawling arts event that opened Friday and runs through Aug. 26. This year, there are more than 3,600 shows on the program, by artists from 58 countries: theater, stand-up, circus and cabaret performances, as usual — but also film screenings, whiskey tastings and a life drawing class with dogs.Robert Ormerod, a photographer for The New York Times, was on the ground in Edinburgh to capture the atmosphere on the festival’s first weekend.Festival-goers crowd the pubs and restaurants in the Old Town district of the city.Poster and flyers — as well as performers hustling in the streets — help the public choose from the more than 3,600 shows.Fringe performers line up for a media event over the weekend.Spectators for a street performance on the Royal Mile, Old Town’s main thoroughfare.Tartan Heather, a Scottish artist who weaves fabric in the traditional pattern for spectators, on the Royal Mile.Handbills for Fringe shows cover a phone booth in the city center.Checking times and venues at the Underbelly box office in George Square, central Edinburgh.Nina Conti, a British ventriloquist who has been appearing at the Fringe for over 20 years, presents her show “Whose Face Is It Anyway?” at the Pleasance Grand.A performer from “I Wish You Well: The Gwyneth Paltrow Ski-Trial Musical,” performs an impromptu song on Friday after a power cut canceled the show.Julia VanderVeen in “My Grandmother’s Eyepatch.”The Fringe sold nearly 2.5 million tickets in 2023.The performers on the official Fringe program were joined by nearly 500 street performers in 2023, according to Fringe.Relaxing in Princes Street Gardens, a stone’s throw from the hubbub of the festival. More

