Tightrope test for tackling the political and artistic divide
Short plays a year on from Israeli boycott will challenge many opinions
Walking the Tightrope for her Offstage Theatre company at the London-based Theatre Delicatessen space. “I wasn’t around Edinburgh last year, and all I could see was how vicious people were being about it on Twitter, but that’s not debate.”
For its Edinburgh run, Offstage will present Walking The Tightrope in co-production with Underbelly and in association with Theatre Uncut, who Brown has worked with on the company’s similarly formatted presentations of hot-off-the-press works responding to issues of the day. As Brown discovered in London, the discussion is as important as the work itself.
“One of the challenges of the project is that we don’t just get people who have the same opinion,” she says. “Whether they’re writers or panellists, we want to get people out of their safety zone and challenge the perceived notion of what is largely seen as being part of a liberal culture.
“To be honest, the more I think about it, the more it feels like a social experiment about what happens when you get a group of disparate people with different opinions in the same room. You’d have people one evening rolling round the aisles, and another with people listening to every single word. My pseudo-scientific views on this is that there were large groups of people from one particular community listening really hard to see if there was anything there that they found offensive to them.
“You also had some people being hypocritical and contradicting themselves depending on which side of the political fence they were on. Someone actually said that you don’t protest to stop things.”
For Underbelly co-director Charlie Wood, last year’s incident with Incubator was regrettable.
“We were expecting a hip-hop murder mystery,” he says, “and we didn’t see what happened coming at all. Looking back, I’m still not angry with the people who called the boycott in July, and I can totally see their point of view. I agree that what was happening in Gaza was wrong and that there was an incredible argument for a boycott of Israel, but I still feel a level of frustration that at the time there was no opportunity for debate and to hear arguments from both sides. A year on we can explore that.”
Of the eight pieces on show, minded people,” he says, “and sometimes people don’t want to talk because their theatre might get blown up. I don’t think my play is going to change people’s minds about something in seven minutes, but the great thing about theatre is that someone will also have a different response that opens things up, and that is the place to do these things rather than get into a bar fight or a war.”
For Brown too, Walking The Tightrope offers a place for people to engage with others who they might not necessarily agree with.
“People are scared of speaking up,” she says, “because they’re worried they’ll be challenged and subjected to scorn, but I’m hoping that the more things like Walking The Tightrope happen, the more people will get angry, and hopefully that anger will trickle down into theatre.” Walking The Tightrope: The Tension Between Art and Politics, Underbelly, until Aug 31, 3.35pm. www.underbellyedinburgh.co.uk
Rob Adams MEL Frye Will Double Your Money is the sort of Fringe show that can develop into a cult, although not necessarily for positive reasons. The affable host welcomes his audience on arrival and opens with a song before getting down to the main business of drinking malt whisky from ever bigger glasses while fending off Skype calls from his wife and his agent in New York.
Frye, who really does seem to have come direct from New York’s Slipper Room, has apparently been sent to Scotland to raise capital for a film by insulting the tight-fisted inhabitants. He doesn’t do it very well, either fundraising or insulting, and calls on his put-upon assistant, Betty Bombshell, for more whisky and a striptease.
Then he introduces his perfectly appalling, spectacularly expectorating special guest, a cross between Marty Feldman and Julio Iglesias’s worst impersonator, who is much better at the insults and might best be encountered with Kagoule at the ready. You’re dying to see the show, I can tell. The blurb blesses Frye with nearly a century of performing and joke writing. He hides this experience well in both looks and content, although perhaps Americans really do do irony after all. Runs to August 16
‘‘ Just because someone goes to the theatre doesn’t necessarily make them the most liberal-minded people