A Table Tennis Play

Hhhh

VENUE: Underbelly, Cowgate

TIME: 12:30pm – 1:30pm, 1–25 Aug, not 10

TICKETS: £11 – £12

Who knew a table tennis table could double as a time machine?

To watch Sam Steiner’s characters bop a ball back and forth—gadonk-donk-ga—is to fall into an unthinking trance. Minutes barely register. Time melts away.

It’s a gorgeous centrepiece in a gorgeous little play. In an old

Pathetic Fallacy HHH

VENUE: CanadaHub @ King’s Hall in association with Summerhall

TIME: 5pm – 6pm, 31 Jul – 25 Aug, not 5, 12, 19

TICKETS: £11

Pathetic Fallacy is performed unseen by a new performer every day, a now very familiar format on the Fringe. The show’s creator Anita Rochon would perform, but she is reducing how much she flies, and so a stand-in Anita is required. For this performance, comedian Daniel Connell steps up, often adding to the laughs with his expression.

Much of the play is presented as lecture, and there are interesting facts to be learned. Storms named after men lead to fewer deaths; weather reporters once drew the weather on a chalkboard. However, these extended lectures leave the guest performer sitting to the side, and throughout the whole show air raid shelter at her old family home, Cath’s sorting through her late mother’s stuff. Her boyfriend Cal’s helping, passing the time with ping pong and word games, but at 32-and-a-bit, Cath’s about to surpass her mum’s age to the second: a milestone as minute as it is massive. Where’s her life going? It’s two questions in one.

Both are thrown into focus by 18-year-old Mia, a junior tennis pro who’s not yet learned to wear life lightly. Looking up to Cath like a long-lost big sister, her seriousness contrasts with their studied silliness. And yet, all of them are hiding behind facades, sheltering from something in this corrugated iron cocoon.

A meditation on our experiences of time, A Table Tennis Play has an Annie Baker-ish charm. Little happens, lots changes, but Steiner takes such care of his characters, allowing their anxieties, insecurities and oddities to emerge, that we follow suit. He stirs meticulous images into the mix—malt whisky that matures just as we do, vinyl records that sound better with crackles—so that meaning gradually comes to cohere. In Ed Madden’s beautifully judged, brilliantly acted production, a play that takes its time comes up like a bruise. ✏︎

Matt Trueman

they are under-utilised.

The show utilises green screen and projection, with prompters for the guest performer, mimicking the way a weather report is created. There are a couple of small glitches in the tech, but this technology allows for the most interesting part of the show where Rochon and the guest performer meet in conversation, seated together on a plane. The recorded

Rochon asks big questions, and often there is not enough space left for the guest performer to reply. It is unclear how intentional this is. Still, repeatedly employing the clincher, “how does it feel to know your very existence hurts the planet you are on?”, Rochon’s questions certainly linger in the minds of her audience and her guest. With that as her goal, the show is a success. ✏︎ Emma Ainley-Walker

VENUE: The Studio

TIME: times vary, 7–25 Aug, not 12, 19

TICKETS: £20

You can tell from the title that this is going to be a weird one. And so it proves, as each audience member is given a book containing both the play text and a series of illustrations that reinforce the story we are about to experience.

We’re told by the actors when to turn the page – a smiley “OK” that is somehow both comforting and unnerving. It feels like a Bible class or a remedial readers’ workshop