Raging against the machine

0 The assured, impassioned performances make the play feel raw and vivid a guaranteed fail. Though ultimately without power, the young people are quickthinking and resourceful in their attempts to outwit it.

In the course of the play, they explore a wide range of possible responses: belligerence; abandoning integrity altogether; opting out; giving up radicalism and embracing (Heloise Spring) and Padraic (Sky Yang) in this new romantic drama by Luiza Minghella. From teenage fumblings in Padraic’s bedroom to an ongoing “see-you-nextyear” tryst well into later life, the couple meet up every 2 March to make love, argue and fight yet continue to remain a “sort-of ” couple.

While the performers cope well with the transition to middle age, the physical dance couplings that serve as scene transitions make no concessions to advancing years. Minghella’s script is reminiscent of Pinter’s Betrayal – but in fast-forward, rather than reverse – but the dialogue is occasionally prone to be overly elliptical (“only the lonely and the evil ever go to the beach,” apparently).

However, the performance moves at a rapid pace, packing in around 20 years of heartache, marriages, mortgages and illness into a tight 50 minutes without seeming unduly rushed. So if one line of dialogue clunks, there’ll the middle-class lifestyle. Mass protest is energising for a while, but is crushed in the end.

The assured, impassioned performances make this play feel raw and vivid. While the metaphor has its limitations (why can no-one break ranks?) and to some extent avoids defining the nature be another one along very shortly and Spring and Yang do manage to make you care about their – occasionally annoying – characters. It’s an impressively performed production from Sweet Nothings Theatre and ultimately gently affecting. RORY FORD Laughing Horse @ The Cuckoo’s Nest (Venue 106) JJJ A strong virtuoso performance by Miranda Colmans anchors this debut solo show which impressively evokes the twilight world of the insomnia sufferer. Three separate, and seemingly disparate, characters – a teenage girl, a significantly older American insomniac who runs a chatroom for the similarly afflicted, and a former stewardess struggling to cope with her newborn daughter on her own – all speak about of the enemy, it’s a powerful indictment of the situation in which many people find themselves. In this light, the defiant chant of the protester – “I’m not going anywhere” – starts to look less like empowerment and more like another way of being stuck. SUSAN MANSFIELD their difficulties in trying to sleep. The causes are all different; some born of addiction – to drugs or simply the disruptive blue light emanating from their phones – while the worries caused by the difficulties of caring for a newborn may strike a more familiar chord.

The narrative is initially fractured – a kaleidoscope of fatigue – but it doesn’t take very long before the three women’s stories begin to coalesce into one larger story; a tragedy. Performing her own, remarkably strong script, Colmans is excellent and handles the transitions of voice and character and accent exceptionally smoothly.

It’s a deft achievement – not least because of the momentary distractions endemic to many free Fringe venues – to which she seems oblivious. It’s rare to see such a confident debut solo show from a young actor but, in this case, that confidence is merited. RORY FORD It’s not just a clever title, there really is both genius and idiocy at play in this anarchic, loveable but slightly frustrating circus show.

Ben Moon Smith has a shopping trolley filled with mixing desks, microphones and instruments, and boy does he know how to use them, and Santiago Ruiz scales the Chinese pole as if he first clung on seconds after leaving the womb and has done nothing else since. Tom Brand wraps himself in the vertical rope, climbing and falling with dramatic finesse while John Simon Wiborn is one of the bendiest, bounciest acrobats you’ll ever meet.

Together they make Svalbard Company, an international troupe talented to the core with an attitude to circus that lies firmly outside of the box. Which is all to the good – there are enough acrobatic troupes playing it straight out there. But in this 60 minute show there is roughly 30 minutes of excellent circus skills, ten minutes of banter-filled affable nonsense – and then a whole bunch of other stuff that should have been left on the rehearsal room floor.

Chances are you’ll forgive them for the fillers, though, when the rest of the material is so sharply executed and wonderfully chaotic. KELLY APTER thespace on the Mile (Venue 39) JJ L’auftritt , the Swiss company behind this stylised sci-fi play, have made a bold decision: to perform all dialogue in German. There’s a brief summary at the start of each scene in English – projected on a screen – but otherwise audience members are left to their own translating.

This creates an unusual, international experience through which a story about state control and how we value time emerges. The engaging, polished performers prove you don’t always need to understand words to know what’s going on – but also that often you do, and a greater use of captioning would help with this. SALLY STOTT