Festival Theatre
flipped,’ says the Australian actor, laughing.
A hit at the fringe in Adelaide and in
Sydney, the play presents Tim, an out-of-work civil servant, and his downstairs neighbour Diane, who was fired from her teaching job. Though he wants nothing to do with
the neighbours, she craves their friendship but can communicate only by slipping notes under their doors and banging on her ceiling with a broom.
‘Anyone who’s ever lived in a flat will be able to identify with what they see,’ says Kingsford-Smith, himself a former Edinburgh resident. ‘It’s funny but there’s also a tinge of sadness. If only these two people came out to talk to each other they’d find they had a lot in common.
‘Hopefully we’ll inspire people to go home and knock on their neighbour’s door and introduce themselves.’ (Claire Prentice) ■ C Chambers Street, 0845 260 1234, until 31 Aug (not 17), 6.45 pm, £8.50–£10.50 (£7.50–£9.50).
SUCKERVILLE Spitting Distance crashes onto the Fringe with a topical show
The Fringe has always been a rich forum for performers to respond to global events and it was inevitable that theatre-makers would take on this year’s hot topic, the world economic crisis and its aftermath. Intriguingly, up-and-coming young company Spitting Distance has opted to explore the West’s ailing economic systems through the prism of the 1929 crash. ‘The choice to focus on 1929 came
out of a state of general ignorance,’ says Victoria Featherby from the company. ‘Trying to understand the current economic crisis we looked to the Wall Street crash as it was an event we were all aware of. Friends were losing their jobs and we felt theatre practitioners were not responding to these recent events that are affecting many people.’ The company started by amassing a huge body of research and then found a very small point of focus: an account of a woman who jumped to her death
shortly after the Wall Street crash. ‘We wanted to explore the less tangible reasons for economic collapse – the human psychology and culpability for the repetition of boom and bust,’ says Featherby. ‘To misquote Eric Morecambe, it’s all the right notes in all the wrong order.’ (Allan Radcliffe) ■ C Cubed, 0845 260 1234, 6–31 Aug, 2pm, £8.50–£10.50 (£7.50–£9.50).
list.co.uk/festival
Telephone Booking Fringe 0131 226 0000 International Festival 0131 473 2000 Book Festival 0845 373 5888 Art Festival 0777 169 3470 THE WORLD’S WIFE Visceral poetry from the new laureate
You can’t fault Linda Marlowe for timing. No sooner had the original Oh! Calcutta star and Berkoff protégé decided to adapt Carol Ann Duffy’s The World’s Wife for the stage, than the Glasgow-born Duffy landed the job of poet laureate. An hour or so after Duffy herself performs The Princess’ Blankets at the Scottish Storytelling Centre, Marlowe will be bringing life to The World’s Wife, Duffy’s 1999 collection of portraits of the female partners of famous fictional characters. ‘The moment I read her work I fell in
love with Carol Ann Duffy,’ says Marlowe who is interpreting 18 of the 30 poems. ‘It’s amazing poetry and amazingly actable. It’s almost as if she’s written them for the theatre. It’s crying out to be acted.’
Joining a portfolio of one-woman shows – including Berkoff’s Women and Mortal Ladies Possessed by Tennessee Williams – The World’s Wife introduces us to everyone from a Spanish gorilla to Mrs Quasimodo. ‘It’s an extremely physical show,’ says Marlowe, promising no dry readings from the poetry lectern. ‘She’s as tough and as visceral as Shakespeare and Berkoff. It’s provocative stuff.’ (Mark Fisher) ■ Assembly Rooms, 623 3030, 7–31 Aug (not 12, 19), 1.50pm, £11–£12 (£10–£11). Preview 6 Aug, £5.
UNIT 46 Former Edinburgh resident creates offbeat comedy about flat-dwelling YOU FANCY YOURSELF Icelandic-born Canadian performer returns to her roots – in Edinburgh
Maja Ardal represents the true international spirit of the Fringe. Originally from Iceland, she moved to Edinburgh at the age of four and, after completing a course at the RSAMD, relocated to Canada in the early 1970s to start her theatre career.
In 2009, Ardal is returning to Edinburgh for only the
third time in 40 years with You Fancy Yourself, a semi- autobiographical account of her time as a pupil at Bruntsfield Primary School. The one-woman play details Ardal’s formative experiences of poor 1950s Edinburgh neighbourhoods, portrayed through a girl called Elsa. However, the project started life as a series of poems. ‘I came to Scotland and realised that there were kids
who were really desolately poor and struggled,’ she says. ‘That sparked my writing poems. I strung them together and realised I had a story to tell about a little
Leof Kingsford-Smith locked himself in one room of his family home for four days to get into the mindset of his reclusive character in Unit 46. ‘I drove my family mad, they thought I’d finally
girl who has to learn what it is to be Scottish.’
While there are clear differences between Elsa’s fictional childhood and Ardal’s real one, there are distinct overlaps too. ‘I was one of those kids that wanted to look after everybody,’ Ardal says. ‘I wanted to make the world perfect. Obviously, I fabricate and create a lot of fiction in You Fancy Yourself, but it’s true that I wanted to be as Scottish as I possibly could and it’s true that I couldn’t save some of my little friends from the bullies at school.’ And with a Dora Award for Outstanding Performance under her belt, Ardal’s return to Scotland in the year of Homecoming promises to be memorable. ‘It’s been a long time coming,’ Ardal says, ‘and now, for me to come back to Edinburgh with this play, I feel like I’m awakening these ghosts. I’m enormously excited – I’m going to look up all my old boyfriends.’ (Yasmin Sulaiman) ■ Universal Arts @ St Georges West, 0844 477 1000, 8–30 Aug (not 10, 18, 24), 4.45pm, £10–£11 (£8-£9). Previews 6 & 7 Aug, £5.
6–13 Aug 2009 THE LIST FESTIVAL MAGAZINE 63