Fringereviews

The Edinburgh Festival Fringe may be drawing to a close, but we still have some shows to recommend to our readers

standards used for men and women; the trauma of what is witnessed on the ground; the concern for family back home. And then there are the particular problems faced by this unit, management issues which ultimately let this exceptional group of women down.

Playing a kind of composite character, Johannsen conveys a sense of highly competent women, bristling with barely contained anger. The episodic structure of the show means that the emotional impact of their story does not build as it might, and the sections of movement and repetition which act as a kind of punctuation are less successful than the sections of narrative. Nevertheless, it’s an important story, told with energy and passion, which deserves to be heard. SUSAN MANSFIELD Underbelly Cowgate (Venue 61) JJJJ It is a strange and troubling tale for our times, the one told by Bafta-winning actress and writer Monica Dolan in this disturbing monologue at the Underbelly. In the character of a woman psychiatrist trying to help the courts unravel the case, Dolan tells the story of a little girl called Layla who, like most little girls, wants to be a grown-up lady. In Layla’s case, though, this desire to have the body of an adult woman takes such a forceful and specific form that at the age of eight, with the baffling complicity of her doting single mum, she finds herself in Brazil, undergoing cosmetic surgery that will give her a grown-up pair of breasts.

It’s an extreme story, perhaps so extreme – in its absolute oddity – that it slightly diminishes the force of Dolan’s solo play. Yet the combination of Dolan’s fine performance, and sheer drama of the situation helps to create a memorable hour of theatre, which raises the most searching and heartbreaking questions about our society’s ever more relentless obsession with body image, and with doing “whatever is necessary” to get the body we want. As the doctor observes, cases like that of Layla and her mother, who is now facing prosecution, tend to be viewed as individual aberrations from the norm.

Yet in a society which simply cannot handle the idea of Layla’s situation without generating a storm of pornography, rape fantasies, and lascivious media stories, combined with hypedup hate against those held to be responsible, the doctor increasingly wonders whether she can do anything about the forces with which young girls now have to contend; the combination of big money, intensely visual porn and celebrity culture, and the relentless commodification of the self, that makes common sense about physical appearance almost impossible, and is steadily normalising the futile attempt to buy beauty itself. JOYCE MCMILLAN