Edinburgh Fringe round-up: Stuffed, Revenge: After the Levoyah and Good Luck, Cathrine Frost!
On three shows which combine comedy with a political edge.
I’m still at the Edinburgh Fringe where I’ve seen just under 50 shows (which in any other context is insane, I know). I am kind of running on fumes at this point, but I suspect that’s true of half the people here.
Keep an eye on The Stage for the latest reviews from me and the rest of the team. We’ll be covering stuff well into next week. In the meantime, I’ll be using this space to explore some of the other work I’m seeing in a little more depth. This is actually the second newsletter of this week (did I mention I’ve seen a lot of shows), here’s the first if you missed it.
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Stuffed, Pleasance Courtyard
A clown show about food banks? On paper this might sound like the fringiest thing ever but Ugly Bucket’s Stuffed is actually one of the most furious shows on the fringe. Despite being one of the richest countries in the world, large numbers of people in the UK are struggling. Spiralling rent and mortgage coats, zero-hour contracts, the fact that can take weeks for people to receive the benefits they are owed and the amplifying factor of the cost-of-living crisis mean that a staggering 25 percent of people in Britain are now living in poverty, some are in situations of such precarity that they are forced to make decisions about whether they eat or buy new shoes for their kids, eat or heat their homes, eat or pay their electricity bills.
Food bank usage has rocketed. Between April 2023 and March 2024 the Trussell Trust network of foodbanks distributed 3.1 million emergency food parcels, the most parcels ever distributed by the network in a single year.
Dressed in orange workman’s overalls, Ugly Bucket launch into a thumping, percussive intro. They’re making another show about ‘bad stuff,’ they sing to blaring backing music. Another fucking theatre show about how shit things are. Great.
Stuffed presents us with recorded testimony from foodbank workers, as they talk about the hardships their clients face, desperate to keep their kids fed, some unable to pay for gas to cook on or for the bus fare home. The workers help where they can, keenly aware that it’s not nearly enough. Social safety nets have been stripped away, zero hour contracts have been normalised and absolutely everything is more expensive. In one case, a family is reliant on a single lightbulb, which they move from room to room where required.
They perform a game show in which contestants must choose whether to eat or pay their rent, eat or stay warm through winter. (There are no winners). They expose the oft-made suggestion that families on low incomes could help themselves by making soup or other cheap but nutritious meals for the judgmental nonsense it is – soup requires a heat source, it requires access to at least some staple ingredients.
Founded in 2018, Ugly Bucket made a name for themselves with a show called Good Grief, a show about bereavement which critic Fergus Morgan praised for its “quirky combination of documentary interviews, verbatim theatre and sheer silliness.” This show is less silly, but Rachael Smart and Grace Gallagher’s show does still contain a few lighter moments in which the cast display their skills as physical comedians. At one point they play birds - chickens, I think - fighting over crumbs, which is how the foodbank workers describe their service users. The performers make excellent birds, bobbing their heads quizzically, but this section does go on a bit (and not in an interesting durational way).
Things eventually get back on track, however, as the show reaches its furious conclusion. The nature of the fringe means that some of the work can lean towards the solipsistic, the inward and whimsical, and, occasionally, the onanistic, but this was an unashamedly angry performance and I for one, was thrilled by it. What’s happened to this country is criminal, they yell, damage has been done and things have been broken, people have suffered - are suffering - and it’s a fucking disgrace.
I overheard someone describing the show as an hour of being shouted at, to which I would say why aren’t more people shouting. And to be fair to them, they don’t just shout, they also sing, using autotuned vocals to brilliant effect in a final, musical call-to-action. They fully acknowledge the disconnect of making a theatre show about people in poverty, but they have clearly thought hard both about the form of the show and its purpose. Raising awareness is valuable, as is sharing the experiences of those working in and using foodbanks, but it is just the beginning. This is one of the most socially engaged shows I’ve seen this year. Instead of taking a bow they hand out a little guide to how to better donate, campaign and organise, to take the next steps together.
Revenge: After the Levoyah, Summerhall
Levoyah is the Yiddish word for funeral, but though Nick Cassenbaum’s play starts with a passing. Twins Lauren and Dan have just lost their granddad and this is the jumping-off point for a full-throttle comedy, a breathless crime caper that is very, very funny and also very, very Jewish.
Like Cassenbaum’s earlier work, including 2015’s Bubble Schmeisis, a play about the ritual of the schvitz set in one of the only remaining bath houses in East London (there’s a lovely review of it here on Exeunt), it is rooted in the British Jewish experience, with a particular focus on Essex and East London. Last year he penned the UK’s first Jewish panto. (There’s a great Guardian article on this here).
The play is set in 2019, when Jeremy Corbyn was still leader of the Labour Party. Antisemitism is on the rise in the UK. Lauren and Dan’s gran has taken the mezuzah off her door and is worried about leaving the house. They regularly have to clean graffiti off the headstones in the cemetery. Family friend Malcolm, an ageing East End gangster on his last legs, has the answer. He might not (quite) be old enough to remember Cable Street, but he knows that at times like this, when faced with hate, you have to step up, you have to take action. So, obviously, the best thing to do is kidnap Corbyn. That’ll sort it.
