Edinburgh Fringe round-up: Burnout Paradise, L'Addition, and James Rowland Dies at the End of this Show
On three more memorable shows from this year's Edinburgh Fringe.
I’m writing this from Newcastle, but for the purposes of this newsletter I’m still at the Edinburgh Fringe, where I saw 55 shows in all, including intimate solo pieces, contemporary clowning, stand-up comedy, a hand-crocheted cow and someone dousing themselves in strawberry milkshake to the strains of Bohemian Rhapsody.
You can read my piece in the Guardian on Every Brilliant Thing, Duncan Macmillan and Jonny Donahoe’s uplifting play about depression which has become something of global phenomenon after it was first performed at the fringe 10 years ago.
The Stage will continue to publish fringe reviews until the end of the festival. In the meantime, I’ve been using this space to explore some of the other work I’m seeing in a little more depth. Here’s last week’s newsletter, which includes words on furious foodbank show Stuffed and Jewish crime caper Revenge: After the Levoyah, in case you missed it. (And if you’re a bit tired of these fringe round-ups, normal service will return next week).
Café Europa is free and I’m really keen to keep it that way, but putting it together takes time, so if you’d like to help support my writing (and receive the occasional bonus edition - like this one about up-and-coming Greek director Mario Banushi - please consider subscribing or becoming a paid supporter. Or just share it with anyone you think will like it. That helps too.
Burnout Paradise, Summerhall
Four treadmills fill the stage. As a metaphor for modern living, for the feeling of struggling to stay on top of things, to keep up with everything that needs to be done in a day, it may not be the most original but, boy, is it effective.
Australian performance collective Pony Cam have created a cracking piece of conceptual theatre which captures the sense of being always on the go, always straining to meet a deadline, how even the life of an artist can feel like a grind. Each of the treadmills is assigned a particular area of activity: ‘Survival’, ‘Admin’ and ‘Performance.’ One of the performers has to cook a three-course meal for two audience members. Another has to perform for the audience – a Hamlet soliloquy or the tap routine they performed as a five-year-old. A third has to apply for a £20,000 grant from Creative Scotland (which a couple of days later announced the closure of its Open Fund for Individuals, as reported here), filling in the online application in front of us. The final treadmill is labelled ‘Leisure’ because sometimes finding time for basic self-care and body-maintenance can feel like a chore in itself, yet another thing you need to squeeze into your day.
The show is broken down into four 10-minute sessions during which the performers must run continuously on each of the treadmills while trying to complete their assigned tasks and beat a collective personal best. It’s an exercise in exertion, but it turns out that watching someone attempt to make a rudimentary tomato sauce or get their legs waxed while running on a treadmill is also very funny. To complete their tasks, audience members are invited to provide assistance. Asking for help is built into the form of the show. Audience members rush to lend a hand, to peel onions and paint fingernails. OK, admittedly we are helping them run themselves ragged, but we are helping them.
Further collaborative activities are stitched into the show. A game of bingo takes place. Artists in the audience are invited to help with their funding application, by emailing in testimonies during the performance and helping them fill in their risk assessment. To keep our collective energy up glasses of free Berocca are distributed by the stage manager on a regular basis throughput the show. The need to beat their previous records inspires them to push themselves harder. Inevitably things get very sweaty. To introduce even more jeopardy into proceedings, they promise to refund the audience their tickets if they fail to complete their tasks. I checked and this is legit. They even have cash to give out if they don’t make it, but though they haven’t successfully completed their tasks in every performance, apparently - and happily - no audience member has yet accepted the refund.
On the performance I saw, they completed the tasks – hitting submit on their funding application at the very last second (a sensation which I suspect will be familiar to many).
