Total Immediate Collective Imminent Terrestrial Salvation HHH When the Birds Come HHH

VENUE: Underbelly, Cowgate

TIME: 2:40pm – 3:40pm, 1–25 Aug, not 12

TICKETS: £10 – £11

The impact of the climate crisis is made tangible in this quietly delectable two-hander. The attic room in Underbelly forms a kind of igloo over us as 13-year-old Margaret and her little brother Stanley glide over frosted wooden crates. In Alaska, the ice is melting and the overflowing Ninglick river

– especially when we’re asked to join in, stand up and speak lines of dialogue.

The unusual format serves to distance us from the core content while also creating an atmosphere of high curiosity as to exactly what the hell is going on. It’s a clever ploy, as we inexorably get sucked into the the strange story of a family stricken by tragedy.

Personal crisis blurs into epic cataclysm as we meet a trio of characters with shifting identities and attitudes, who may or may not be able to help us make sense of the uncertainty we read on the page and see in front of us.

It’s likely to be either a profound or a shallow experience, depending on how much you decide to commit. Writer Tim Crouch (who also appears as an actor) is playing a postmodern game rather than telling a clear story. He invites you to feel deeply about big themes but he is careful to withhold exactly what they might be.

Stu Black

is forcing their community to relocate. But the move is too slow, and Margaret is fed up with her rural lifestyle. Lured by the glitzy materialism of the closest town—iPhones, central heating, Kim Kardashian—she wants to leave. Pumped for adventure in puffy coats and snow-boots, the young pair plan their escape.

Awaiting the arrival of the snow geese which marks the start of spring, they play games and make us fall in love with them both. A painful thread of corrupted innocence lies just beneath the warmth of their mutual affection, as Margaret feeds Stanley a dangerous lie, packing it with ice to prevent it from bruising. But as the tundra weeps around them, the lie threatens to show, and we spend much of the time worrying about how Stanley is going to get hurt.

It’s a slow burn and while it could do with some dramaturgical tightening to make its impact hit deeper, there is a delightful softness to this play, like fresh snow about to be trodden on. Under an ethereal sountrack, Zak Douglas and Phoebe Vigor are gorgeously subtle performers, switching easily from eager children to adults, in turn stubborn and anxious. Stanley’s delight at his environment—and his fear that he is somehow the cause of it melting—almost make the ice a third character – one we desperately want to protect.

✏︎ Kate Wyver

All of Me HHH

VENUE: Summerhall

TIME: 3:10pm – 4:20pm, 31 Jul – 25

Aug, not 12, 19

TICKETS: £15

All of Me starts with an avalanche of apologies. Caroline Horton spits her sorries like spite. Sorry this show’s such a wreck, she snarls. Sorry it’s not ground-breaking, or sweetness and light. This show won’t sugarcoat suicidal depression. Horton smirks: Sorry, no refunds.

Four weeks ago, during a deep spell of depression, Horton

Pizza Shop Heroes HHH

VENUE: Summerhall

TIME: Run Ended

“We are heroes because we have to be,” say Tewodros Aregawe, Goitom Fesshaye, Emirjon Hoxhaj and Syed Haleem Najibi in unison. All were unaccompanied asylum seeking children – from Eritrea, Eritrea, and Afghanistan respectively. Between them they speak at least eight languages, many of which they use in this clear-eyed telling of their stories: their pasts, their travels, their present lived realities, and their imagined futures. They are supported on stage by Kate Duffy, who also co-directs.

It’s hard to say whether this works as a piece of theatre –there’s plenty here that might get directed out in a theatre company serving a different purpose. It’s a compelling suite of stories, supposedly junked her entire script and started afresh. “I ruined that show,” she scowls, “FOR YOU.” Instead, she’s made something unrepentant and honest: a mental health show that feels scrawled onto the stage.

