Talented duo makes it a great day at the office

Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33) JJJJ There’s a rule reiterated at the start of many Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meetings: “What you see here, what you hear here, when you leave here, let it stay here.”

It’s a considerate and understandable guideline to establish when people are sharing intimate, often painful personal details, though it does present challenges to the critic reviewing a verbatim theatre performance set in an AA meeting.

Nevertheless, here goes. Meeting at 33, though listed as playing at the Pleasance Courtyard, is in fact staged across the street at the Salvation Army homeless service.

Down a fluorescent-lit, grey and white corridor, participants enter a square room containing Bible-stocked bookshelves and a ring of plastic orange chairs, and are invited to help themselves to polystyrene cups of tea and coffee before the meeting starts. (It’s so immersive, I had to clumsily check with the cast member holding the door that I wasn’t actually interrupting a real meeting.)

In the wrong hands, this could be seen as, at best, tacky, and at worst, exploitative of some vulnerable groups’ genuine lived experience for the sake of middleclass Fringe-goer entertainment. Second Circle Theatre are not the wrong hands.

The following hour, drawn from anonymous interviews with addicts, is a plain-spoken and humanely presented account of what takes place between the plastic chairs.

There’s no division between cast members and audience; the performances are so natural, you’re unlikely to know you’re sitting next to an actor until they speak up.

One minor quibble: the show does not appear to have been cast locally, and it’s noticeable that every contributor speaks with an English accent.

There are also numerous opportunities for noncast members to join in, to respond to the issues raised in a safe place.

While not without incident, the show never descends into tabloid sensationalism or mawkishness. An honest and affecting hour. NIKI BOYLE Assembly Roxy (Venue 139) JJJJ The weirdly hilarious opening to this two-handed physical comedy is almost worth the entrance fee alone, as our two hosts – Kiwi comedians Trygve Wakenshaw and Barnie Duncan, appearing within the NZ at Edinburgh showcase strand – silently stride on the spot towards another day at work, stopping to hand their business card to toddlers in a fake 1980s-style “credit sequence” soundtracked by John Carpenter’s frostily electronic Escape From New York theme.

The piece starts as it means to go on, with the duo’s day at Rucks’s Leather Interiors (“imagine a house covered in skin...” is their unsurprisingly ineffective phone-answering technique) chronicled with minimal talk and maximum expressive vigour. The pair Underbelly, Cowgate (Venue 61) JJ Underbelly, Cowgate (Venue 61) JJ These twin shows from Familia de la Noche bring us to Beadledom, a sort of cosmic bureaucratic HQ where, against a backdrop of wallmounted computer arrays, messy desks and insistent fax machines, life and death themselves are dealt with in triplicate. The staff are clowns, literally; white-faced, red-nosed, non-speaking.

In Beadledom: Alpha, we meet Max (Edward Cartwright), the fastidious administrator of births forced to deal with a major system failure. Beadledom: play perfectly off one another, their performances wellbalanced despite the singularly uncanny, gangling physical skills of Wakenshaw, who made his Edinburgh breakthrough in 2013 with Squidboy.

Appearing elsewhere in a show with his own baby, Wakenshaw is a strikingly good mime and clown, as well as a comedian, and a sequence where he keeps on sliding from a high stool which would be easier just to sit on is dazzlingly funny. Duncan is more of a classic comedy talent, and each is, by turns, stooge and straightman, pratfalling off a missing chair, attempting to share an impossible handshake with one another which takes all morning, or launching into random, perfectly observed animal impersonations.

The aesthetic of the performances is odd, and bizarrely there were a few walkouts in the show by people who clearly just couldn’t click with it. Yet far more were in stitches at a piece which was indescribably sin- Omega, meanwhile, centres on Deborah (Dott Cotton), a sort of dressed-down, daydreaming grim reaper curious about creating rather than ending life.

Both performers are engaging and sympathetic: Cartwright blends stiff hypervigilance with unexpected wonder while Cotton shows lackadaisical languor, excitement and poignancy. There’s plenty of heartfelt imagination in the shows’ visual design, in which off-kilter office decor meets childlike drawing, augmented by clever use of moving image. The recorded score of skiffle percussion and sinewy strings is good too.

But the storytelling in both shows is slow and less than clear – it’s often hard to discern quite what’s going on or what’s at stake, practically or emotionally, for the protagonists – and the lowkey

0 Duncan and Wakenshaw complement each other perfectly gular. In its finely-honed silliness it feels like the Mighty Boosh with John Cleese in a lead role. A Fringe comedy humour provokes gentle smiles rather than belly laughs. BEN WALTERS Liquid Room Annexe (Venue 276) JJJ Goldsmith has become the consummate raconteur. He is relaxed and genial onstage as he fills up an hour with tales of his life as husband and dad.

He knowingly plays with his own middle-classness, toys with affected horrors of his new life and has fun with pseudo-confessions about his shortcomings as a parent and regrets as a husband.

This is all very nicely unlike any other you’re likely to see this year. DAVID POLLOCK entertaining. Then there are some superbly funny, clever digressions on the subject of meat farming, vegetables and drones. Unlikely as it sounds, these are moments of comedy brilliance. There is also a thought-provoking bit about Life On Earth (he has Netflix now) and how we work out goodies and baddies in life.

Goldsmith is a comedian of intelligence and class. Listen to the way he describes things and you hear a proper wordsmith. This is a lovely hour, albeit regularly interrupted for a deeply irritating running gag on deconstruction.

To be fair, he has found a new way to bring his internal monologue out and into the show but I still found it selfindulgent after a few repetitions. He is smooth, charming comic who will warm up any wet Edinburgh afternoon. KATE COPSTICK Three office workers go about their repetitive daily business, carrying out tasks almost through muscle memory that they have done them so many times. But one of them is less content than the others, and his flights of fancy form the heart of Rendered Retina’s funny, clever and well-performed show that almost hits the spot.

Early on, a trip to the downstairs stationery cupboard is pure clowning gold. Then, as the protagonist’s fantasy takes hold, 20,000 paper balls litter the stage, each one depicting a droplet of water that is, in turn, the sea, a shower and eventually a snow storm.

All three performers, Tom Mangan, Alex Mangan and Jordan Choi, know how to use their physicality for comic effect without losing sight of subtlety. Just over halfway through, however, the pace drops, the humour stops (and isn’t replaced by anything cohesively meaningful) and audience members start looking at their watches – which is a real shame.

There is definitely something here worth keeping an eye on; a company of talented and skilful performers with big potential under the right guiding hand. KELLY APTER Ciao Roma (Venue 283) JJ This is the second show where I have found myself the only member of the audience. But Mark Silcox battles on and so must I, although it is hard to laugh when you are alone with a comedian in the basement of an Italian restaurant.

His material travels from home remedies for coughs to a spurious scientific theory of homosexuality, all delivered in an exaggerated and monotone Indian accent (mercifully, he is Indian).

He offers tea, biscuits and Indian snacks which is nice and demonstrates how to make hydrogen, which is interesting – but even when another audience member arrives, it is hard for him to retain the momentum. CLAIRE SMITH