    • 75 Shares159 Views

      in Theater

      Meet Edinburgh Festival Fringe’s Breakout Clown

      by

      Around 2 a.m. one recent Saturday, Julia Masli laughed as she glided up to an audience member in a sweaty basement room at Edinburgh’s Monkey Barrel comedy club.Wearing a ghostly outfit with dolls’ legs sticking from a black hat, she pointed a microphone at the panicked-looking man and asked a simple question: “Problem?”After a confused “Er,” he blurted out a genuine issue for most people in the basement. “I’m quite warm,” he said.Masli, looking concerned, led the man onstage and made him sit on a stool. Then she pulled a huge electric fan from a nearby cupboard and duct-taped him to it.As the audience laughed, the clown was already moving on. “Problem?” she said, pointing the microphone at another audience member.Masli, right, had planned for “Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha” to run only two weeks.Robert Ormerod for The New York TimesMasli’s show “Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha” (running through Aug. 27) has become the surprise hit of this year’s Edinburgh Fringe, Britain’s largest arts and comedy festival. She considered it a work in progress and had planned for only two weeks of performances, but word-of-mouth enthusiasm and rave newspaper reviews quickly sold out the run, forcing Masli to extend it in the only available time slot: 1:30 a.m.On Wednesday, the show was nominated for the fringe’s main comedy award, and Masli announced a three-week London run next year.Viggo Venn, another clown and Masli’s partner, said the show had gripped audiences because “it feels so risky and exciting,” with little possibility of planning. “She just has to trust the comedy gods that something magical will happen,” Venn said. “And it does. Every day.”In one recent show, Venn recalled, a man said he had a strained relationship with his mother, so Masli called her at 2 a.m., leading to an emotional chat onstage. That wasn’t something you get from many comedy acts, Venn said.During a recent interview in an Edinburgh pub, Masli, 27, said she developed shows by coming up with games to play, “and then from those I find where the meat is.” Last year, she started a routine where she’d walk up to audience members and say “Ha” in increasingly silly ways, seeing how they responded. If they echoed her, she tinkled a bell. If they misplaced the phrasing, she screamed.Saying “Problem?”, Masli found, quickly made audience members share startling tales.Robert Ormerod for The New York TimesOne night, she decided instead to say “Problem?” and see what happened. She found that audience members quickly shared startling tales. Working with Kim Noble, a performance artist, she said they realized: “This is it. The ‘Problem?’ is the show.”Performing “Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha” has changed Masli’s own perspective on the world, she said. At an early show, a man said he was overweight, so she began running around the venue with him to help him burn calories. “It was wild,” she recalled.But when another man said he too felt fat, she said, she concluded the problem lay not with the men, but with how society saw them. She asked other audience members if they felt the man looked overweight, then kicked out anyone who agreed.“Clown is really about connection,” Masli said in the interview when asked why she thought the show was a success. “Maybe right now everyone just wants to be connected.”The daughter of two lawyers, Masli grew up in Tallinn, Estonia, until age 12 when her parents sent her to a girls’ boarding school in England. Masli has said she spoke so little English at the time that she would mime to be understood.As a teenager, her heart was set on becoming an actor and performing the great tragedies on London stages. She auditioned for British drama schools, she said, “but got nowhere because I had this really strong accent.” So she moved to Étampes, France, to study under Philippe Gaulier, a clowning instructor whose past students include Sacha Baron Cohen.Masli uses a microphone taped to a golden mannequin leg as a reminder of her first Fringe show.Robert Ormerod for The New York TimesFor nine weeks of a 10-week module, Masli said, she failed to make anyone laugh. In the final week, Gaulier told her to perform as a plumber. She came onstage, looked at the pipes and said, “Oh, God.” When everyone fell about, she couldn’t stop thinking about how to make it happen again.Venn, Masli’s partner, said there was something in Masli’s eyes — “this innocent but cheeky look” — that could make anyone laugh with a glance.After returning to London, Masli struggled to make it as a clown. At one point, she stopped performing for 18 months and became so depressed she couldn’t get out of bed. Things only changed in 2019, she said, when she took her first show, “Legs,” to the Fringe. Made with the Duncan Brothers, two other clowns, it featured skits such as Masli shaking hands with audience members using her feet.Only two people saw the first performance, Masli recalled, but the show won a prize for comic innovation. Masli now tries to highlight the appendage in all her shows. “‘Legs’ saved me,” she said. “It was the biggest ‘Keep going.’” Last year, she returned to Edinburgh with “Choosh!” a solo show about a migrant struggling to make it in the United States, for which The Daily Telegraph named her the Fringe’s “best sad clown.”Masli onstage. On Wednesday, her show was named as one of eight nominees for the Fringe’s main comedy award.Robert Ormerod for The New York TimesBoth those shows featured some audience interaction, but nothing compared to what happens in “Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.” During the recent Saturday performance, the problems ranged from the trivial (someone’s glasses were broken) to the seemingly insurmountable (a man said he was a hypochondriac). Masli tried to solve them all.She only seemed stumped once, when an audience member said that she was devastated after splitting up with her girlfriend. Masli empathized, but that didn’t seem to help. She solicited relationship advice from other audience members. That didn’t work, either. So Masli suggested something a little more left field: that the person crowd surf.Approaching 2:30 in the morning, the audience member leaped into the crowd, who then carried her from the front of the room to the back. Her heartbreak was far from solved, but for a minute, at least, she seemed to forget all about it. More