Scuffing round the stage braless, in shorts and scarecrow hair, Horton starts something, then lets it slip. Songs morph into self-loathing rants. Soothing soundscapes are shot down by sirens and seagulls. This is a show that continually self-sabotages.

Because All of Me isn’t just an evocation of depression: it is, purportedly, a product of it as well, a mess of a show made by a mess of an artist. Frank as that is, it’s also mighty frustrating – at least in the moment. The further I get from its gnarled nihilism, the more I’m coming round.

Hung off a hard-to-grasp myth that drags Horton down into the underworld, it ducks behind the excuses it gets in early on. The more it self-destructs, the more it succeeds. Depression does that, and Horton dares to argue its case, lambasting a broken world that keeps on keeping on – neatly illustrated by a mechanical penguin toy. Glinting in the darkness, clad in a carnivalesque headdress, Horton wonders if she’s at her best at her worst. All of Me gives us both at once. ✏︎ Matt

Trueman

and the central narrative, told as a myth quest is an effective way of recasting the UK’s hostile environment for refugees in a new and unforgiving light. The use of pizza boxes as signboards is fun, but some movement-based interludes retain the impression of a workshop rather than driving at dramatic ends; a “myth busting” section sits at odds with the personal storytelling and feels more like a policy explainer or research summary, shoehorned in. But that’s not what Phosphorous

Theatre are driving at. Their aim is to enable refugees to tell their stories to audiences – the company itself is part of the City of Sanctuary network. As they say, very clearly, they are here to tell their stories – “you’re not here to judge whether we’re credible or not. We’re not here to make your conscience feel better.”

In that sense, the packaging is irrelevant as compared to the importance of the stories being told. We’re not here to judge, just to listen. ✏︎ Evan Beswick

Traumboy HH

VENUE: Summerhall

TIME: 8:10pm – 9:25pm, various dates between 2 Aug and 24 Aug

TICKETS: £12

It’s Traum as in the German for dream, not as in trauma. That is important to know, and also one of the last things mentioned in Daniel Hellmann’s solo show about his life as a sex worker and artist. Hellmann is his clients’ dreamboy, fulfilling their fantasies with personas designed to match: “Antonio”, “Leo”, “Phil”.

After a brief moment of pure theatricality, Hellmann starts the show as a lecture. He describes his clients—mainly men—and their preferences with a wry, matterof-fact tone, throwing out bashful, boyish jokes that help hold off monotony when the pared-down segments stretch on too long. In between are dances, conversations,

Traumgirl HH

VENUE: Summerhall

TIME: 8:10pm – 9:25pm, various dates between 2 Aug and 24 Aug

TICKETS: £12

Traumgirl begins with a naked woman splayed over a bubble machine, projecting a live close-up video of her vulva on a three metrehigh screen that takes up half the stage. Don’t worry, it gets more intimate.

A response to Daniel Hellmann’s Traumboy, Anne Welenc’s solo show explores sex work as photo shoots, all jarring in their suddenness.

The show is obviously meant to be discomforting, but it often doesn’t get there. At one point Hellmann interrogates audience members about their own prejudices against sex work. It would work better if he came up against opposing views, but plenty in the audience at Summerhall (motto: Open minds, open doors) were nodding along from the start.

And why wouldn’t they? Hellmann is an extremely charismatic performer, letting his audience glimpse behind the scenes of the show he puts on for clients. But he also puts audience members in his clients’ shoes. He offers to answer questions sent to him on WhatsApp, mimicking his back and forth messages with clients. And, more than once, he raises the possibility that like Antonio, like Phil, “Daniel” is a fiction too.

It’s unsettling, yes, but also unsatisfying. Without Daniel, a man speaking the truth about sex work, the show has little holding together its disparate elements, no catharsis. Like a dream, with too much thinking on it, it falls apart. ✏︎ Frankie Goodway performance art from a female perspective. It’s the stronger of the two, more tightly focussed on a single strand: how Kim, a GermanPolish actress decided to start working in a brothel in Switzerland.

