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And so it is in the (Ltd/y. intimatxe and multifaceted world of T.’r/kSe».S/iow.c replete With Videos. lectures and live demonstration Better still, the easily offended can rest easy: 'Tne two actors have wonderful genitals' Nice. Ugly appendages be damned. iAnna Millar,
I Underbelly, 0870 2‘45 3085. 37 Jul—24 Aug. 7.45am {It} f 70 473538;.
THIN WALLS An Upper West Side story
The elegant. scaffolded building On New York's Upper West Side has seen better days — in the 1940s people even waltzed on the roof. But the once-glamorous. ten-floor Belle Claire Hotel is the undisputed star of a one-woman show, written and played by one of its long-time tenants.
Alice Eve Cohen's play Thin Walls. set during a turbulent ten-year period from the mid-80s. gives the lie to the notion that New Yorkers don't give a damn abOut other people. A mesmerising performer. Cohen has lived in a huge apartment in the Broadway btiiiding since the late 1970s She conVinCingly plays a dozen roles in 41 scenes. Many of the characters she portrays are still her gossipy neigthurs — and friends. "When they came to see the show. they all gave me notes.’ she says.
All human life is here — mental illness. drug dealing, a brutal murder — because walls have ears. iJackie McGlonei I Assembly Rooms. 226 2428. 2—25 Aug (not Tue). 6300/77, 570—57 7 (5:94: 70/.
THE TOWN OF MICE Mice work
Non text-based theatre is one of those artistic phenomena that tends to diyide Fringe-goers.
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One such SHOT. debuting at this year's festival is The Town of Mice performed by Russia's Performing Monkey Theatre. who create lllUSIC With Instruments made out of household objects. their comical tale being augmented by dance. sound and light effects. While it sounds like the kind of offbeat perfomiance that used to grace the stages of Opportunity Knocks. the Performing Monkeys' piece caused something of a splash in their native Moscow when they appeared in collaboration With ‘Ouartet E'. a theatrical troupe borne out of faCuIties of the State Institute of Dramatic Art. (Allan Radcliffel I Gateway Theatre. 3173939, l—lQAi/g.
3. 75pm. 74—25 Aug. 70.30pm, £70 (£8).
WISHBONE: INTERFERENCE Getting the lucky end of Wishbone
Anyone who Witnessed Wishbone's ingenious. multi-faceted production. Scapegoat Will be thrilled With the award-Winning company's return to the Fringe With its latest triumph, Interference. Set in American-occupied West Berlin in 1972. it's essentially the tale of a woman's search for her brother. Yet. as fans Will testify. Wishbone primarin tells stories through various stunning Visuals.
‘The work is deVised from smatch,‘ explains Karen Glossop. who forms one half of Wishbone alongSide Paul Murray. ‘The thing we're really interested in is the idea of framing performance. so we know we'ye hit on it when the ideas and pictures COnie together.‘ And. despite the speCific setting, the piece Will undoubtedly resonate With current
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s ARON NEILL She talks to dead people
‘I never ever felt that I would be in Edinburgh or that I would be doing this on a
FRAULEIN ELSE Get your Schnitzlers . out
Spirits of the Fringe
big scale,‘ says Sharon Neill, 36, who claims to be able to communicate with the spirits of the dead. ‘When I first started doing this I was a sociology student. I did a psychology degree. I mean, I'm no pushover.’
She has clearly met the sceptical before. Her conversation meanders
somewhere between the lazily conversational to the urgently defensive. Blind since birth, Sharon has taken a long journey to the festival, full of whispers of madness and shamanism. ‘My family thought I had an overactive imagination
because I went to a deaf and blind school, and that the grunts and moans of the deaf kids were subconsciously frightening me,’ she says.
Something of a minor celebrity in her home country, Ireland, Sharon came to prominence through a local TV programme in 1995. Since then, at the behest of her management, her schedule of private readings and public shows hasn’t stopped. ‘Up on stage I’ll just be passing on messages, I can‘t see who I’m talking to, living or dead, so I don’t lie. If I don’t get a specific contact, I tell them so. It's great, I just love it. The part that is most important
to me is being able to let people know that their elders are still around, to take
away some of the mysticism.‘
When I hit with the big question, she answers with excitable glee: ‘Everyone wants to believe there is something on the other side. I don’t believe - I know
there is one. It’s not a question of belief - it is a question of knowledge.’
(Paul Dale)
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- THE LIST FESTIVAL GUIDE 73