    • 100 Shares149 Views

      in Theater

      At Edinburgh Fringe, Small Shows With Big Ambitions

      by

      This year, the stronger productions in the open-to-all event were on a par with many in the more prestigious, curated Edinburgh International Festival.Shortly after I arrived in Edinburgh for this year’s festival, I had lunch with a Scottish friend and her young son. The boy was enthralled by the colorful posters plastered all over the city advertising upcoming shows in the Fringe, the scrappy sidebar to the highbrow Edinburgh International Festival. This year, the Fringe — which runs through Aug. 28 — comprises over 3,000 shows, and many posters featured eye-catchingly silly titles. My friend’s son was particularly amused by “Sex Job,” “My Sleepybum” and “A Shark Ate My Penis.” His delighted guffaws were a fitting prelude to my stint in Edinburgh.There was plenty of laughter at “Hello Kitty Must Die,” a musical inspired by Angela Choi’s cult novel of the same title. In this zippy farce, Sami Ma plays Fiona Yu, a Chinese American lawyer fed up with being fetishized by white people and shouldering the unrealistic expectations of her out-of-touch parents. She reconnects with a mercurial childhood friend, Sean (Lennox T. Duong), and they embark on a ludicrous killing spree reminiscent of the movie “Heathers,” with musical numbers including a hymn to a silicone dildo.The all-female cast is hugely talented, and their portrayals of obnoxious men were particularly striking for their impressively rendered physicality, whether the swaggering gait of a self-styled Lothario, the slumped posture of a feckless gamer, or the pompously militaristic bearing of the protagonist’s father.“Hello Kitty Must Die,” is another adaptation of a novel, with musical numbers and a standout all-female cast.Justine BarbinElsewhere, two dance productions explored somber subject matter with impressive subtlety. “Woodhill,” by the activist theater company LUNG, examines the failings of a real British prison where a conspicuously high number of inmates have died by suicide. The story is told in a series of fragmentary voice-overs — interviews with lawyers, prison staff and bereaved relatives — while performers act out the relatives’ grief through dance, set to thumping electronic beats and strobe lighting. It’s a powerful spectacle, and the message — that Britain’s prisons need urgent reform — hits home.“Party Scene,” by the Dublin troupe, THISISPOPBABY, has a similar aesthetic. It depicts four gay Irishmen who are active in the “chemsex” scene, in which people hook up for sex under the influence of methamphetamines. The men’s choreographed dancing is pointedly joyless in its zombified roboticism; for all their synchronicity, they seem lonely and abstracted. The show evokes the existential bleakness of a comedown, of morning-after remorse and shame. And yet it doesn’t lapse into preachiness: The nightclub atmospherics are sufficiently appealing, in themselves, to suggest good times. (On the way out I overheard a theatregoer say to his friend: “I felt like it made me want to do chemsex …”)From left: Liam Bixby, Anderson de Souza, Carl Harrison and Matthew Morris in “Party Scene.”Olga KuzmenkoFor budgetary and logistical reasons, many Fringe shows are relatively small productions, and there are always many for solo performers. One of these is “The Insider,” by the Danish company Teater Katapult, in which Christoffer Hvidberg Ronje plays a lawyer implicated in a huge tax fraud. We find him in a transparent interrogation cell, weighing up whether to spill the beans in return for a reduced sentence. He does lots of sweating, writhing and shaking while oscillating between hubris and remorse. The protagonist’s back story provides some intriguing psychodrama — an obsession with transcending his modest provincial origins led him to embrace a ruthless social Darwinism — his uncomplicated moral abjectness makes for a one-dimensional portrait. It’s an open-and-shut case, in every sense.In another one-man-show, “The Ballad of