Simone’s rage still burns

Fingers Piano Bar (Venue 221) JJJJ The Creative Martyrs have, as they put it, “spent many a year being accidentally prescient”.

They are canaries in the cabaret coalmine, their longstanding observations about the consequences of political cynicism and cultural complacency sounding with each passing year less like warnings and more like the daily news.

The Weimar-style duo, whose whiteface makeup and shabby suits evoke both Waiting for Godot and Laurel and Hardy, accompany themselves on ukulele and cello as they sing accomplished, jaunty ditties about nationalist folly, the arms trade and drowning refugees.

The speedy patter and musical dexterity – a pile-up of puns here, some sinister, sharking bass tones there – only partly sweeten the bitter tidings of a world spinning awry.

As always with the Martyrs, audience engagement is a powerful part of the mix.

The performance space becomes, in a convivial, quietly powerful way, a miniature temporary society where ideas can be roadtested, responsibilities offered, alliances proposed and differences explored.

The duo are hardly naive about the likelihood that likeminded folk will gather at a politically-minded Fringe cabaret show.

Yet they still find ways to needle at complacencies and allow for argument.

The question of agency is emphasised: how far do good intentions and political awareness go without action? What can line dancing teach us about a nation’s political leanings? And is it okay to punch a Nazi?

That last question underpins the show’s finest number, a knotty, nuanced and needling song that shows cabaret at its best, inviting those present in the room to express and question their beliefs, to listen and act while acknowledging our different kinds of privilege, ignorance and inexperience.

Just the ticket for those who appreciate critical thinking as well as toe-tapping ditties, deadpan absurdity and – still, somehow – moments of stubborn, nourishing hope. BEN WALTERS Traverse Theatre (Venue 15) JJJJJ When Nina Simone was a little girl of 12, she refused to play at her first-ever piano concert for a “mixed” audience in North Carolina until her parents, who had been moved to make way for a white couple, were allowed to resume their seats in the front row.

Rage is the name of the story, in Josette Bushell-mingo’s magnificent show about the mighty singer, musician and civil rights activist, coproduced by Unity Theatre and Riksteatern of Sweden; rage transfigured first by the sheer musical genius of Simone herself, and then by the almost shocking brilliance of Bushell-mingo’s show about the meaning of Simone’s story for her as a black woman, but rage still simmering, unassuaged. As Bushell-mingo says, “Nina forgave no-one.”

As the show opens, Bushell-mingo and her fabulous three-piece band begin to conjure up the Nina of the late 1960s, at the height of the civil rights movement, singing Revolution while police helicopters swirl overhead. Yet like Simone at the end of that time, when the movement began to fragment, she also senses a despair that will not let her continue; and through angry riffs on the Underbelly, Cowgate (Venue 61) JJJ There’s so much to love about this show, not least Sarah Milton’s performance. She plays Daisy, a young woman who takes up swimming as therapy only to discover she’s a born winner – at least she would be if she had the competitive instinct. In her black swimsuit and swimming cap, Milton plays her with drive and focus, at one with the rhythms of her own script and never missing a beat. She glides gracefully into the cast of supporting characters, including Cath, her upperclass nemesis, and Alice, her backstabbing best friend, as well as her overbearing mother.

0 Josette Bushell-mingo brilliantly channels both Nina Simone’s musicianship and anger at racism chronicle of slaughter and injustice that has been black history for so many centuries, right up to this shaming Black Lives Matter moment, she follows Simone’s journey from civil rights activism to a much more militant sense of the need for violent struggle, as she ranges across the audience, picking out the few black people who would be

It is an excellent performance in a play that holds much promise in its themes about the psychological impact of a traumatic event, the insidious hold of a psychopathic criminal and the social pressures that can lead to body dysmorphia. “I swim because I love my body not because I hate it,” she says, resisting the athlete’s quest for physical perfection.

So why the hesitation? It is simply that, at 40 minutes, the play doesn’t allow Milton enough time to explore the ideas in full or to give them the emotional weight they deserve.

In Tom Wright’s fine production for Back Here! Theatre, it skims impressively across the surface but stops short of diving deep. MARK FISHER saved, if she were to turn the gun of unthinking racial violence back on us.

And then, when Bushellmingo decides at last that she can continue the concert, and returns shaven-headed, glittering, goddess-like to lead us through a tremendous set of Simone songs from Mississippi God Damn to You Know How I Feel, the sense of thespace on North Bridge (Venue 36) JJJ The residents of Edgartown are preparing for the Founders’ Day parade, an important date in the town’s tourism calendar. There’s only one problem: a child has died, and the sheriff – a relatively new arrival in town – suspects foul play, while the mayor is keen to avoid a scandal.

There are some clear similarities to Jaws in there – the Fringe brochure describes it as a “homage” to the famous shark tale – but Edgartown’s macabrely humorous tone and expressionist steampunk aesthetic make it much more Tim Burton or Lemony Snicket than Steven Spielberg. creative release and energy is electrifying, almost overpowering. The audience roars, the band nods, Bushell-mingo smiles gloriously as she takes her bow; but the rage is still there, a creative powerhouse, a reminder, and a warning that grows louder every day. JOYCE MCMILLAN It’s also worth mentioning that the play is staged as part of Acting Coach Scotland’s one-year training course, which explains why some cast members are less surefooted than others. Given that circumstance, the performances of Adam Ross Green (as shell-shocked troubadour Crow Parker) and Mira Vasiliu (as the clownish Deputy) are stand-out successes.

Only one or two creative decisions really let the production down – there are niggling anachronisms, and one character dies, only to return as a nonessential extra. You can see the logic behind it – each cast member/ acting student requires the same amount of onstage experience – but it distracts from the overall production. NIKI BOYLE In the land of Trump, Trayvon Martin and Tamir Rice, the restless spirits of three Carolina slaves haunt their graveyard while gunshots ring out.

Betty, like a benevolent Lady Macbeth, just cannot scrub the sullied earth clean enough. The happy-go-lucky Alvis enthusiastically shares what he has learned of hiphop and R&B culture and uncovers trophies from the 21st century which are seemingly frivolous but had tragic significance in the real-life fates of Martin and Rice.

The simmering, raging, committed George is ripe for politicisation and returns from his ghostly wanderings rigged out in the leather uniform of the Black Panthers.

Songs of sorrow and struggle float to them on the wind courtesy of a live soundtrack of gospel, bluegrass and Appalachian folk played on guitar, viola and beautifully sung by Dionna Michelle Daniel – though all the cast have rich singing voices.

Daniel also wrote the play, as an angry but poetic vehicle to explore how much or how little has changed from the slave lynchings of the 19th century to the current epidemic of US shootings which have inspired the Black Lives Matter movement. FIONA SHEPHERD The premise of this dystopian steampunk misfire is that Dr Jekyll’s work has been built upon and every resident of London in 1884 is a scientifically enhanced “cog in a well-made machine”. Not that you’d necessarily know this, because that backstory isn’t detailed until halfway in (with the show’s best aspect, a shadow puppet show).

Even with this foreknowledge, Matt Beames’s play resembles little more than a tribute to Zack Snyder’s 2011 visionary pervathon, Sucker Punch, as the all-female ensemble, dressed like sexualised Victorian dolls, glide among the neon poles mouthing unspeakable dialogue. The cast move well – but the play goes nowhere. RORY FORD