European Citizen Popsong

Summerhall (Venue 26)

What about Europe, then? Is the European Union just an idea whose time has come and gone, or does the notion of a Europe bound together committed to peace, negotiation, and bureaucracy rather than war, still have a future? If these questions trouble you of a night, then this impossibly engaging Big In Belgium show by Marieke Dermul is the Fringe experience for you.

Baffled by Brexit, and worried about the future, Marieke dons a baseball cap bearing an EU badge, and sets off, video camera in hand, to talk to people across the continent, in Athens, Kiev, Berlin and Brussels, about the possibility of creating a European Citizen Popsong, to help unite the nations. At this point, she invites four members of the audience to take on the roles of her four main interviewees, all musicians, and the rest of the audience to become a choir, with a view to presenting an EU entry in the 2017 Eurovision Song Contest in Kiev; and in general, as she travels and chats, she seems to uncover a thick layer of cynicism and disillusion about European ideals, which suddenly gives way to quietly impassioned support for the idea of the EU when the chips are down.

All of her musicians agree to join the pop-song project, contributing a wonderful range of sounds and influences to the final tape; and although Marieke’s journey lacks a conclusive ending, it’s exhilarating to see a young performer raise her eyes momentarily to the wider political picture, and to the taken-for-granted structures without which political debate and protest, however impassioned, would have no meaning at all.

Until tomorrow. Today 6pm.