It turns out that watching someone attempt to boil water or put on a pair of Speedos on a treadmill is as stressful as it is funny (or rather it is simultaneously stressful and funny in an interesting way). Some other shows I’ve seen recently which centred on exertion – Miet Warlop’s One Song, for example, and Žiga Divjak’s Crises – had more metaphoric resonance, with the treadmill coming to symbolise the toll life takes on us all. This had more of a gameshow-like quality, which made it feel a little more superficial, and yet that didn’t stop it feeling like they had found the perfect form with which to capture the relentless, cyclical nature of producing art under our current flavour of capitalism.
L’Addition, Summerhall
Bert and Nasi make stripped back shows that encompass big themes. Tim Etchells has been making experimental work with Forced Entertainment for 40 years.
L’Addition sees them working together on a show that premiered in Avignon last year. It was created to tour community spaces in the villages around the medieval city, where it was performed in French to local audiences as well as festivalgoers. Earlier this year the show was remade for the Wiener Festwochen as Die Rechnung, with German-speaking actors standing in for Bert and Nasi. The play was created as a Volksstück/pièce commune, a performance created specifically for touring, made with a maximum of two actors and minimal technology, and intended to be performed in community centres, open air spaces and other small scale venues. Wiener Festwochen and Avignon Festival intend to create a new piece in this manner every year.
The English language iteration of L’Addition (which retains its French title) has already been performed in Berlin, at HAU Hebbel am Ufer and now UK audiences have get to see it in Edinburgh, as part of the Here and Now showcase.
The show takes the form of a short scene, as Bert and Nasi explain at the beginning in considerable detail, the explanation taking much longer than the scene itself. One of them will play a waiter, the other a customer in a restaurant. The customer will order some wine and the waiter will overfill his glass, spilling wine on the tablecloth. The customer will react, and the scene will reset itself, and start over from the beginning, with Bert and Nasi exchanging roles. Each time they tweak the scene in some way, their delivery shifting from deadpan monotone to Basil Fawlty-style bellowing. They change the pace, speeding up and slowing down again. Sometimes the actions become nonsensical, with Bert spending a good couple of minutes waggling a fork in front of his face. In order to change things up, they explain they will set one iteration of the scene 50 years in the future and they proceed to shuffle round the stage like old men (this reminded me of Julie Walters in the iconic "two soups" sketch). Ultimately the scene always plays out in the same way, the wine is spilled, the tablecloth bundled up, and we return to the beginning.
In different hands this could be patience-testing, but Bert and Nasi are expert physical comedians who draw humour from all the small variations in gesture and tone. A lot of this is down to their rapport. Bert somehow makes the act of saying ‘waiter’ over and over again in an exasperated fashion into something hilarious; similarly when Bert hovers uncomfortably close to Nasi with a tablecloth, it’s hard not to laugh. The backdrop of red curtains gives the whole thing a vaudevillian air, and as this Guardian review points out there’s something quite Beckett-y about the whole thing too.
It’s a show that works on its own terms but is also interesting for the ideas behind its creation, as an accessible touring show and a way of connecting major festivals with their surrounding communities.
James Rowland Dies at the End of This Show, Summerhall
To call James Rowland a gifted raconteur feels a bit dismissive. It’s a word I connect with Peter Ustinov and people who were good value guests on Wogan. To weave a yarn and weave it well is a skill though and it’s one Rowland has in abundance. His first show Team Viking was a beautifully crafted piece of storytelling about the pain of losing a friend which Rowland delivered with just a loop pedal, a funeral suit and Viking helmet. While often very funny, it reduced many people to a soggy, sobbing mess by the end (as this lovely review on Exeunt attests). He went on to make two more shows in a similar vein, forming the Songs of Friendship trilogy.
After the pandemic, Rowland returned with Learning to Fly, an even more minimal piece, which Rowland performed with just a portable record player. It was another play about friendship, this time about an unlikely union between a young boy and an older woman, both a little lonely, who become close. It was a sweet sad story – this review calls it small, and in a way it is, but it was also about the huge currents in our lives, the different forms friendship can take. Music played a big part in the performance, the heart-swelling, mood-lifting power of listening to something beautiful together.
