You’ll tumble for their talent
One of those rare Fringe shows that you could happily catch a number of times over the course of its run, Mat Ewins appears to have finally hit the mother lode with his multimedia hi-jinks, refining his film spoofs and computer game silliness into an hour that doubtless rivals anything at the Festival for sheer density of gags.
Introducing us to the Indiana Jones-style movie series Adventureman, Ewins’ alterego works at the British History Museum where, thanks to a budget shortfall entirely of his own creation, he needs to find Tutankhamun’s lost amulet to save the day.
In marked contrast to the flimsiness of the film’s plot, the show has been painstakingly sequenced together, and features a riotously funny stream of smoothly cued video clips and even computer game sequences, the height of audience interaction in a show that consistently finds Ewins manipulating and pulling the rug out from the audience’s feet.
He makes imaginative use of webcam, karaoke and his cramped venue’s confines. He’s even programmed random algorithms into his characters’ names.
Broadly entertaining, superficial nonsense though it is, Ewins suddenly halts the action around the 40-minute mark to reflect on his career to date and mock the often high-minded pretentiousness that can run away with itself at the Fringe.
It’s an atypical sober moment in an otherwise knockabout, free-flowing production but justifies its presence as Ewins swiftly reverts to his juvenile mischief. Not every joke lands as impactfully as others.
But there are some for the ages in there and he keeps the show barrelling onwards with nary an opportunity to catch your breath between them. Tremendous stuff.
Rebecca Atkinson-lord is in action before the audience
The Ping-pong Ball Effect
Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33)
At first, it’s easy to view this show through the lens of social conscience. Upsala Circus is populated by atrisk young people from St Petersburg so, of course, we have to like their show regardless. But by the end, the warm cheers are genuine – and it’s because of what they’ve done, not who they have even taken their places. She’s seated on a desk on centre stage in leggings and plain black T-shirt, blonde hair scraped back into a ponytail, brassy Wolverhampton tones garrulously welcoming us all in, commanding everyone to get up the front and fill in the seats closest to her. When the play proper starts most minds will already be made up about her; about her intelligence, her preferred topics of conversation, where she lives, what her show will be like, whether they might stop and talk to her on the street. About her class, essentially.
Some might even wonder what she’s doing in a theatre in the first place. Which is a canny and brutally realistic sleight-of-hand on the part of Atkinson-lord, who really did grow up as the child of a working class family in Wolverhampton, but who was the only one of her siblings to be privately educated. She’s are. In the increasingly oversubscribed world of contemporary circus, there’s always somebody who can jump higher or land more spectacularly – and honestly, there are stronger acrobatic shows at the Fringe than this one.
But Upsala has something special – charming yet cheeky, which makes your smile grow bigger by the minute. There’s also theatrical artistry accompanying the circus skills, thanks, in part, to two adult musicians, who create looped vocal sounds mixed with walked either side of the class barrier which divides Britain throughout her life, and the show she has created is personally political rather than exercise in polemic, turning the focus on herself to excavate the parts of her upbringing she’s left behind in order to become a metropolitan actor in London.
In doing so, she takes us through her family background and the surrounding politics of her lifetime, reading pre-recorded conversations of her parents discussing their lives and breaking the piece up with defining quotes from prime ministers Thatcher, Blair, Cameron and May. Some of these elements feel slightly over-styled, but Atkinson-lord’s point – and the manifestation of it, as she subtly transforms into an elegant lady in an evening dress with a cut-glass, haughty tone – is expertly made, inviting all of us to question strings to form a gorgeous live soundtrack to the tricks. Most of which are the usual fare – shoulder balances and flips, Cyr wheel, hula hoop, juggling – all delivered with a confidence that’s assured but friendly, never arrogant.
The eponymous balls are everywhere: juggled impressively against a wall, suspended comically in the air by blowing at them, or pouring down onto the stage during the crowdpleasing finale. A bespoke contraption, part-drum, partcannon, is wheeled out and how much of our own class is an outward protection, and how malleable that might be, depending on what we choose to leave behind.
Michael Brunström: Parsley
Heroes @ Dragonfly (Venue 414)
Nothing is as pointlessly silly as it might seem in Michael Brunström’s latest opus, Parsley. Not his blowing balls of paper off a book at the floor, not his garnishing us with sprigs of parsley. OK, some things are. The singing of made-up Cockney market songs, the metronome snogging and the frequent appearances of George Orwell singing easy listening classics. Brunström’s book of New Material, from which we walloped to produce enormous smoke rings that billow above our heads. And a large padded mat is rolled onto the stage to give the performers extra height as they fly into the air in an impressive torrent of tumbles.
It’s this kind of thing which gives the show its uniqueness – something all circus productions are desperately trying to find, and which this happy, loveable band of young Russians is most definitely in possession of. read, goes beyond silly, past surreal and comes back to just hilariously funny.
We, as an audience, are called upon frequently and for increasingly absurd reasons. We sing, we sift fact from non-fact and we cheer for our respective parsleys (curly or flat leaf ), in whose name we battle, the air full of tiny planes. We play slide whistles, recreate seminal moments in the history of parsley and come up with a multiplicity of thyme based puns. All just a waste of thyme ? Absolutely not. Brunström’s shows are things of beauty and love. The bloke in front of me sat arms folded and stone-faced throughout. Each time I hooted with laughter, he turned and looked at me askance. I feel very, very sorry for this man. Learn to love Michael. It will enrich your life.
It may not be the most demanding show on the Fringe, and its narrative arc is entirely simple; but all the same, this glorious co-production from Knee-high Theatre of Cornwall and Bristol Old Vic must be one of the most lusciously beautiful shows in Edinburgh this year, a magnificent feast of colour and lyricism that also reflects with some sadness on this year’s dominant Fringe theme of migration and exile, and the intolerance and violence that too often lies behind the movement of people.
Written by Daniel Jamieson, The Flying Lovers Of Vitebsk tells the story of the painter Marc Chagall and his wife, the writer Bella Rosenfeld, who were born into the thriving Jewish community of Vitebsk, now in Belarus, at the end of the 19th century. Marc and Bella – exquisitely played by Marc Antolin and Audrey Brisson – fall in love, and Marc goes to Paris for three years to make his fortune as a painter; but by the time he returns to Vitebsk in 1914 to marry Bella, the European horizon is dark with war, and their story becomes one of growing uncertainty and exile, as their daughter Ida is born in freezing wartime St Petersburg, and Marc gradually falls out of favour with the new revolutionary Soviet government, after 1917.
The story is told in a torrent of lush and beautiful colour and traditional Jewish wedding-band music (played live by Ian Ross and James Gow) that somehow captures the unforgettable vividness and almost child-like wonder of Chagall’s paintings, without slavishly imitating or recreating them. The story of Bella and Marc ends in New York State, where she died during the Second World War; the story of Vitebsk ends in utter horror, with the total destruction of its Jewish community at the hands of communism and Nazism.
Yet in Emma Rice’s magical production, there is a sweetness in the narrative, and in Chagall’s character and work, that survives every horror; and leaves a legacy of love, belief, and joyful colour, forged in the most terrible times.