Fishbowl

Hhh

VENUE: Pleasance Courtyard

TIME: 1pm – 2:15pm, 31 Jul – 26

Aug, not 14

TICKETS: £14 – £17.50

It’s not so hard to see why Fishbowl won the Molière Award for best comedy play in its native France. A riot of slapstick, visual jokes and silent farce, this is a delight for connoisseurs of physical comedy – les Francais among the most committed. That it combines technical whizz bangs with three exceptional clownish performances is all in its favour. And yet, there’s something missing here.

Red Dust Road (EIF) HHH

VENUE: The Lyceum

DETAILS: run ended

In adapting Scottish makar Jackie Kay’s 2011 autobiography Red Dust Road, co-producers the National Theatre of Scotland and Home in Manchester are bringing to the stage an essential story for our times. This isn’t just the deeply personal tale of Kay’s birth to a Mormon mother from rural northern Scotland and a visiting student from Nigeria, and her subsequent adoption by a working class white couple from Glasgow, but also a more wide-ranging story of growing up mixed-race in a Britain which was overwhelmingly white, and in places fearful of and angered by difference – and which, in many ways, remains so.

Partly, it’s the venue. Sure, it’s usually a bit unfair to pick on the venue at a festival where any cupboard is costly, but for one of Pleasance’s tentpole shows in the Grand, this is no two-bit affair. It seems clear that the set has been only minimally adapted to a big, wide performance space. With this complex set, sightlines are awful. Anything played to the back of the three apartment blocks we are presented with is lost to the sides. For a production where technical excellence is everything, this is fatal.

In part, it’s also perhaps a victim of its own success. We see three (sometimes) single people living, loving and bumping alongside each other in the close confines of a Paris tenement. We’re introduced to each, via some brilliant visual jokes. But their strength—that they are used but once—is also their weakness as the team must keep things inventive. One senses that they start to test the repertoire, like gymnasts working through the range of disciplines. It’s very impressive—high points from the judges—but it feels laboured.

Their best gags come at you quickly from odd angles, whereas longer sequences, for instance with a peeping-Tom payoff, can be seen creeping up from miles away. A postscript that is messy in the best possible way ends Fishbowl on a high, but the scene adds nothing to the narrative and one feels it’s added in to make up for the fact that it’s not all plain sailing getting there. ✏︎ Evan

Beswick

The characters around Kay are memorable: we come to know her adoptive parents John and Helen (a wonderful, easily humorous double act between Lewis Howden as her Communist Party activist father and Elaine C Smith as her endlessly wise mother), her religious birth mother Elizabeth (Irene Allan), and her intriguing father Jonathan (Stefan Adegbola), a respected religious figure in his homeland, whose evasion of publicly accepting his daughter is intended to preserve his reputation.

In the fine-focus details of Kay’s story, as adapted by Tanika Gupta, her life story is absorbing and emotionally powerful. Sasha Frost binds the play well as a hopeful, inquisitive Kay, piecing the fragments of her identity together. On the subjects of building your own self as an adopted child, and on acceptance of one’s own racial identity (and, to a lesser extent, sexual identity), director Dawn

Walton brings together a work which is resonant and truthful.

Yet somehow this flagship Edinburgh International Festival production feels physically small-scale, with the wider stage under-utilised. It feels like an excursion, rather than a journey, into the reality it seeks to reflect. ✏︎ David Pollock