Truman Capote,” Patrick Moys plays the renowned American author as he prepares to host a masked ball in 1966. Written by the Scottish novelist Andrew O’Hagan, the play is a maudlin monologue in which Capote muses gnomically on his childhood and career. (“Being published is not like being loved”; “My creative life is an unmade bed.”) The problem is not the lack of action per se, but the monotonous timbre of the reminiscences: Capote’s elliptical inwardness makes for dull company.Holding the audience’s attention is a perennial challenge with a single actor onstage. In a smart revival of Cyriel Buysse’s Flemish classic, “The Van Paemel Family” by the Antwerp troupe SKaGeN, the actor Valentijn Dhaenens sidesteps this difficulty by playing all the play’s roles. He takes three of the 13 characters in the flesh, and the rest appear in the form of prerecorded scenes digitally projected onto a screen.The story revolves around a farmer who falls out with his two sons after they side with striking farmworkers during a period of social unrest. Mr. van Paemel is slavishly loyal to the landowner for whom they all work, and believes organized labor is a scourge. Even when he and his family are driven off their farm by rent hikes, and his daughter is cruelly taken advantage of by the landowner’s son, he prefers to maintain his beef with his sons, rather than focus on those responsible for his plight.There was something uncanny about seeing the real-life Dhaenens interact with his vaguely spectral digitized selves. This eerie visual texture, neatly complemented by the doleful tones of an accordion, made for a memorably unique aesthetic. The play dates from 1903, but the story’s central character is a timeless archetype: The embattled patriarch who clings stubbornly to every reactionary shibboleth even as he gets shafted from all directions.The standout Fringe show was Lara Foot’s stylish adaptation of “The Life and Times of Michael K.,” J.M. Coetzee’s Booker Prize-winning 1983 novel about the struggles of a poor man during a fictional civil war in South Africa. The play is a collaboration with Handspring Puppet Company, best known for its work on “War Horse”, and Michael K. and his elderly mother are represented by puppets that are manipulated and voiced by onstage performers.The interplay between puppets and actors made “J.M. Coetzee’s The Life and Times of Michael K.” a Fringe standout.Fiona MacPhersonMichael K. is a borderline simpleton, kindhearted and determined, but naïve; something about the puppet’s plaintive expression and scrawny frame evokes a pathos that fits the story perfectly. Yet this somewhat desolate tale is mitigated by moments of humor, such as when the famished Michael comes unstuck trying to eat a sandwich. Being a puppet, he can’t actually do it, so the three men controlling him hungrily take a bite each, on his behalf.People think of the Fringe, which is open to anyone who can pay the accreditation fee, as defined more by quantity than quality. Yet the stronger Fringe shows were pretty much on a par — in intelligence, aesthetic ambition and technical execution — with several of the productions I saw at the more prestigious, curated International Festival. The difference was mainly a question of scale.For all its bustling, chaotic energy and anything-goes philosophy, the Fringe’s organization was impressively slick, although there was, inevitably, the occasional blip. My heart went out to the cast of “Exile for Two Violins,” whose performance at the French Institute was marred by noise pollution from a street party next to the venue, complete with a P.A. system blasting pop music. This delicate meditation on the life and work of the Hungarian composer Bela Bartok could probably have done without the accompaniment of loud rhythmic clapping, periodic cheers and whistles, and the booming strains of the White Stripes’ garage rock anthem, “Seven Nation Army.” The performers plowed on — heroes, one and all.Edinburgh Festival FringeThrough Aug. 28 at various venues in Edinburgh; edfringe.com. More