In last year’s show Piece of Work, Rowland wove together the story of another, more troubled friendship with snatches of Hamlet (he has a way with verse). At times it entered the realm of textual analysis, exploring how one of the most famous of Shakespearean soliloquies is open about suicidal impulses in a way we rarely are today. (It’s worth noting that Rowland took over from Jonny Donahoe in Every Brilliant Thing, which deals with similar themes).
In Piece of Work, Rowland performed in pyjamas, in his most recent show, he’s wearing nothing but a hospital gown and a pair of Crocs. It is, he says, a show about mortality. There’s a clock on the wall to prove it. After a characteristically rambling preamble he starts to talk about Robin Hood and his role in English myth, About a quarter of the show is given over to a giddy gallop through one of Robin Hood’s adventures. This is delivered with relish. It contrasts with the more melancholic reflection on what it means to leave this life. He also talks about the death of Robin Hood, how the stories we tell are of a quiet expiration, a hero weakened by blood loss and aware he has little strength left, who exits this realm surrounded by those he loved. (I had a book of Robin Hood stories as a kid, but always avoided reading the last tale. Because that way he stays alive).
In recent years Rowland has performed at the anatomy lecture theatre, one of the most atmospheric spaces at Summerhall, a former veterinary college. The audience sits on semi-circular wooden benches while Rowland holds the floor. It’s a space that suits him. He knows what to do with, how to work it. (It’s also not an easy space to leave if you’re feeling uncomfortable or just need a wee, so he always takes care to assure you that it’s fine to walk out at any point).
I went to see the comedian Mark Thomas perform at The Stand a few days before I saw Rowland’s show. At one point Thomas mentions that his father was a street preacher, and his sister is a vicar. His ability to deliver rousing oratory is evidently a family trait; even when he’s delivering a scathing attack on those in power, (or just calling Boris Johnson a cunt) it is delivered with an innate understanding of pace and delivery and the emotive power of words. I mention this because, while Rowland’s delivery is nowhere near as splenetic, there’s a shared quality to their approach to performance. They both have the skill of preachers.
Is this show as narratively satisfying as some of Rowland’s past work? Maybe not (the Robin Hood section does go on a bit). But I kind of didn’t mind. It’s such pleasure being in a room with a storyteller of his abilities. In his hands, those hard wooden benches start to feel a bit like pews (in a good way).
This week in European theatre
A round-up of festivals, premieres and other upcoming events over the next seven days (because there is other stuff happening in Europe outside of Edinburgh)
Zürcher Theater Spektakel – Zurich’s international theatre festival takes places in various purpose-built venues on the shores of the Lake Zurich and features a varied programme of contemporary performing arts. The 2024 programme includes Rimini Protokoll’s This is Not an Embassy (Made in Taiwan) and Mario Banushi’s Taverna Miresia (which I wrote about previously here). The festival opened on 15th August and runs until 1st September.
Ruhrtriennale –One of the big draws in the 2024 programme for the German music and arts festival is I Want Absolute Beauty, in which actor Sandra Hüller will sings songs by PJ Harvey accompanied by the Ballet national de Marseille choreographed by artistic collective (LA)HORDE, with the whole thing directed by Ivo van Hove, who is also the festival’s artistic director. Other performance highlights include new opera The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions and Legende, Kirill Serebrennikov’s salute to film director Sergey Paradjanov. The festival opened on 16th August and runs until 15th September.
Stockholm Fringe Festival (STOFF) - spanning seven days, Sweden’s multidisciplinary arts festival features work by 100 artists and companies, both Swedish and international. which take place in venues around Stockholm. This year’s fringe runs from 26th August – 1st September and also hosts the World Fringe Congress, the biannual gathering of the international fringe community.
Thanks for reading! If you have any feedback, tips, or thoughts about this newsletter, you can reach me on natasha.tripney@gmail.com