Edinburgh Fringe highlights: Euronews Culture’s five theatre picks

We’ve been at the Edinburgh Fringe trawling through the shows so you don’t have to. Here are Euronews Culture’s five highlights from the theatre on offer this year.

This year’s Edinburgh Fringe has been a bumper effort with tons of high-quality acts across the month.
As we reach the half-way point in the festival, here are our highlights in drama, comedy, and miscellaneous shows we’ve seen so far.
In the latest show from Forced Entertainment, a customer sits in a restaurant and orders a glass of wine. The waiter obliges but over pours the wine and it spills everywhere. No worry, the waiter quickly handles the situation, wrapping up the entire place setting in the table cloth and replacing it with a new one. In that moment, the waiter becomes the customer and the customer becomes the waiter, and the two actors replay the scene with their roles reversed. Which then happens again. And again. And again. As actors Bertrand Lesca and Nasi Voutsas keep repeating the same basic premise, the performance warps. Frustrations arise, their energy oscillates, desperation seeps in. Stuck in an endlessly repeating routine with no clear reason why, or any obvious way out, the pair of deftly comic actors leap through emotional states. Every so often, they break from the routine to attempt some explanation – squabbling with each other over whether the concept is complicated or not – and later implicating the audience directly into the horrors of their self-imposed eternal return. This is basically the improv activity of replaying a scene while trying to change the energy every time, and would be an exhausting watch if it weren’t for how well the two actors carry each moment. Equal parts funny and frustrating, ‘L’Addition’ feels like it might never end but when it finally does, you don’t want it to stop.
‘L’Addition – Here & Now Showcase’ is on at the Old Lab in the Summerhall at 11:30.
At a funeral for their grandfather, Jewish twins Darren and Lauren’s lives are turned upside down when they’re introduced to their late grandfather’s gangster friend Malcolm Spivak. In need for a way to insert action into their humdrum Essex existence, the twins get embroiled in a plot to kidnap – and maybe murder – the then-Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. Nick Cassenbaum’s archly funny script zings through Essex Jewish stereotypes from a place of adoration as he delves into the complicated emotional grievances the community felt towards the politician in the run-up to the 2019 election. The absurdist plot zips through everything from awkwardly probing Shiva chat over relationship statuses through to a botched heist that’s infiltrated by the top levels of Mossad, Israel’s secret service. On the way, actors Gemma Barnett and Dylan Corbett-Bader delight as they animate a plethora of Jewish caricatures, in particular the quick-talking confidence man Spivak and his 94-year-old Holocaust survivor accomplice Moishe. We haven’t seen a camper depiction of the 20th century’s underground working class Jewish mob culture since Tom Hardy’s brilliant portrayal of Alfie Solomons in ‘Peaky Blinders’. Throughout, the play never loses sight of one principal question: were British Jews’ concerns around Corbyn valid, or had nefarious right-wing actors utilised the community’s trauma to their own devices?
‘REVENGE: After the Levoyah’ is on at the Anatomy Lecture Theatre in the Summerhall at 15:00.
Amy Liptrot’s 2016 memoir has been adapted not once but twice in Edinburgh this month. Alongside this theatre adaptation at the Edinburgh International Festival, a film by Nora Fingscheidt starring Saoirse Ronan is also playing at the Edinburgh Film Festival after its debut at Sundance earlier this year. Written for the stage by Stef Smith and directed by ex-Royal Court artistic director Vicky Featherstone, the staged version of ‘The Outrun’ is an intense journey into Liptrot’s plunge into alcoholism and her later recovery as she moves from her solitary upbringing on remote Orkney to debauched London and back again. Featherstone’s direction gives this memoir piece pace – it is often told like a one-woman show with a large cast of actors for emphasis through singing and dance – yet despite spending the runtime largely in Liptrot’s head, we rarely feel we understand what’s behind her descent into unhappiness. Others might feel it’s an area underwritten, but it feels true to a memoir about alcoholism. Sometimes life gives no straightforward thematic answers. What’s best about the play is how life on Orkney is sketched out with Isis’s bi-polar farmer father (Paul Brennen) and his stoic aphorisms a standout.
‘The Outrun’ is on at the Church Hill Theatre as part of the Edinburgh International Festival.
In a church tower, somewhere around Oxfordshire, two bellringers await their doom. Much of their predicament is held from the audience. The year is unclear, although a mention of Agincourt implies at least the 20th century, though perhaps many years in our future. What we do know is that these two unlucky bell ringers are stationed in the tower tonight because there is a deadly storm coming. The local villagers believe that the only way to avert these frightful tempests is to ring their bells from their tall towers at the height of the storm, leaving them perilously vulnerable to lightning strikes. The bell ringers are concerned about this, but not too concerned. Life is all too cheap in this world as global devastation is slowly picking the last remaining locals. In the stage debut of Daisy Hall’s ‘Bellringers’, a finalist for this year’s Women’s Prize for Playwriting, there’s a distinct air of ‘Waiting for Godot’. The entire production is suffused with the energy of a Beckettian tragicomedy as Aspinall and Clement bicker, lament, and quake at their situation. The setting here is also that of an implied post-apocalyptic world circling the drain, but her characters air their hopes and loves more readily. It’s also a world that – whether mistakenly or not – relies on great religious belief in the power of the bell towers. Though their faith may be misplaced, ‘Bellringers’ manages to recreate the scintillating back-and-forths of Beckett with a strangely hopeful 21st century bent. It feels like a climate-crisis themed update for a generation desperately trying to find hope, instead of stripping it from our lives entirely.
‘Bellringers’ is on at the ROUNDABOUT in the Summerhall at 13:15.
Easily the most controversial show before the Fringe even began, ‘TERF’ made headlines for taking on the controversial – and litigious – British author J.K. Rowling’s views on trans rights, her tweeting habits, and the then-child stars whose careers they should be grateful for. What’s most interesting about ‘TERF’ is that, despite its clear perspective on Rowling’s gleefully hateful approach to social media, it spends a fair chunk of its (longish) runtime devoted to recognising the hurt in her own life. Interspersed between scenes of Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, and Emma Watson staging an intervention with the author in 2024 are scenes of Rowling’s first publishing meeting with a misogynist editor, a run-in with her abusive ex-partner, and a confrontation with her absent father. Rowling is cast as a ghastly sneering contrarian in 2024, but the play’s concern with how bitterness entered her life is remarkably touching. Throughout, the play is haunted by a trans woman, briefly recalling the details of a bigoted attack. She rarely directly impacts the drama of Rowling’s life in a fitting metaphor for how the actual tragedies that follow her words will rarely reach her gilded position. Somewhat unclearly, the play links this woman’s tragedy with Rowling’s own difficulties. If only the real-life woman could share half the empathy that this play has for her.
‘TERF’ is on at the Ballroom in Assembly Rooms at 15:35.
The Edinburgh Fringe Festival takes place until 26 August.