    • 100 Shares189 Views

      in Theater

      Edinburgh Festival Review: ‘Food’ Is an Acquired Taste

      by

      At the Edinburgh Festival, Geoff Sobelle presents a dinner party as a theatrical spectacle, in which silliness is the end in itself.In an auditorium in Scotland, the American theater artist Geoff Sobelle is hosting a dinner party. The stage is taken up by an enormous square table, laid out with plates and cutlery. Around three of its sides sit twenty-four audience members. At the center of the fourth is the waistcoated figure of Sobelle, who brings wine, hands out menus and takes orders. When one lady requests a baked potato, he produces a bucket full of earth and empties it out onto the table; he plants a seed in the mound, waters it and waits a while before reaching in to pull out a large spud.After several skits in this vein, Sobelle withdraws into himself and proceeds to binge silently: He eats one apple, then another, and then another and another, followed by a bowl of cherry tomatoes, a few radishes and carrots, a concerning quantity of ranch, a number of raw eggs, an entire onion and some bank notes.Sobelle’s one-man show “Food,” which runs at The Studio through Aug. 27 as part of the Edinburgh International Festival, is billed as “a meditation on how and why we eat.” But, aside from a short preamble about the primordial nature of our relationship with grub, there is little attempt to intellectualize. Audiences primed to look for meaning will find none here: Silliness is the end in itself; the enjoyment is in the buildup of nervous energy in the room as Sobelle carries out his buffoonery with the focused determination of a doctor performing lifesaving surgery.Sobelle trained as a magician, and then as a clown, before turning his hand to absurdist theater. In an artistic mission statement on his website, he declares that he sees his body of work as “a colossal practical joke.” This checks out.Midway through the show, Sobelle carefully gathers up the guests’ wine glasses, then returns to his seat and violently pulls away the tablecloth, amid much clattering of plates. Underneath, it turns out, is not a table, but a field of dirt: The set is transformed into one big muddy landscape. A remote control tractor trundles across this terrain, and sheafs of wheat sprout upward in its wake. The trappings of modern civilization materialize; toy trucks are handed to the diners and passed around the perimeter of the dining table-turned-landscape. Sobelle clambers onto the scenery, sticks his hand in it and strikes oil; tall buildings start popping up here and there. We begin to suspect there may be someone underneath the table.The audience was bewildered, but charmed, and for 90 minutes reduced to a state of childlike wonder, reveling in the frisson of anticipation, awkwardness and unease. The immersive setup produced some amusing unscripted moments, like when a theatergoer’s cellphone got swept away as Sobelle removed the tablecloth; his demeanor as he handed it back was a picture of dumb officiousness, both apologetic and vaguely affronted.Sobelle’s comedy of affable idiocy may be witless, but it is also timeless — every bit as primal, one suspects, as our love of eating. (There’s a reason “Mr. Bean” is still so popular around the world.) In drawing much of its mirth from sheer ridiculousness or grotesquerie, “Food” channels a comic sensibility from less exalted sectors of the entertainment world — think provincial circus troupes, or competitive eating championships.In the comparatively rarefied environs of the Edinburgh International Festival, the show’s sensibility feels like an ironic curio. I was reminded of Freddie Mercury’s line about wanting to bring opera to the masses: Sobelle, it seems, is doing the inverse, bringing low culture to the cosmopolitan elite. A perverse kind of altruism, perhaps.FoodThrough Aug. 27 at The Studio, in Edinburgh; eif.co.uk. More

