A riff on musical extremes

Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33) JJJJ John Vernon Lord and Janet Burroway’s picture book has accompanied many a bedtime regime since its publication in 1972. Yet, until now, no British theatre company has adapted it. Well they’ve been missing a trick, because this simple tale of a village infested with wasps has huge potential for a family show – all of which is realised here.

East Midlands-based New Perspectives Theatre has (necessarily) stretched the original tale to fit an hourlong show, giving some characters a back-story and others more rounded personalities – ably handled by the superb cast of three. Not only do they bring an endless supply of energy and enthusiasm to the roles, but a sharp comic wit. Christopher Finn, in particular, by turns a nippy mayor, helicopter pilot and chilled out wasp, really hits the mark.

Much of the dialogue is delivered in verse, often to humorous effect, as we learn about the struggles of the formerly quiet village of Itching Down. The arrival of 4 million wasps shakes the residents from their sleepy lives and sends them into uproar – with a nice light-touch metaphor for the grown-ups, as the villagers look around for somebody, anybody, to blame.

While the mayor rambles on about meetings and committees to solve the problem (again, throwing the adults a comedy bone – but the kids are well-served, too), our heroes Bap the Baker and Farmer Seed get down to the real business of solving the problem with, as the title suggests, a giant jam sandwich in which to trap the swarm.

This leads to some imaginative and fun set design, including an enormous billowing ball of dough and a vast loaf of bread. The baking process is aided by some nicely timed audience participation, and James Atherton’s strong soundtrack of songs is sung with full voice throughout. KELLY APTER thespace on Niddry Street (Venue 9) JJJJJ Sean Shibe is a Jekyll and Hyde of guitarists – in the best possible sense. His SOFTLOUD show, which was premiered at this summer’s East Neuk Festival, switches from the acoustic delicacy of ancient Scots music to an (almost literally) stunning sonic maelstrom of multi-tracked electric guitars.

To open, he took us back to 18th-century Scotland and earlier, with one of Fife-born composer James Oswald’s Divertimentis for early guitar then four tunes from historic lute manuscripts. The Oswald was gently melodious and meticulously articulated, similarly the lute tunes, their venerable phrases hanging fresh and crystalline in the air, bright with harmonics. And it was good to hear Shibe give the presentday Scots lutenist, Rob Mackillop, due credit for his work in revivifying such music.

Then he played a beguiling guitar setting of Peter Maxwell Davies’s Farewell to Stromness, its folk-like melody brimming with tender regret, yet with a faint sense of threat in its middle section, which was perhaps a harbinger of what was to come. Out came the Fender Stratocaster, laptop and pedals for the irresistible, headlong rush of Steve Reich’s Electric Counterpoint, with its layered, what a dead body looks like”. He has the face of an angel, but talks like he’s just stepped out of a sewer. His teeth are white and his skin glowing, but he is rotting from the inside. Writer Dan Pick’s cold, cynical, sexually explicit language might be alienating if it wasn’t so well written, and performed with such unsettling charm by Adam Harley. You may not like the perspective of this wired narrator, who can barely conceal his contempt for the women he meets and views online, but it’s somehow appealing to watch him self-destruct. Maybe that’s because, in this play, we are all voyeurs of one kind or another.

What initially seems like a comedy turns into something darker. Through a fragmented story that slowly reveals

0 Early, classical, contemporary, folk – it’s all fuel for guitarist Sean Shibe partly pre-recorded guitar voices singing and shifting subtly around each other.

Working through Shibe’s suggestion that, in the face of ever more alarming world events, “we’re not screaming loudly enough”, this electric itself, the man takes us through his squalid, superficially functioning life, occasionally reaching into a bucket of blood, within which lie the horrors behind his lack of empathy. This is a snapshot of male disconnection, rather than a wider exploration of the reasons behind it. The way genuine feeling is replaced by grim sex and violence is disturbing, and is made more so by the striking way it’s done. SALLY STOTT thespace on Niddry Street (Venue 9) JJJ

A Scotsman, an Englishman sound world intensified with Julia Wolfe’s LAD, composed for nine bagpipes but here arranged for multi-tracked guitars, building up a swarm of angry drones, over which he used an E-bow and steel slide to create terrifying Stuka and an Irishman are led into a void and don’t get what the punchline of their own joke is meant to be.

They wear nightshirts and sandals, and explore a featureless landscape with only a medical couch placed in the midst of it.

Aware of the significance of their nationalities and with no memories of who they were before, they begin to explore the purpose of a joke to find out which one it is that they belong in, and therefore what the purpose of their existence is meant to be. It’s Waiting for Godot with gags straight from the music hall.

The three-handed cast includes ex-doctor Who Sylvester Mccoy, former Star Trek: Voyager doctor Robert Picardo and Richard Oliver; respectively, a Scotsman howls which became a bagpipe-style lament.

To finish came the brutalist slam of David Lang’s Killer – raw, angry music for an angry world. JIM GILCHRIST playing an Irishman, an American playing a Scotsman and a northern Englishman playing a southern Englishman, and these differences are remarked upon.

The audience is clearly swelled by some fans of Mccoy and Picardo’s genre work, and writer/director Dan Freeman’s script doesn’t avoid in-jokes.

“Doctor, doctor,” begins Oliver, and both look up, while Mccoy’s spoon-playing ability is deployed. It’s a simple fifty-minute sketch, but one that is designed to use the talents of the cast members to their full, with Oliver’s phlegmatic classical delivery playing well off Mccoy and Picardo’s fierce ability as comic actors. DAVID POLLOCK Just the Tonic at The Caves (Venue 88) JJJ Winners of this year’s Amused Moose Comedy Award for “relatively unknown performers”, The Kagools are a likeable if lightweight mime double-act who rely heavily on audience participation and music-cued slapstick, their stage antics augmented by a giant screen and pre-recorded video.

Dressed in their eponymous cagoules, Claire Ford and Nicola Wilkinson affect a bravado display of wordless dancing, squabbling with each other and wideeyed flirting with men in the front rows. Two principal factors inspire their sketches. A toy unicorn at the side of the stage introduces magical possibilities with the malevolent chuckle of a capricious deity. And the Kagools’ fondness for water-based tomfoolery, which leads to supersoaker shootouts, a recurring Baywatch-spoof and their signature skit, in which they affect to be submerged in a water tank, arms, legs and torsos popping up and out of the video into the here and now of their cave venue.

The problem is that the energy, and by extension the knockabout comedy, often seems propelled by the soundtrack of familiar tunes rather than deriving organically from their humour, with the action lagging whenever one of their marks don’t quite intuit what’s required of them. Still, Tutti is a lively, undemanding romp. JAY RICHARDSON Underbelly Cowgate (Venue 61) JJ A Logan’s Run for the internet age from playwright Karla Marie Sweet, this ensemble piece for five actors imagines a future where climate change has ruined the world and algorithms decide whether individuals are contributing enough to society and whether they must be culled or not. Shri Patel’s Jay works in this system, until his mother is chosen for termination and he’s faced with an impossible choice. The dystopian world-building is intriguing, but the sense of real drama lacks somewhat. DAVID POLLOCK