Traps for a supicious mind

0 Foreign Radical takes its audience through a dark moral maze against me. It’s a show that gets under your skin.

It does that through a combination of chance and uncertainty. The 30-strong audience is ushered through a seemingly arbitrary series of rooms – at any given moment, we could be in a holding cell, a torture chamber or a debriefing unit – and at any point, we could inadvertently answer a question that determines where we CV (she is also a producer, PR and Soho Young Comedy Lab graduate).

Under the direction of Niall Phillips, the piece is sonically compelling and always in motion around Gauge, a sharp and comfortable character lead. Beatboxer Haydn-sky Bauzon and singer Georgia Bliss deliver a vocal-only (with the occasional pre-recorded beat) soundtrack of big-room house and garage club classics which give the show an infectious, contemporary energy. Yet for all the quality and talent throughout the production, the fact that Gauge’s script reveals no layers beneath the rather simple story it purports to be denies it the edge that would have made it great. DAVID POLLOCK go next. Our quizmaster is Milton Lim, all shiny showbiz suit and rictus grin, a figure of family-viewing friendliness and malicious purpose.

His binary questions split us into gangs, then subdivisions, then cells, our suspicions turning on each other or alternatively on Aryo Khakpour, the man we keep finding in states of undress and distress.

Is he culprit? Victim? Pleasance Dome (Venue 23) JJJ I’m standing on stage in a play about a play I may well have also been standing on stage in – or if I wasn’t, I should have been, because this must be the most self-referential piece of theatre at the Fringe.

I’m playing Tim Honnef, the writer, who is playing Jonas Müller, who is credited as the writer, but is actually Honnef ’s alter ego and sometimes nemesis. Müller has apparently written Honnef a play – which is to be his last: a critique of Honnef ’s past behaviour, which Honnef gets to read out on stage in a mind-melting battle of two opposing egos. Müller Innocent? Guilty? It’s our call. And just as it seems to be pushing us into an easy liberal condemnation of the USA’S “reasonable grounds for suspicion” immigration rules, it turns the tables and demands we make decisions of our own, giving us a disorientating view of the herd mentality and of our personal contradictions. MARK FISHER and Honnef might both have an inflated sense of their own work – although there is nothing in this piece that isn’t drenched in irony – but there’s a noir-like quality to Honnef’s dry, downbeat delivery and the melancholy of a writer who has spent too much time alone with a destructive inner voice.

A love triangle develops into a more interesting story about taking responsibility for your own work as an artist when it goes wrong, of taking a risk when it would be far easier to do something else.

While it’s disappointing that 12 coffins and an urn never turn up, I really hope this isn’t Müller and Honnef ’s last play.

In talking about art, they prove it’s worth making it. SALLY STOTT If there were a prize for the best flier on the Fringe Olaf Falafel would be a strong contender.

The Swedish comic, who is also an illustrator, has created a fantastic animation of a group of marmosets, which run around his head when you use a bunch of his fliers as a flicker book.

Last year at his debut Fringe, Falafel created a show based around Vines – little funny films which had earned him a following on the internet. This year Vines are no more, but Falafel has landed a children’s book deal. Sadly comedy seems to be playing second fiddle.

There are some good silly jokes in here but Falafel needs to get his slightly overbearing energy under control and work on his presentation. He also needs to re introduce himself – rather than assuming everyone already knows who he is. Although the audience enjoy his knockabout hour, there is too much messing about and not enough content.

My heart sank when he embarked on a powerpoint presentation about how to create the perfect Fringe show. It always smacks of desperation and suggests the inspiration for the show has not travelled far enough from the drawing board. CLAIRE SMITH ZOO Southside (Venue 82) JJ There’s some evocative folk music performed live on stage that accompanies this triptych of tales inspired by the Celtic legends of the selkies. Unfortunately, the myths of seal-folk (frequently women), who come to live on the land, has provoked a wildly portentous script littered with clanking dialogue such as: “SO IT GOES IN THE WORLD OF MEN” (and, yes, the lines are delivered like that – as if they were typed out in Gothic Bold lettering). There’s some decent moments but they’re drowned out by vast tracts of impenetrable guff. RORY FORD