Lauren and Dan have already dispatched a menacing plumber who was almost definitely (maybe) a Nazi, so they go along with it. What follows is an increasingly frenetic and ridiculous romp featuring explosions, car chases and a Uzi-toting nonagenarian Holocaust survivor. The scenario becomes increasingly absurd and elaborate, incorporating everyone from a ‘Jews for Jeremy’ campaign group to members of Mossad.
The writing is thick with Jewish jokes and references - at one point a jar of chraine is lobbed from a moving car like a grenade. Cassenbaum wrote this interesting piece for The Stage on how cultural specificity needn’t be a barrier to making work that engages a wide audience, if anything the opposite was true. This is proven out here in a play that is super culturally specific and yet very accessible.
The show’s two performers, Gemma Barnett and Dylan Corbett-Bader, are fantastic, continually role-hopping, flipping from character to character (though neither of them play Corbyn, who remains mute throughout and in narrative terms functions more as a provocative MacGuffin), keeping the whole helter-skelter exercise from derailing even as things get increasingly cartoonish. It’s a hard balance to strike and yet they nail it, thanks in part to Emma Jude Harris’ controlled direction which delivers in terms of momentum and energy.
Obviously underneath everything the play has a serious intention. The writing captures the lurching sensation of being faced with naked antisemitism but also interrogates the role of the press. Is Corbyn really a rabid antisemite? The media certainly seemed to believe that, though one character, a liberal rabbi, confides that she actually quite likes him. The play refrains from giving a verdict. It’s more interested in Jewish generational trauma and how the media’s sudden concern about Jewish wellbeing was used for political point-scoring. Cassenbaum has found both a form and a narrative approach to explore all of this in a way that’s exhilarating, silly and madcap but also unavoidably political in a way that’s hard to pull off and yet it does. Mazel tov.
Good Luck, Cathrine Frost! Assembly George Square
When Cathrine Frost gave birth, she was doing something that women all over the world do every day and yet she did not feel ready. She did not feel prepared. She ended up being induced and having an extremely difficult labour resulting in an emergency caesarean. It was a traumatic experience and shortly after she woke from the anaesthetic, she was handed a tiny human and expected to just get on with things.
Frost, an actor from Norway, believes that we do not talk enough about the physiological and emotional impact of childbirth. The ancient philosophers didn’t devote much time to it and it’s not woven into our stories. It is still shrouded in a degree of mystery, something women talk about among themselves perhaps but less so in the wider culture. This is even more true of miscarriage. When Frost had one, the group of nurses who helped her had all experienced their own miscarriages, some more than one. All of these people going through the same painful thing and yet rarely speaking of it, rarely sharing their stories. When women discover they are pregnant, they are often advised not tell other people before three months in case they miscarry. Frost did this and so there was no one who knew what she had lost, what she was going through. This show is a kind of corrective. Frost tells us in detail about her miscarriage, her attempts to get pregnant again and the birth itself.
Created by Norway’s Det Andre Teatret, the show is, however, the anthesis of harrowing and that’s because of Frost’s performance. She is a hugely exuberant performer, enthusiastically stripping off and performing a spot of naked martial arts (a bit like the Greeks did). There’s something very cathartic about watching a jubilantly topless, middle-aged woman smash shit up.
Many shows I’ve seen up here are increasingly careful in how they handle audience participation; in Letters for Revolution, for example, they check beforehand if you’re OK with being asked to speak. Frost, on the other hand, vigorously beckons people on stage to play her partner, her doctor and even, at one point, her vagina. One audience member stands in for partner as she tries to convince them to have sex with her during her window of fertility, waggling her ass at them in come-hither manner. Later, the audience member playing Socrates receives a light spanking.
Even when she’s describing her horrific experience of labour, the contractions and convulsions and the eventual dash to the operating theatre, she maintains this same level of energy and kooky humour. With some acts describing past trauma, you worry about the impact it I having on the performer, putting themselves through this day after day, but Frost looks like she’s having a blast - and it’s infectious. There is a lot of laughter in this show.
I spoke to Frost as part of this piece for The Stage about artists making work about women’s reproductive health, how so much of this stuff is underdiscussed and how it has consequences – the difficulty in getting diagnosed with endometriosis being just one of them. When Frost made the show, she told me, it was only supposed to run for a handful of performances, but the response to it has been enormous. It has struck a chord with audiences in her native Norway and clearly offers people something they need. At the end of the performance I saw, a couple approached Frost with their now adult daughter, and with a note of gratitude in their voices, said “that was our story too.”
Thanks for reading! If you have any feedback, tips, or thoughts about this newsletter, or want to tell me about your fringe show, you can reach me on natasha.tripney@gmail.com