Demonic Barber makes a doozie of a floozie
Musik (Bijou, Assembly Rooms, George Street) Verdict: Frances Barber is brilliant ★★★★✩
Rich Kids: A History Of Shopping Malls In Tehran (Traverse Theatre) Verdict: Tut-tutting in Tehran ★★✩✩✩
Dead Ringers Live (EICC, Morrison Street) Verdict: Ra-ra for the repeats! ★★★★✩
AuGuST in Edinburgh has so far been pretty wet. But that hasn’t dampened the spirits of culture hungry festival-goers.
I’ve never known the pavements to be clogged with so much human traffic: hordes of tourists moving not so much in packs as in herds, summoned by the sound of bagpipes on Princes Street and the Royal Mile.
Much of what’s on offer, however — especially at subsidised venues — has adopted a prim, puritanical tone. Gender warriors furious at newly discovered injustice. Curriculum Marxists in continuing indignation at colonialism. Of Brexit, almost nothing — it’s as taboo as Morris Dancing. So I made it my mission to seek out new work. To boldly go where no snowflake has gone before.
And where better to start this enterprise than Frances Barber, in the new Pet Shop Boys cabaret show — a spin- off from their 2001 musical Closer To Heaven.
Barber is in full louche and lubricious mode as fictional German émigré and cabaret artiste Billie Trix, whose life story is penned by Jonathan Harvey. Born in the rubble of Berlin 1945, Miss Trix loses her virginity to a young man on a ship bound for New York — and then to a woman between the toes of the Statue of Liberty.
She meets Andy Warhol after he throws a bucket of water over her to stop her caterwauling.
Her love of blutwurst (blood sausage), amphetamines and selfdramatisation leads her to Trump Tower, and then Madison Square Gardens, where she gives birth.
Yes, it’s all pretty loony; the action punctuated by six songs: four new and two from Closer To Heaven. They are pleasing, Pet Shop Boys standards with drum machine and shiny lyrics given a husky turn by Barber, who makes a fabulous floozie.
She looks like something that has risen from a coffin: ebony wig, white blouse and black corset with long necklaces swinging low, fingers encrusted in metal, eye make-up total cosmetic carnage.
The audience is middle-aged and, unsurprisingly, pretty camp. You could say it’s all a bit ersatz: Nico from the Velvet underground band meets Sally Bowles. And needless to say it’s in the worst possible linguistic taste.
Even so, it’s a refreshing blast of vitality; albeit one that seems increasingly lost on younger audiences, who appear to have forgotten how to take pleasure in what they disapprove of.
That’s certainly true of the creators of Rich Kids: A History Of Shopping Malls In Tehran. Here, even the small pleasure of turning
off your phone has been ruled out. Instead, presenters Javaad Alipoor and Kirsty Housley ask us to log into Instagram and trace the story of Iran’s hedonistic jetset back to Persia’s ancient roots.
The opening image projected on a back wall is of a yellow Porsche destroyed by a car crash in 2015.
THE accident happened after Mohammad Hossein Rabbani-Shirazi, 21, and his 20-year- old girlfriend Parivash Akbarzadeh went on a champagne and cocaine-fuelled joy ride that killed them both. He was the son of a senior cleric, and because the young man was engaged to another woman, it caused even greater outrage at how the other half live (and die).
So far, so interesting. But what follows is a lecture on the homogenous despair of globalised consumerism. More awkwardly, the Traverse theatre’s chuntering wifi can’t handle 90 people logging on at once . . . and there’s no other signal. Whoops.
Besides, the show isn’t really interactive — and doesn’t need to be. Reciting mantras about power and patriarchy, it’s more like Blue Peter for armchair insurrectionists.
People always used to complain about the number of repeats on the BBC, but Dead Ringers Live
does bear another outing. Even so, I did wonder if charging for material read from scripts already aired on Radio Four’s satirical comedy programme wasn’t a bit of a take-on.
Another run- out for David Davis’s Brexit Bulldog? Louis Theroux investigating Labour anti- Semitism? Theresa May starring in Yestermay — a film about the Prime Minister time forgot? All great stuff, but couldn’t they have mustered something new?
Maybe, but the sheer vocal brilliance makes this an indisputable treat.
Grisly bear Lewis MacLeod does his bad-Boris impersonation with a particular flair for the roaring ‘ phwoars’ and other oral evasions.
In the flesh, he’s a super- size Farage, but an exact fit for agent orange, Donald Trump.
Jan Ravens needs no introduction, offering the timid croak of Theresa May, the bossy bustle of Patricia Routledge, the nasal menace of Arlene Foster and the breathless palpitations of Diane Abbott (‘Jeremy!’). Skinny Duncan Wisbey’s booming Patrick Stewart is a miracle of projection, and his Jacob Rees-Mogg is red meat to the Scottish masses.
But the ringleader is surely Jon Culshaw. Does he even have his own voice? Or is he forever cursed to be ventriloquised by John Humphrys?
No matter. Bring on his Andrew Neil, Huw Edwards and Robert Peston (‘a variable speed limit made flesh’).
Dead Ringers’ secret, however, is writing that reaches rhapsodic apotheosis in the escalating blether of Kirsty Wark. There is still no better way to exorcise the madness of modern politics.