A working-class heroine
The dead parent show has, rather unfairly, become something of a Fringe cliché. However, Robin Clyfan’s debut solo offering is an elegantly constructed, rather touching take on the genre, the tale of his mother’s passing from a rare blood cancer told with irreverence and verve. The fact that this small, working-class Welsh woman is portrayed as a brawny male rugby player and that his father is scarcely less sensitively portrayed as a South African caricature by the strapping, middle-class Englishman, is testimony to a show that seeks to convey emotional rather than literal truth, playing to Clyfan’s strengths as an ebullient comic actor.
Further setting the show apart is the fact that Clyfan’s parents were both gay activists who entered their relationship for the sake of having the comic and his twin sister, raising them about as gender neutral as it was possible to do so in Yorkshire at the time. Centring on one of the final, treasured memories Clyfan has of his fiery mother, a day trip to the seaside town of Whitby, he reveals their relationship was not straightforward. His work as a jobbing actor, which has occasionally involved him humiliating himself for multinational companies and billionaires, prompted tension with her socialist ideals.
Confident in his storytelling abilities, Clyfan teases out these threads at an unhurried pace. Though that’s not to say the show is without energy, as he mugs and capers through such embarrassing memories as the time he was forced to dance as a giant baby for a promotional junket. In between such daft set-pieces, an intimate portrait emerges of a family bond and of love, ultimately, overcoming all. On her deathbed, Elsie’s nan gives her a letter (hidden inside a Jeffrey Archer novel) telling her the father she has never met is still alive and living in Manchester. Soon, 17-year-old Elsie – with a bit of help from her English teacher, Mr Gibson, and from Danny the local homeless guy – is on a bus heading south armed with nothing but her wits.
British-new Zealand actor Skye Lourie’s first play is a vibrant portrait of a Scottish teenager facing the biggest challenge of her life so far.
She herself plays Elsie, a delicious adolescent mix of street smart and naivety, while Graeme Dalling plays all the other
floor with his rap battle opponent Blizzard, his bookish looks and professed career as a teacher very much giving him the air of the underdog. But Grist was an experienced slam poet by the time he hit the internet, and his gift for live and improvised wordplay were well-honed.
Both facets of his work come into play with this, an interactive show which sets him against his audience – particularly its younger members – in a contest to see who will be crowned Poetry King. What works so perfectly about the piece is that Grist attacks it with the verve of an old-style kid’s television presenter, completely buying into the sense of combativeness which eggs the kids in the crowd on to show him who’s boss – as, all the while, he buries a strong educational thread where the crowd’s younger members can’t see it.
Grist invites his audience to call out the final words of a chocolate-related poem, and to get involved in a great game to be played in pairs, in which one must tell a tall tale in a given time, frantically changing the narrative on a dime every time their partner accuses them of lying. The Poetry King’s invention, personality and rapport with his audience well deserves a return to one of the festival’s bigger venues next year. characters, including Elsie’s feckless mother and her self-absorbed best friend. The world of the show is inventively conjured using a trunk, a few props and a
OTOSOTR
Underbelly Cowgate (Venue 61) The first Fringe show ever to come from the central Asian republic of Kazakhstan, this small but powerful piece by Anatoliy Ogay and Tatyana Kim, performed by Ogay as a monologue with songs, tells the tale of his grandfather’s experience as a Korean migrant sent to Soviet Kazakhstan in the Stalinist 1930s, who became a soldier of the Soviet Union in the Second World War.
Ogay’s grandfather faced both bitter prejudice and shocking danger and deprivation during his military service – the title of the show stands for On The Other Side Of The River, in memory of a hallucinatory moment when his grandfather stood on a riverbank looking across to the territory of Nazi-held Europe, and to a Nazi soldier who stood there. In the end, his grandfather survived, although deaf and shellshocked, and even made it to Berlin, where he joined in the triumph of the victorious Allied troops.
Set on a bare stage with only a keyboard and a simple design of three neon tubes which change colour with the narrative, OTOSOTR succeeds both in evoking history washing line to which objects are pinned.
