Interesting delivery from dedicated man of letters
Underbelly, Bristo Square
JUST OVER a decade ago, stand-up comedian Dave Gorman took Are You Dave Gorman? to Edinburgh, detailing his weird and wonderful pursuit of others with the same name around the globe. Dave Gorman’s Googlewhack Adventure followed, charting his more extensive delving into the world of Googlewhacking (a two-word Google search producing a single result).
Now in Gorman’s (non-digital) footsteps comes 30-year-old Ben Van der Velde, a Camden-based Jewish Geordie, who is on a mission to champion the declining art of letter-writing.
Against a backdrop of a washing line of letters and cards, the energetic, straggly-haired comic shares a lifelong love of letters — from his first to a Jamaican girl in primary school to the chain letter he sent to four long-lost friends. These include Gad, a security guard he befriended on an Israel tour. Although his travels are more modest than Gorman’s, the letter takes him to a number of destinations.
There’s also a potted history of letter-writing from the Oxford modern history graduate who has written to — and received replies from — Stephen Fry and Prince Charles. For all his elaborate invention and resourcefulness, the show doesn’t totally deliver. But Van der Velde’s talent is unlikely to get lost in the post.
Until August 26
Summerhall
JANE ARNFIELD gives a spell-binding performance in the affecting story of Zdenka Fantlová, the Czech-born Holocaust survivor. In Mike Alfreds’ detailed and tautly-directed onehander, Arnfield takes her audience to pre-war Czechoslavakia, where the assimilated industrialist’s daughter is confronted by the menace of the invading Nazis.
Ordered to wear the yellow star on her clothes, expelled from school for being Jewish and rounded up with her family, she is dispatched in 1942 to Terezin, then to Auschwitz and, ultimately, Bergen-Belsen. When she was rescued, Fantlová weighed five-and-ahalf stone.
There are the smells and sounds of the period —- from the soft scent of lime trees and the bubbling of water in the moonlit mill where Fantlová and her boyfriend Arno enjoyed a countryside prewar tryst — to the threatening thud of Gestapo footsteps in Terezin, where they embraced in secret.
The tin ring in the title is the one given to Fantlová in Terezin, engraved “Arno 13.6.1942”.
Until August 25