Portrait of a generation
Airbnb where the air is free but there is a big wolf-like dog leafing through the Fringe programme.
There’s a trip to a strip club, which means Kay has to persuade a native Australian to lend him his shoes.
And there is the neverending story of Phil Kay and his bicycles – which are constantly leaving him because he cannot bear to lock them up.
There is never any shortage of things to talk about with Phil Kay. His life is one long, rollicking adventure, flying from one place to another on his bike, sharing moments with strangers, picking up shoes as he needs them.
On stage too he can be unpredictable. But it is just a wonderful thing to see this Scottish giant of comedy in full flight.
As the gig ends, with a sweaty audience tired out from so much laughter, Kay thanks us for sharing the moment.
“Thank you for your response. Thank you for letting my mind flower,” he says. CLAIRE SMITH Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33) JJJJ Jax is hurtling towards her 21st birthday. (Sorry to be distracted, I was just checking Twitter.) She’s working on her dissertation and can hear her textbooks calling. (Did you see that thing Donald Trump said?) And while eyeing up the guy who says he’s a standup comedian, she’s keeping track of her friends with their various insecurities and family problems. (I’ll be with you in a sec – just updating my Facebook profile.)
It isn’t only that her mum has run off with a man from Seville. (We really should be saving the whale.) And it isn’t just that her toaster’s on the blink. (There is a great new series on Netflix.) It’s also that the sheer weight of information overload (swipe right on Tinder) is making it harder
0 Snowflake, in the case of this production, is not a pejorative term and harder (what can we do about Brexit?) for her to do anything other than panic.
And the result in Mark Thomson’s powerful production of his own play for the Network, a new company of recent Scottish graduates, is a fractured nightmare in which the adolescent adrenaline rush of sex, drugs and dancefloor beats is mixed into a cocktail of pressures created by the always-on digital age and a Baby Boomer generation with a death wish. Cue reckless behaviour, selfharm and dropping out.
Holding this chaotic collage together is Shyvonne Ahmmad, whose focus and conviction capture the verve and humour of a sociable young woman coupled with the terror of someone under extreme mental attack. She is given confident support by the eight-strong ensemble some unnecessary, unpleasant and possibly staged rudeness towards his audience. But it is fun to watch Robertson playing with the crowd. He’s been blessed with abundant charisma, a love of wordplay and a capacity for risk-taking which makes him exciting to watch. You get a real sense of jeopardy and a sense of danger and it is refreshing to see someone take so much pleasure in their own rampant virility.
The finale is a thing of joy and wonder and I’m almost tempted to give it away. It involves physical punishment, audience participation and Frank Sinatra. And for some, carefullyselected members of the audience, it seems to offer a genuine sense of release. CLAIRE SMITH who, in their turn, play characters suffering similar levels of insecurity cultivated by the distorting images of the online world.
Until now we’ve talked of “generation snowflake” in reference to those too quick to claim offence; here’s a play suggesting they’re not so much oversensitive as overabused. MARK FISHER Summerhall (Venue 26) JJ James Rowland is an exponent of the Boris Johnson school of theatre. With a calculated mix of aren’t-i-cute vagueness and floppy-haired geniality, he even points out how privileged he is, like it’s all a big joke, even though he shows no sign of doing anything about it. Instead, he tells a commonplace love story (apparently, it may not be true, but hard to imagine why he’d make it up), hoping charm alone can carry its vacuity. He proves only, however, that growing up on a diet of Richard Curtis movies is a recipe for schmaltz. MARK FISHER