Lessons in love and hope
Dangerous quests are par for the course in traditional folk tales, but American storyteller Diane Edgecomb found herself setting out on one of her own when she travelled to Turkey to record the ancient stories of the Kurds.
After meeting a young Kurdish refugee in Italy, she began to learn about the oppression of Kurdish language and culture by the Turkish authorities: “One of the oldest storytelling traditions in the world was vanishing before my eyes”.
So she sets out, with her intrepid carpet-dealer guide, on a quest which takes her to remote mountain villages, past armed guards at checkpoints, in constant fear that her mission will be discovered by the Turkish authorities. It is also a race against time. Some of the saddest moments are those when she sits with an aged storyteller only to find they can no longer remember their stories – they have gone untold for too long.
Weaving together some of the ancient tales with the story of her own quest, Edgecomb’s show is well crafted, if, at 90 minutes, a little long, with a few too many digressions. It’s rich in anecdotes: 100-year-old Gulbahar who is learning English on the internet and offers to share her recipes on “Skypee”; a chainsmoking grandmother who needs to be bribed with Marlboros to tell stories; a mountain shepherd who comes to meet her in an American baseball cap and shirt – from two different teams.
But the stories are told with the windows closed for fear of spies, and Edgecomb has to leave one village in haste after the Turkish schoolteacher starts asking too many questions. The power of A Thousand Doorways comes not only from the ancient stories she collects but from the vital contemporary story it tells about the oppression of a culture.
Carmen Lynch: Lynched
Laughing Horse @ The Counting House (Venue 170)
Carmen Lynch’s dry, deadpan delivery isn’t a great combination with her boxy,
Howtobeakid
Roundabout @ Summerhall (Venue26)
There is no set to conjure up a sense of place, no props for the actors to wave around, and no costumes to indicate the change from one character to another.
All Paines Plough theatre company bring to the stage is themselves – three actors who build an entire world before our eyes, purely through their talent and our attic room, making for a rather airless performance, her lethargic, nihilistic drawl suffocating some otherwise sharp writing. The New York-based comic’s material tends towards the bleakly cynical, establishing her tone with a darkly funny morning-after pill gag soon after her insincere gratitude for Donald Trump’s presidency.
At her best, she’s surprising and quirkily original, setting out a contentious position before justifying it with perverse logic. Too often though, she allows a good punchline to simply drift away into the ether with a blank, expressionless look. Unusually tall, a bundle of therapy-requiring neuroses and blessed with an overtly dramatic Spanish mother, she’s got plenty to stoke her insecurities. Her imagination. We meet Molly, a 12-year-old girl who has just spent five weeks in care while her mother recovered in hospital; her little brother Joe, who is obsessed with dinosaurs and has enough energy to power every venue at the Fringe; and mum, who also doubles as Molly’s recently departed nan, her social worker and a variety of friends.
There are serious life lessons to be learned in Sarah Mcdonald-hughes’s new play, about the different ways people process grief, the resilience we’re capable of in characterisation of the latter injects a little welcome energy into a show that runs comfortably short of an hour, as if Lynch simply runs out of momentum. That’s a shame because you suspect that with a minor tweak in presentation, a little more early ingratiation with the crowd rather than detached observations about how we’re starting at her like she’s crazy, and Lynch might be a force to be reckoned with this Fringe.
Christopher Bliss: Writing Wrongs
Voodoo Rooms (Venue 68)
Rob Carter’s alter-ego Chris- times of adversity, and – most importantly – the need for families to talk openly about how they feel. All of which is delivered with a lightness of touch that ensures we never feel anything less than entertained.
Witty lines punctuate the sadness, highly physical storytelling holds our attention, and strong acting ensures there’s no prospect of confusion.
Cleverly, Mcdonaldhughes turns the more serious moments (Molly trying to get her little brother ready for bed and school topher Bliss isn’t so much a pastiche of the self-important novelist as a generally harmless idiot who’s found a pastime writing novels. Not that he truly comprehends what they are, confusing them with chapters and demanding his literature engage in polite introductions, sniffily dismissing the likes of Moby Dick as sorely lacking in this respect.
Resplendent in turquoise windcheater, spectacles and a high-buttoned shirt, the effusive Bliss’s rhotacism doesn’t impinge upon his self-regard, nor appreciation for his own “novels”, of which he’s dashed off about 10,000. Favouring ghosts, impressive female breasts and clunkingly heavy-handed exposition, they also feature a windcheater-wearing protagonist because mum is too griefstricken to get out of bed, or arriving at the care home for the first time) into a fast-paced comedic romp or drops in a blast of Taylor Swift to keep the young audience on-side.
A few less references to that nemesis of healthy eating, Mcdonald’s, wouldn’t go amiss, but otherwise, this lively tale is a gentle but effective journey into difficult lives that are turned around through communication, hope and love. who seems strikingly familiar.
Invariably disclosing too much information while reading to retain any twists, Bliss engages the audience as if it were a pantomime, instructing us to yell “ruddy hell!” whenever the drama escalates in his school bullying saga. Sweetly naïve, even when his pompous self-righteousness impacts upon others, there’s a sub-plot featuring his long-suffering mother that fleshes out Bliss’s delusions of grandeur.
A significant departure from Carter’s accomplished but less distinctive musical comedy work, Bliss is rather more than the sum of his parts, capably endearing with his artless, oblivious silliness.
From a pale shroud emerges a man clad entirely in white: white greasepaint, white suit and tie and white trainers. After a few false starts in French and German, he speaks in English (with the unmistakable baritone of an Ac-tor) that he is “the spirit of 1917”, and proceeds to relate the most notable events of that year to an audience with a whole century’s hindsight.
There’s a lot on the First World War, which understandably grabbed a lot of headlines in 1917: Passchendaele, Siegfried Sassoon, Mata Hari, Edward Thomas and Vera Brittain are all evoked, as is the 100-strong Canadian regiment who surprised the Germans by dressing in women’s nightclothes. Elsewhere, Lenin led the October Revolution, Finland gained independence, Baghdad fell to the British, an African American named Ell Persons was lynched in Tennessee and the Balfour Declaration called for the creation of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine.
These disconnected vignettes never add up to anything beyond their shared year, but it’s an enlightening and frequently entertaining hour. It also serves as a reminder that 2016 – for all the laments about celebrity deaths and political upsets – was not a remarkable year by historical standards.
Sunil Patel: Titan
Laughing Horse @ The Counting House (Venue 170)
Does the world really need another very mildly amusing middle-class thirtysomething comic waxing wryly about their lives? Even Sunil Patel doesn’t seem sure.
He sounds hesitant around his own gently delivered material, which meanders around the issue of not having much to do with your time when you’re a moderately successful comedian. The big events in his life recently have been taking up badminton and buying new trainers.
Patel’s self-deprecation is quite charming, but this is thin, undercooked gruel.