The opening few minutes feel weaker than the rest; Welenc fluffs her story a few times, and a description of how Kim’s father comes to change his mind on her first career choice lacks any sense of his reasoning.

Welenc hits her stride in the second half, however, particularly in a long section about the minuteto-minute experience of a shift at a brothel. Here she’s funny and gripping as she lists all the potential kinks and extras she can charge for: “licking, fingering, English education”. Then she moves into the audience, and the mood is deeply intimate as she holds each person’s gaze just long enough for a smile. Not everything works so well. It takes a long time for Welenc to build her rapport with the audience, and some of the deliberate strangeness doesn’t feel earned. The bubble machine, for example, is really there for a single joke that isn’t perfectly timed. But despite that, Welenc creates strong images—a red latex suit padded out of all proportion, a half naked woman wreathed in smoke—that are likely to linger. ✏︎ Frankie Goodway

VENUE: Assembly Rooms

TIME: 9:40pm – 10:40pm, 5–24 Aug, not 12

TICKETS: £15 – £16.50

In this one woman musical satire, Frances Barber revives her role of Billie Trix from Jonathan Harvey’s 2001 musical Closer to Heaven

The new spin-off meets Trix as an overdone diva, demanding, impatient and living off her stories of show business.

Musik HH Tricky Second Album H

She says this show is like open heart surgery but it feels more like waiting for the anesthetic to wear off. Sassy, bored and restless, the whole show is resonant of that dotty relative who doesn’t ask questions in conversations and hogs the microphone at karaoke.

Trix’s story takes us from 1960s Berlin to London, Paris and present day New York. She name drops the famous faces she’s met and the ideas they stole from her. Madonna’s eyepatch? Warhol’s soup? Trump’s wall? All Trix’s ideas. She cuts a line of coke on her tambourine and dusts the rest off into the audience.

With a DIY aesthetic, the

Photoshopped projections look like they were scraped together half an hour before. They glimmer behind her as she performs original europop disco music by the Pet Shop Boys, gaudy and overly-repetitive. She tells us that everyone comments on how bad she is at singing. She never takes the hint.

If you loved Closer to Heaven, Musik will no doubt entertain. But for those who missed it first time round, this satire fails to stand alone. Trix wouldn’t be too offended; she’d probably just say 'You didn’t understand the artistry, darling'. ✏︎ Kate Wyver

VENUE: Pleasance Dome

TIME: 11pm – 12am, 2–18 Aug

TICKETS: £9 – £11

There’s a specific line in Fest’s editorial guide that reserves one star ratings for shows that are not just unremittingly bad, but offensive. If the cap fits, then pop it on. But times change, few more quickly and terrifyingly than our own, and criticism always lags behind them. One thing is very clear: In Bed With My Brother’s new show—the follow up to We Are Ian—is absolutely not a building on and refining of accepted theatrical standards. It’s an angry, destructive cri de coeur at a society that leaves an eight-month-pregnant woman with £80 in her bank account and still lets the wealthy burn millions in whatever way they see fit.

Formally, this is a studied attempt to tear up convention and aesthetics. There’s no showing: they tell us what they’re doing and what they’ve done. “That was a really strong start,” pant Dora Lynn, Nora Alexander and Kat Cory. They list past and present theatremakers and tell them to fuck off. Euripides gets listed alongside contemporaries who “will be dead soon – that’s not a threat, just a fact of life”.

They adopt some of the techniques of standup, though the mic dangles awkwardly from the ceiling, and the lead isn’t long enough for the audience patter. The pumping soundtrack is so aggressively loud that earplugs are provided (and required). There’s no attempt to build community or uplift. We leave empty and emotionally spent. Job done.

Is this an awful show or a revolutionary moment in theatre? Honestly, we can’t see the critical wood for the ghoulish trees right now. We won’t know, perhaps, until we look back in anger and awe.

✏︎ Evan Beswick