    • 88 Shares129 Views

      in Theater

      At the Edinburgh Festival, Wrestling With Identity

      by

      In plays from Scotland, Korea and Switzerland, theater companies explored questions of belonging, with varying degrees of success.Questions of nationhood, identity and belonging loom large in three politically themed productions at this year’s Edinburgh International Festival. The tagline for this year’s edition is “community over chaos,” and there was plenty of both in “Thrown,” a National Theater of Scotland production running at the Traverse Theater through Aug. 27.Written by Nat McCleary and directed by Johnny McKnight, it’s a sentimental comedy about five women from Glasgow who travel to the Scottish countryside to compete in a backhold wrestling tournament. In this folk sport, indigenous to Scotland, competitors are initially locked into a clamp-like hug, before trying to wrestle each other to the ground. It dates back more than a thousand years, and the escapade is a kind of pilgrimage for the characters as they seek to connect with their national heritage. Along the way they playfully dissect what it means to be Scottish, reeling off some serviceable — if not terribly original — gags about haggis, kilts and “Braveheart.”Personality clashes emerge. Jo (Adiza Shardow), who is mixed race, and Chantelle (Chloe-Ann Taylor), who is white, are both working class and have been best pals since their school days, whereas Imogen (Efé Agwele), who is Black, was expensively educated and is new on the scene. When Imogen encourages Jo to take a greater interest in racial politics, this puts a strain on Jo and Chantelle’s friendship. Chantelle resents Imogen for boiling everything down to race and vents her frustration at being seen as privileged, simply because she is white. Imogen, in turn, points out that her affluent upbringing has not protected her from racism. They are both right, of course, and their circular squabbling brings home the absurdity of pitting different types of oppression against each other.Lesley Hart is boisterously engaging as the group’s intense coach, Pam, but the star of the show is Maureen Carr, who plays Helen, the most unlikely of the five wrestlers. Diminutive in stature and older than the rest of the gang, she is a fish out of water who Carr plays with winning geniality. Helen provides moral support to Pam when she reveals her struggles with her gender identity and delivers the play’s defining monologue: a positive message of unity through celebrating difference.Pam explains that the play’s title denotes the feeling helplessness in the split second when you realize you’re about to lose a wrestling match. The sport is a metaphor for personal struggle, and the team, of course, is a metaphor for the Scottish nation. It’s heartwarming stuff, but heavy-handedly allegorical.Maureen Carter, right, who plays Helen, is the standout actor of the show. She delivers the play’s defining monologue: a positive message of unity through celebrating difference.Julie Howden“Dusk,” a show that the Brazilian theater maker Christiane Jatahy developed with the Swiss company Comédie de Genève, is more intellectually ambitious, but similarly flawed. Its protagonist, a young undocumented migrant called Graça (Julia Bernat), takes a job with a French-speaking theater troupe that is working on a stage adaptation of the Lars Von Trier movie “Dogville.”Graça claims to have fled Brazil as a political refugee, and the troupe’s members believe they are doing a good turn by hiring her, but relations sour when troubling stories emerge about her history. The women in the group become nasty as they suspect Graça has designs on their partners, and one male colleague, a naturalized citizen, takes against her because she reminds him of his own past experience as a hated outsider. The dynamic tips into exploitation and abuse, both psychological and sexual.Jatahy is known for work that blends the conventions of theater and cinema. Here, the onstage action is recorded by a camcorder synced up to a large screen displaying close-up footage in real time. This is occasionally interspersed with prerecorded footage that differs jarringly from what’s happening on the stage. The intention is to discombobulate the audience, and it does. The trouble, however, is that the big screen ultimately overshadows the actors’ in-the-flesh presence, as the eye is continually drawn upward. One might as well be at the movies.In “Dusk,” directed by Christiane Jatahy, close-up footage of the actors is displayed in real time on a screen at the back of the stage.Magali DougadosRunning at the Royal Lyceum Theater through Aug. 27, “Dusk” is a provocative and pointedly bleak allegory of liberal hypocrisy. The central concept is strong, but the play is let down by overkill, especially in not one, but two, graphic depictions of sexual violence. When, after the second, the fictional troupe’s director (played by Matthieu Sampeur) earnestly agonizes over the ethics of storytelling, we detect a none-too-subtle attempt to pre-empt criticisms that “Dusk” trades too heavily on shock value. (Reader, it does.)The final 30 minutes of this 90-minute production are spent laboring the message of the first hour, culminating in a catastrophically unnecessary audience-facing lecture from Graça on xenophobia, gendered violence and the rise of the far right. The applause at the end of the show was damningly restrained.A refreshing antidote to that production’s audiovisual clutter came in an exquisite production of Euripides’ “Trojan Women,” by the National Changgeuk Company of Korea. (The final performance of its three-show run is Aug. 11.) Set in the immediate aftermath of the decade-long Trojan War, it portrays the women of Troy as they await their imminent subjugation by the Greeks, who, having killed the Trojan menfolk, intend to take the women as wives or slaves.The National Changgeuk Company of Korea production of “Trojan Women” directed by Ong Keng Sen.Jess ShurteThe director, Ong King Sen, and the playwright Bae Sam-sik, have done a fine job of reimagining this tale, which is mostly told through the medium of Pansori, a Korean genre of musical storytelling in which singing is accompanied by drumming. The propulsive pounding of the drum lends the songs a certain martial quality, which combines with the mournful tones of a zither and the singers’ plaintive laments to produce a powerful blend of sorrow and defiance. Kim Kum-mi delivers a vocal performance of remarkable intensity as the Trojan queen Hecuba, and Yi So-yeon is arresting as the fey clairvoyant Cassandra.The splendid set, by Cho Myung-hee is all the more imposing for its elegant simplicity. The Trojan women emerge, clad in white, from a strange, otherworldly tunnel flanked by two golden staircases; at various points, the structure is brought to life with elaborate lighting effects to evoke fire and sea.Euripides’s play dates from 415 B.C., but its enduring resonance is all too obvious as we look around the world today and reflect, for example, on the anniversary of the genocide by ISIS of the Yazidi people of Syria and Iraq — and the subsequent sexual enslavement of hundreds of Yazidi women — which began nine years ago this month; or the mounting evidence of sexual violence by Russian soldiers in Ukraine.Hecuba’s howl of anguish — “Destiny is drunk, the gods are blind!” — is a lament for the ages, a visceral and succinct protest against the abject cruelty of war.Edinburgh International FestivalThrough Aug. 28 at various venues in Edinburgh; eif.co.uk. More