Edinburgh Fringe round-up: Red Like Fruit, Jeezus! and Creepy Boys: Slugs
Some thoughts on some shows.
Hello from Edinburgh, where I am seven days and just under 30 shows in to the fringe. (You can follow my reviews and those of the rest of The Stage team here). There was initially a plan for these round-ups to be more thematically coherent but that went out of the window around Wednesday. So below you’ll find a round-up of things that caught my eye. (Please note this belated round-up comes to you care of an excess of coffee and insufficient sleep and there may well be typos).
If you want to support my writing, you can do so for just £5 a month or £50 a year. Or, if that’s not doable, just share this newsletter with someone you think might find it interesting. That helps too.
Red Like Fruit, Traverse Theatre
A woman sits rigid on a chair in the centre of the stage. It’s her words we are hearing but she doesn’t speak them. The bulk of Canadian playwright Hannah Moscovitch’s text is read by Luke (David Patrick Flemming), who stands at the side of the stage, while Michelle Monteith’s Lauren keeps her mouth shut.
Lauren is happily married and financially comfortable, but she’s dogged by a sense of unease, an absence of joy. She feels angry but can’t pin down why. A journalist by profession, she’s investigating a domestic violence case. The story is a messy one. What happened is not clear cut, though something clearly did happen. As Lauren interviews people about the case, she begins to reflect on incidents in her own past, like the tour guide who touched her inappropriately when she was 15. Just one of those things, she reasons. The kind of shit that happens when you’re growing up as a teenage girl, par for the course, nothing to complain about.
One night when she was 17, she went to stay with an older male cousin, waking in the night to find him pressing his body against hers, naked, expecting sex. When she says she's on her period, he suggests she give him head instead. She complies. She only cries afterwards in the bathroom, alone. These are stories she keeps inside, brushes off, normalises. Maybe it is her fault for misreading the situation? Maybe she did not make her wishes clear? Maybe she somehow signalled to him that this was OK? Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.
Even though Monteith occupies the centre of the stage, it's hard to stop your eyes drifting in Luke’s direction. He speaks clearly and calmly, talking of Lauren in the third person. She mostly sits quietly, occasionally looking upset or glancing at him questioningly. Once her mouth widens into something like a silent scream, a big red ‘O.’ Sometimes though, she interrupts, to ask him what he thinks of something he's just described. Was it OK, what this man did to her? She needs to hear what he thinks. She needs to hear him say ‘no.’ No, it wasn’t remotely OK.
Moscovitch captures that little niggling voice that whispers in most women’s ears, saying maybe you did something, or said something, to encourage that behaviour. The voice that persuades you that maybe it’s better, easier for all concerned, to say nothing. She captures that weird but depressingly familiar need to have a man affirm that, no, that kind of thing is not acceptable.
That said, Moscovitch’s play is queasily on-point in its details. Like the male friend who bangs on for ages about how things have changed post #MeToo, and how his colleague got called out for sending dick pics, without ever pausing to ask Lauren her thoughts. And she really excels at evoking the things we, for want of a better term, call ‘grey areas’, the knotty scenarios in which not everything is clear cut - and the tangled emotional terrain they can create.
Red Like Fruit, Traverse Theatre, times vary
JEEZUS! Underbelly Cowgate
Praise be. JEEZUS! is a treat. Written and performed by Sergio Antonio Maggiolo and Guido García Lueches, it’s a musical coming-of age tale about growing up queer in a Catholic country that is as incisive about the psychological toll that internalised shame can take on a person as it is uproariously funny.
Maggiolo plays Jesus, son of Maria, with a dad is in the Peruvian military. Having been made an altar boy for his first communion he has to grapple with the idea that his desire for other boys is, in the eyes of the Catholic Church, a mortal sin. The kind of thing for which you will definitely go to hell
I first saw a 15-minute taster of this show at Summerhall Surgeries, their morning work-in-progress series, two years ago when it was still called Jeezus Fucking Christ. In that scene young Jesus, visiting the US, watches his first porno and finds himself aroused by his rugged cousin’s bare feet. (His first fetish!) It was delightful, subversive with a purpose and when they segued into Living on a Prayer, I almost dropped my coffee. Could they sustain that level of wit and transgressive energy over an hour? The answer, hallelujah, is yes. Yes, they can. JEEZUS! combines a primer Peruvian political history - that puts the “dick” in dictatorship - with an abundance of fun-poking at the Catholic Church’s controlling attitude to sex.
