Festival Theatre PLANE FOOD CAFE Living the high life down low ●●●●●
As the years pass by, and all the various Fringe shows you have seen begin to blend into one, very few will have the power to stand out in your memory. But this one will. Despite being in the Theatre section of the Fringe programme, Plane Food Café is actually more art installation meets informal chat meets short film meets lunch.
It’s also the kind of show which works far better when you don’t know what to expect – so suffice to say that Plane Food Café takes place in one of the more unique venues at the Fringe this year. The subject matter – and film
– is decidedly offbeat, yet ultimately deadly serious, while your two hosts also mix a witty irreverence with super- smart efficiency. Best of all, if you’re willing to lower your standards a little, the £6 ticket also includes one of your main meals of the day. Unforgettable. (Kelly Apter) ■ New Town Theatre, 0844 477 1000, until 30 Aug, noon, 12.40pm, 1.20pm, 2pm, £6.
LEWIS BARLOW: CLOSE- UP MAGICIAN A magical hour in a safe pair of hands ●●●●●
Barlow starts the hour by not claiming to be a comedian or perform any flashy illusions. Magicians are notorious liars, though, and this masterclass in card and coin tricks proves to be very entertaining, and as jaw-droppingly impressive as any of David Copperfield’s supersized shenanigans. Starting small, he takes for granted that the audience knows the basis for each trick and even the particular skills he uses to achieve it. Demonstrations of producing coins from thin air,
locating a single card in pack and dealing a winning hand at poker are all effortlessly done, but never in a way that would incur the wrath of The Magic Circle.
When he kicks it up a notch and escalates each trick beyond the understanding of all but other magicians it becomes something else. It’s the difference between knowing how to read music and hearing a virtuoso wring all the emotion out of Beethoven. At the top of the hour Barlow claims that this is as close to ‘real’ magic as it gets. What is easily dismissed as more of that magician- style falsity turns out to be true. (Suzanne Black) ■ C Central, 0845 260 1234, until 31 Aug, 9.10pm, £8.50–£10.50 (£7.50–£9.50).
CHAUNTECLEER AND PERTELOTTE Bestiality and poultry fornication make for unexpectedly fun viewing ●●●●●
THE DOUBTFUL GUEST The Gorey details ●●●●●
That Hoipolloi’s staging of the Edward Gorey fable is entertainingly done is without question. It is not only an adaptation of this story about a pointy- faced creature in white canvas shoes who takes residence in a grand country mansion, but also an imaginative improvisation around it.
We see nothing of Gorey’s thing that goes bump in the night – and, for that matter, in the day – but we see an awful lot of the tremulous Edwardian family who are disconcerted by its arrival. Driven to despair by their own politeness, they have become a bunch of helpless neurotics, hardly able to get to the end of a sentence without apologising for their own existence.
Chicken sex is perhaps a rather unlikely subject matter for a play but writer Dougie Blaxland somehow manages to make the idea seem realistic in Chauntecleer and Pertelotte, though some may find graphic descriptions of coital relations between humans and poultry unpalatable. A bawdy Chaucerian romp, this highly physical and inventive production – nominated for Best Show at the Brighton Fringe – is presented in the form of a children’s fable but it’s anything but a cautionary tale for kids.
With a meta-theatrical twist, the production, written and directed by Shôn Told entirely in verse, the play
Dale-Jones, brings Gorey’s mischievous creature into the wings, while the hapless characters explain the nuts and bolts of their story-telling technique to the audience. There’s a touch of the mechanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream who ‘come not to offend’, as the Bishop family show us their props and talk us through the story as if we too are likely to be spooked out by their creepy tale. The show is all false starts – and, indeed, false endings – which serve to
pad out a slim story and sprinkle it with comedy. It’s as much a show about a group of people putting on a play as it is about the play itself. With interruptions, forays into the audience and disturbances from the doubtful guest himself, the production has an amusingly shambolic atmosphere and a clutch of good jokes.
That’s fine, as far as it goes, but it also feels like a completely unnecessary piece of work, one that exists in an arts-centre bubble, making no connection with the outside world and no reflection on life as it is lived. It is fun, well done and irrelevant. (Mark Fisher). ■ Traverse Theatre, 228 1404, until 30 Aug, times vary, £16–£18 (£11–£12).
depicts randy cockerel Chauntecleer seducing Pertelotte, a hen to whom he is devoted until he encounters a desperately unsatisfied farmer’s wife. From its slightly shaky beginnings to its revengeful end, Tim Dewberry and Abigail Unwin-Smith charge about the stage with a relentless sexual energy that leaves them drenched in sweat, and their accomplished switching between many animal and human roles is this production’s greatest success.
The silliness of Blaxland’s verse occasionally tests the patience of the audience, but once settled into the rhythm of its rude, rhyming pitter-
100 THE LIST FESTIVAL MAGAZINE 27 Aug–10 Sep 2009
patter, it’s hard not to get behind this loveable and completely ridiculous play. (Yasmin Sulaiman) ■ Zoo Southside, 662 6892, until 31 Aug, 6.30pm, £8 (£6). WONDERMART Avoid the security guards on this inventive supermarket exploration ●●●●●
There are moments in Wondermart that might make the more self- conscious shopper ditch their trolley and run away in fright. Through the course of this 30-minute supermarket wander, the listener is required to become the performer, quietly complicit in the actions directed by the speaker – though the impact the show has on you depends entirely on how much you buy into the conceit. Devised by acclaimed theatre- makers Rotozaza and brought to Edinburgh by the Forest Fringe, Wondermart is an absorbing journey into the heart of modern consumerism. After obtaining the audio track from the Forest Fringe box office or downloading it online, your trip starts and ends outside your chosen supermarket, considering the building (or ‘the egg’ as the serene lady’s voice in your ears puts it) and the people scuttling to and from it. At times remarkably intuitive, there’s a conflict between its request that participants act like normal shoppers and the few out of the ordinary actions it directs. Nevertheless, it’s an affecting dissection of the clinical aspects of supermarket-shopping that forces you to look beyond the shelves. (Yasmin Sulaiman) ■ Selected supermarkets across Edinburgh (audio available from Forest Fringe, The Arches @ St Stephen’s and online), 220 4538, until 29 Aug, times vary, free.
COCORICO French mime duo breaks down invisible walls ●●●●●
A petite, doll-like man in a Little Jimmy Osmond/Austrian prince costume who plays the piano beautifully and tries to avoid the ministrations of his larger and more buffoon-like partner . . . this French mime duo is not comprised of silent white-faced stair climbers with a habit of getting trapped in boxes. From the moment Patrice Thibaud produces bendy multi-instrumentalist Phillipe Leygnac from a suitcase, the