Festival Theatre
Online Booking Fringe www.edfringe.com International Festival www.eif.co.uk Book Festival www.edbookfest.co.uk Art Festival www.edinburghartfestival.org THAT MOMENT Endearing and comic one-woman performance ●●●●●
The lead character in this one-woman show, Alicia Harding, is a budding actress and one of those girls who seems to attract calamity like dog shit attracts flies – and she’s also developing an alarming habit of landing jobs which involve cleaning up piles of the aforementioned stinky stuff as opposed to proclaiming her lines on stage. If the tangled plot of scrapes and awkward situations she gets herself into is all a bit chick-lit, it’s partially redeemed by its surprisingly ambivalent ending. There’s plenty of in-jokes about the acting trade, the Fringe, and the unbearable fakery of the theatre world, but it’s all accessible stuff.
The real draw here is the engaging performance of born raconteur Jenny Harrold as Alicia. She tells her story, slipping into different roles with ease – from Alicia herself to her snooty Scottish agent, an obnoxious Irish casting agent and a pair of plummy old luvvie directors she’s desperately trying to impress by means fair or foul. All this makes for an unchallenging but very likeable and funny hour of lunchtime theatre. (Laura Ennor) ■ Underbelly, 0845 545 8252, until 29 Aug, 12.50pm, £8.50–£10 (£7.50–£9).
SUSPICIOUS PACKAGE Immersive fun on the streets of Edinburgh ●●●●●
If you’re in a shop in the Grassmarket or on Victoria Street and see some people in daft hats having a stilted conversation read from iPods you’ve probably stumbled across a ‘performance’ of this interactive promenade piece. After being greeted by creator Gyda Arber in the C Too courtyard, costumes are donned, instructions issued, iPods inserted and the fun begins. Originally staged in New York, the detective noir for four or six players traverses the cobbled streets and
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66 THE LIST 19–26 Aug 2010
E N R O H T A L L U E V E T S
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out from behind the safety of dark auditoriums and into the action appeals, this is a great way to spend an hour. Despite the hats. (Suzanne Black) ■ C Too, 0845 260 1234, until 30 Aug, times vary, £8.50–£10.50 (£7.50–£9.50).
THE FRAGILITY OF X Blurring the boundaries of behaviour ●●●●●
You could be forgiven for assuming that a play about the relationship between a single mother and her autistic teenage son would be very worthy and pretty heavy going. The Fragility of X is those things (in a good way), but it’s also incredibly funny and enormously moving, and the humour, which switches from slapstick to blackly comic, is absolutely revelatory. It’s also key to getting a handle on the nature of the relationship between the loving but exhausted mother and her doting but exhausting son. Written and devised by the
performer-led Manchester company Coal, under the direction of Told By An Idiot’s John Wright, the play unfolds
over the course of a single evening. From the moment the boy gets in from school the house becomes a bewildering whirl of shouting, screaming, stamping and fighting. Initially, mum deals with his frantic behaviour, but by the end of the night she’s run ragged and driven to her wits’ end. Here, the definition of normal and abnormal behaviour becomes blurred, which is what raises this well-performed show above the usual issue-led fare. (Miles Fielder) ■ Underbelly, 0844 545 8252, until 29 Aug, 4.10pm, £6.50–£10.50 (£8.50–£9.50).
steep staircases around the venue. The instructions are easy to follow, the time to reach each checkpoint ample and the syncing between participants accurate. Blithely following the digitally
imparted instructions, there’s a lot of trust on the part of the participant. Where will we end up? Will I make a fool of myself? What’s in the mysterious titular package we’re all ferrying about? The unpredictability adds to the fun, although it means you never know how good your fellow actors will be. If the idea of stepping
LOCKERBIE: UNFINISHED BUSINESS Capturing the human story behind the headlines ●●●●● The ongoing furore surrounding the early release on compassionate grounds of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi – the only person convicted of the Lockerbie bombing – is almost a footnote to David Benson’s one- man show on the subject, and has very little relevance to the substance of the piece. Benson’s monologue, based on the testimony of Jim Swire, father of Flora, who died when Pan Am Flight 103 exploded over the Scottish Borders in December 1988, wisely foregrounds the much more powerful human story of a father’s grief and ensuing quest for justice.
the trial of the two Libyans in the Scottish court in the Hague and the holes in the evidence that led him to the view that Megrahi had nothing to do with the bombing. His testimony is punctured throughout with footage from the immediate aftermath of the bombing and scenes from the trial. Whether you agree with his view that the authorities got the wrong man is irrelevant: his investigation is compelling because it is driven by that horrific memory of seeing Flora’s body at the ice rink, and a desperate need to know who killed his precious daughter. Benson tells this extremely sensitive story without histrionics, capturing Swire’s barely suppressed anguish and the wry humour that sustains him even in harrowing moments such as a face-to-face meeting with Colonel Gaddafi.
The monologue opens with Swire (a detailed but The piece raises many emotive issues, such as the
unshowy performance by Benson) and his wife hearing of the atrocity on the news. When their worst fears are confirmed the family travels to Lockerbie, and in a harrowing scene Swire takes it upon himself to identify Flora’s body in the local ice rink. Haunted by the image of Flora’s final moments on the plane, Swire determines not to rest until the perpetrators of the bombing have been brought to justice. Swire conducts us through the ensuing investigation,
lumbering response of the British and American establishment to the bombing, the treatment of victims’ families and the generally immoral expediency of foreign policy. But the lingering impression is of a man haunted and driven almost demented by what he perceives as a lack of retribution for the death of a much-loved daughter. (Allan Radcliffe) ■ Gilded Balloon, 622 6552, until 30 Aug, 2.30pm, £9–£10 (£8–£9).