Lueches, the creator of the acclaimed Playing Latinx, plays the other characters, including Jesus’ imposing dad and a creaky old priest who probes the audience about their masturbatory habits. Broken down into suitably Biblical sections, from Genesis to Revelation, the show does not stint on the onanistic humour. There’s a gloriously naughty water-into-wine scene and someone does something improper with a crucifix and some spit-lube (though the fact I chose the word ‘improper’ there feeds into the thesis of the show). The latter third of the piece sees Lueches playing actual Jesus with a gold lamé loincloth and flowing Timotei locks. Both men reflect on their daddy issues – Jesus’ dad sent him to earth specifically to kill him and people are weirdly fixated on his penetration, so he’s kind of bummed about that – and the interrelated oppressively patriarchal tendencies of church and nation.
The beauty of the show is how it combines elements of romantic comedy with a moving reflection on the complex relationship between faith, shame and self-acceptance. I actually think it's not a massive overreach to draw a line between this and Florentina Holzinger's Sancta. Not in terms of form (or scale, obviously) but in spirit. Both pieces are similarly embracive and preach the unshackling of sin from love (And Holzinger is definitely not above a bum-sex joke).
The show is one of three winners of the Untapped award, which supports early and mid-career theatre companies to create boundary pushing work, at this year’s fringe. While Laura Killeen’s production is pretty taut, it would be wonderful to see it scaled up. It’s already magnificent - a celebratory queer migrant story with a surprisingly large heart - imagine what it could do if engorged.
JEEZUS! Underbelly Cowgate, 18.50
Creepy Boys: Slugs, Summerhall
What’s happening here? They’re just kind of wriggling around and…oh, I get it, they’re slugs. That's funny. Boy, I am glad I'm not on the front row. I like their eyeshadow and this song is absolute blast. Like a delicious listicle or every recent fringe trope. A show about nothing. They’re very insistent about this. A trauma- free zone. No, identity shit, no climate crisis. Nada.
Ok, now we have funny little ditty about chickpeas. It feels kind of throwaway but that’s - oh god, no, don't do that. No, no, no. Ew, so, yeah, I'm never eating chickpeas again. Hmm. I’m not sure where they’re going with this duck stuff? Oh, OK, that's where they're going - I could probably have worked that out. First vagina of the fringe. Yay. And is that his? Oh yes that's his. And it’s still there. It's still flopping out there. I'm really glad I'm not sitting on the front row, or near the aisle for that matter. And, yeah, it’s still there. And now we have puppets! Well, puppets of sorts.
It's nice to see a show about nothing, but it kind of feels like the ‘somethings’ keep intruding. Whoops, there’s another one. Funny how that keeps happening. And now they’ve just opened a big can of transness. It’s all over the place. That’s not going to be easy to clean up. Here comes a JK Rowling joke. The third one I’ve heard this fringe. I’d start a drinking game if I hadn’t already finished my can of wine (yes, I know). And the somethings just keep coming. There’s another one. Oh, his trousers are coming off again. But this time there’s a puppet-wiener. It’s actually kind of cute.
Who are these guys again? The Creepy Boys. Sam Kruger and SE Grummett. Hmm, I definitely saw the one in the red do a show here a couple of years back. That show was about ‘something’ - I mean it was literally called Something in the Water - and it was about gender, but at the same time it was also kind of silly and I’m pretty sure I used the word ‘squid-jaculate’ in my review (which isn’t a word, but OK). I wasn’t wholly sold on that one, I admit, but this - this is a fucking riot. Fucked up chaotic clowning with an underlying anger. Avoidance theatre kind of feels like a thing this year, doesn’t it? Or maybe not avoidance exactly but shows that smuggle stuff in under a cloak of absurdism and messy energy rather than big capital ‘A’ about-stuff theatre. That maybe feels necessary? There are a lot of ‘somethings’ around at the moment. A whole lot of somethings. And, oh. holy shit, now there’s a gun. This bit is a quite a lot actually. How serious should I be taking this? I am really, really fucking glad I’m not on the front row. Did I mention that? Phew, saved by Joni Mitchell. Not sure how Joni Mitchell fits into this but – oh, that’s how, that’s smart. Hey, they’ve just described this show as a little bit niche and mostly gross, and that is not inaccurate, but it also doesn’t convey how fucking clever and also kind of rigorous this is – at the end they’re literally shoving the ‘something’ in our faces - and I’m laughing really fucking hard but there’s also a tension in the air, and that’s a really appealing mix, and…oh that’s a really neat call-back to something they did earlier. This is actually really well-structured. And is that a horse? Of course, it’s a horse. I’m going to need something stronger than a can of wine after this…
Creepy Boys: Slugs, Summerhall, 21.15
Thanks for reading! If you want to tell me about your show you can reach me on natasha.tripney@gmail.com
I enjoyed 'squid-jaculate' immensely
Oh god this is really fun, in the moment writing! Keep these coming - I know you will! Thanks Natasha!