Working-class Scottish voices are hard to find on the Fringe, and it’s unusual to find them as well done
with a rare intensity, and in seeming like a thoroughly modern reflection on family and identity, mediated through Ogay’s lyrical but driven 21st century music; and this show takes its place alongside others on this year’s Fringe – notably Chris Thorpe’s Status, and Our Theatre of Taiwan’s Delusion Of Home – that try, one more time, to square our capacity for a deep sense of belonging in one country or place with the sheer complexity of the historical narratives that make up each one of us, and remind us that the truth about human identity is rarely pure, and never simple.
Lauren Pattison: Peachy
Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33) Though she affects to hate the idea of becoming comedy’s Taylor Swift, constantly crashing out of relationships, you suspect that Lauren Pattison actually rather enjoys the comparison. After last year’s Edinburgh Comedy Award-nominated debut about her break-up, she expresses frustration that this year’s gone rather well for her, as she’s fallen in love again, travelled the world and beefed herself up physically. as they are here. Elsie is no stereotype, either, she’s clever, generous and resourceful, but she will need all of that to deal with the surprises waiting for her in Manchester.
Lourie’s script isn’t perfect, as it does harbour a few clichés, but there are also surprises and plenty of laughs along the way. The conclusion, too, is well handled, never schlocky, but not shying away from difficult issues. And Elsie is a proper heroine, bright, straight-talking and unsentimental, a young woman with her life ahead of her who stays with you long after the play is finished.
Outside the Fringe, Lourie is making her way as an actor in television and film. One has to hope she keeps writing, and that she might have a few more Elsies up her sleeve.
Pattison though, remains prey to depression and confidence issues, with her achievements a test of her growing independence. You can take the girl out of Newcastle but not Newcastle out of the girl, a situation she’s keen to reinforce as she fears losing herself to London pretentiousness.
Returning to her family home as often as she can, her new relationship with a posh boy causes ructions in her parents’ marriage but helps ground the comic.
In stark contrast to the protective pragmatism of her best friend, whom she acquired in a nightclub toilet, there’s a touchingly sweet quality to her relationship with her boyfriend that Pattison never dispels, even when it’s threatened by her heading to Australia to perform. Once there, she proves herself as worldly unwise and susceptible to bleak introspection as ever. Then confronting a childhood bully, she only belatedly demonstrates some personal growth.
Vulnerable but game, you’re constantly willing Pattison to succeed. Increasingly belying her little-girl-lost appearance, she reiterates her strength of character, underpinned by a clear-sighted intelligence and growing assurance in her storytelling abilities.
Laura Davis: Ghost Machine
Underbelly, Cowgate (Venue 61) This uniquely disturbing show actually preceded Laura Davis’s excellent Fringe debut last year. But the Australian is only now bringing it to Edinburgh, replete with many of the same existential crises, only more so. Performed for the most part under a ghostly sheet, illuminated by fairy lights positioned under the costume, she’s been performing comedy for 11 years and this is how she feels safest.
The missing engagement that the lack of eye contact creates, her occasionally shrill, blame-scattering delivery and the frequently bleak subject matter ensure that initially at least, Ghost Machine is a confrontational listen.
But from the start, something about the freedom it affords her allows Davis to ponder both the big questions of the universe and her small, wretched existence working in a menial job in Melbourne’s Exhibition Centre.
What’s more, she’s emboldened to ask personal questions of the audience, apparently genuinely interested on a philosophical level rather than malevolently motivated when she asks what keeps someone awake at night or if they’ve ever contemplated suicide.
Gradually, the house lights start to come up and the costume begins to be removed, with Davis directly addressing the crowd about her epiphanies, sexual awakenings, vengeful conquests and feats of strength. Now the onus is very much on the audience to contribute. She threatens a Kate Bush-style sweep around the stage for the rest of the hour, seeing out her remaining time, if we don’t respond to her naked honesty with candour of our own.
Playing a sophisticated game of establishing and breaking tension, she never forgets to puncture the anxiety that begins to envelop the room with a well-placed and crafted punchline, her nihilism not inhibiting her joke-writing talent. She’s an acquired, alternative taste to be sure. But unquestionably worth the effort.