Is there anybody out there?
0 Flying saucer sweets aren’t all that make this show a success
Later he explains that an alien has answered his Airbnb advert and is coming to
stay. The show is billed as “docu-comedy”, and Robert is presented as a real person – but we never find out for sure.
A fittingly imaginative way of telling this and other stories of UFO sightings, uses audience participation and flying saucer sweets to question whether or not there really is anything “out there”. Although nobody knows for sure, by creating an increasing number of interactions between audience and cast, the shows asks whether the ongoing search for UFOS represents something more universal – our desire to connect with each other.
Do life-changing experiences cease to matter when they are proven to be false? Why is it that people can still feel lonely when they are surrounded by others? While the show almost inevitably ends with David Bowie’s Life on Mars, it’s more thoughtful questions such as these, rather than the search for aliens, that we’re left thinking about as everyone joins each other on stage for the finale. SALLY STOTT
Until 27 August. Today 10:50am.. Summerhall (Venue 26) JJJJJ
In the context of a Fringe that seems, in certain respects, to get more homogenous and commodified every year, it’s a joy to find a work that’s deeply rooted in the messy specifics of Edinburgh and that champions the value of queer difference. Written by James Ley and directed by Ros Philips, this hilarious, heartfelt and provocative play tells the story of Lavender Menace, the gay bookshop that occupied a basement in the New Town between 1982 and 1987. Or rather it presents us with two of the shop’s young employees – idealistic, politically engaged Lewis (Pierce Reid) and amiable, fun-loving Glen (Matthew Mcvarish) – as they try to tell its story in between getting sidetracked into talking about the local scene, activist history, their favourite books and songs, their hopes, fears and desires.
Ley’s script achieves a deft and sophisticated balance of subjects and registers, shedding light on queer experience with humour, warmth, passion and complexity. There’s vivid attention to the quirky particulars of Lavender Menace, from the signage that was taken down each night in case of hostility to the proud, curious or furtive customers who found in it a sense of belonging and possibility. But there’s also great local detail about Edinburgh and nuanced attention to the lived politics of queer life as well as the risks – no less acute today than in the 1980s – of mistaking limited mainstream tolerance for genuine liberation.
Reid and Mcvarish are both superb, animating the odd couple of Lewis and Glen with laughter, frustration and fire while also inhabiting supporting characters including the shop’s founders, a policeman, a bank manager and even Margaret Thatcher. It’s a play that insists on the joy of the unexpected, the strange fluidity of time, the power of storytelling and the ecstasy of radical culture, from proud disco to scandalous erotica. Far from sentimental nostalgia, Love Song to Lavender Menace is a reminder of how precious and precarious spaces of real difference truly are.
BEN WALTERS
Until 26 August. Tomorrow 12:55pm.