Tim Cornwell
Canadahub at King’s Hall, tied to the Summerhall venue, has presented a statefunded slate of Canadian shows for the last three years and this year’s batch sets a high standard. Songs in the Key of Cree is an earthly delight, to rank with the best jazz cabaret shows of the Fringe.
Cree is the most widely spoken native Canadian language, with as many dialects as English – and here is a chance to hear it spoken and sung, the playwright, pianist and composer Tomson Highway informs us.
Boxing fan Travis Jay has taken some blows of late and is struggling to remain on his feet as a proud black man.
He’s leery of the characterisations society imposes upon him – from his friends’ peer pressure and the media’s racism, to small talk he goes out of his way to avoid. He knows he’s got internal issues that go way beyond his road rage and his difficulties raising his kids.
Shifting his persona with his glasses and his phone manner, the South Londoner takes inspiration from his late, straight-talking Jamaican grandfather, instigating a very funny act out of some emergency flight procedures, but also opening up about his difficulties in displaying his emotions. He has a magically whimsical personality – “I don’t sing, I just speak,” he breathes.
Patricia Cano is the singer, and boy, does she belt it out. She has a take-no-prisoners act to send a shiver down your oesophagus, and featuring the most lascivious description of a tango known to Argentina. Then there’s another musical change of gear as the singer heads for the Grand Ole Opry to sing country. The show is as much English and French as Cree, with Marcus Ali as the soulfully charismatic saxophonist.
Cue total change of tone, for Blind Date. Comedy psychologists could explain why it’s rib-shakingly funny to see a member of the audience pulled up on stage – not for a few minutes, but more or less the full
90. Blind Date recently celebrated its 800th outing, has toured from Canada to the US and London, and tonight’s pick, Greg, becomes an astonishingly effective straight man in the hands of Rebecca Northan, who channels Graham Norton as Mimi the clown (Ali Froggatt
With an appealing front that invariably folds quickly, but a clear-sighted grasp of his faults, he closes on the amusing account of how he inadvertently became a leader of the Black Lives Matter movement.
The Grand Scheme of Things
Underbelly Cowgate – Delhi Belly (Venue 61)
In a pointed rebuke to oldfashioned ideas of who gets the lion’s share of stories – which are fast-unravelling – a man named Nic relates his overpowering love for and hurt feeling towards his friend Flora, while she sits at a computer, voiceless bar answers typed through projected text.
When his view of their relationship is challenged he explodes in rage, but she takes the role once a week). She asks intimate questions over dinner, flashes pert looks to the audience over a red nose, and is all smiles and eyebrows over her new friend. The thought of being Greg instils both jealousy and terror. It’s the show I’m telling friends to see.
finds the words to say what she needs to.
Kopfkino Theatre’s latest Fringe offering is built on strong elements, with Nic Mcquillan and particularly Flora Marston splitting the show between two powerful monologues.
Yet the unusual idea that both are friends who have also lived for all of history remains unexplored, while the dialogue which finally links the pair feels somewhat trite and unsatisfying.
Mandy Muden: Is Not The Invisible Woman
Gilded Balloon Teviot – Balcony (Venue 14)
Mandy is vexed about the invisibility of the middleaged woman in today’s society. To be fair, she has had, over a lengthy career, much less visibility than she deserves. She is a force
Sea Sick should be required watching for Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Tayyip Erdoğan, Ivanka Trump, and Mohammed bin Salman and anyone else possibly in a position to do something.
A chalk circle. A blackboard. Enter writer and reporter Alanna
for happiness in the world, warm, down to earth, and wonderfully funny in her own way.
Yes, she does magic … cards, wineglasses, mentalism and the old metal rings all get a shot in the show. Even this close up, rummaging for props in a bag and a bit pushed for space, she manages to elicit gasps from the crowd.
But the whole of Mandy’s performance is much greater than the sum of its parts. The comedy, the magic, the personality and the crazy bag lady look all meld together into an hour of great warmth and fun. She creates a wonderful rapport with her people, so that even if a trick goes wrong (and it does), we love her not one whit the less. And when the properly impressive mentalism sections go well, we are thrilled as well as amazed.
There is no one else like her in magic. I don’t think there ever will be. Mitchell, formerly of the Canadian Globe and Mail, with the promise: “This is my extinction rebellion”.
Mitchell takes us on a journey through the world’s oceans, like a medic hunting a diagnosis. She experiences the sexual energy of coral, joins a futile fish hunt in the blob, an expanding dead zone. She reflects how journalists need the compulsive curiosity to find the facts and the art to tell the story. Spoken word rather than theatre, but a nightmarish whistle in the prairie wind.
If we had existed, and been wiped out before, millions of years ago, would anyone even know? Sea Sick and Vigil beg that question between them. Vigil is outwith the Canadahub programme, part of the Bruford at Summerhall season.
A solitary figure atop a box of bleached bones watches scrolling names across a giantscreen. Awaterfall Swift, a Laugh Owl , a Crotch Bumble Bee. It’s a kind of blind date of the extinct and threatened species of the world, about 26,000 of them.
Why is he doing it? The piece, from performer and director Tom Bailey doesn’t answer this. It’s more performance art than theatre, calling for a little more character, but a memorable piece, a requiem against a clock that’s counting down.