Bachelor infiltrates socialist party to get laid in this Edinburgh Festival Fringe production.
Show me yours, I’ll show you mine: relationships as transactions are not a new idea and sex often plays a crucial role when partners negotiate their needs. In According To His Need, hobby socialist Nick joins the party to finally score again. He meets the party loyal Cass who wants to elevate Nick’s interest for Che Guevara above that of an ornamental T-shirt decoration.
Hannah Mamalis as Cass makes debatable enunciation choices and as her speeches drips with frustration over the wannabe leftist: her stream of political jargon becomes almost indistinguishable. Michael-David Mckernan copes better with the socialist babble. Although a needy loner, his confusion is charming as his commitment to Cass (and Marx) blossoms and he realises that instating socialist values might not agree with his libido.
The emotional bartering between them exposes the logical flaws that emerge when real people try to apply abstract political theories to their lives. Unfortunately, the play is not a clever allegory on real live political events. Oliver Eagleton’s script seems oddly unaware of socialist core issues like class and labour. Instead it contents itself with a rambling flow of theoretical jargon. Together with Nora Kelly-Lester’s pragmatic direction the show is more lacklustre than revolutionary.
Originally written for The List as part of their Edinburgh Fringe 2014 coverage.
You don’t have to be a Londoner to get nabakov’s Symphony but if you are, then in between the lines, beats and off-beats of the drum the piece shares a knowing wink that talks of take-away coffee and unlikely beauty among unrelenting hectic. Although there is a different kind of electricity in the air, at the Fringe that London cynicism can get momentarily lost between an unironic “I <3 Edinburgh” tote swung over my shoulder and the morning saunter through the meadows that can get me anywhere in the city without the need to squeeze into a metal tube on rails. This storytelling event with musical interludes is a bit like casual sex – entertaining while it lasts but ultimately it leaves you with little to warm your heart for long. Four performers, dishevelled to varying degrees, give a concert laced with three short plays by young British playwrights.
Symphony is about finding your own story among the advertised illusion of lifestyles, opportunities and pre-written shoulds and woulds. Fluidly slipping in and out of characters or behind the keys, various guitars and the drum kit, the performers are a talented bunch, and especially at the kick-off with Tom Wells’ Jonesy, often manipulating the instruments to comedic effect.
Iddon Jones plays a 15-year old Welsh underdog who gets the PE GCSE blues. It’s all skimpy shorts, adolescent dreams and grinding expectations of lad culture but it also manages to take a witty look at how we measure our own success against expectations we draw from existing narratives. In Jonesy’s case Cool Runnings was his forming narrative, and why not? In Tom Wells: Plays 1 published in 2021 Jonesy will be right next to Jumpers For Goalposts, part of the playwright’s “Young Men and Sports”-Cycle and it will feel like foreplay, an amusing side note to the infinitely superior Jumpers.
A Love Song for the People of London by Ella Hickson makes Symphony slide unashamedly from dick jokes with asthma inhalers to pie-baking Zooey Deschanel admirers on this years’ universal kookiness scale. Bemoaning kindles for ruining chances to flirt and damning fateful brollies for communication mishaps, the players in this menagerie are serenaded by London (in shape of a Brit Pop front man) itself. It’s a great twist, delivering one of the best (musical) moments of the piece – a throbbing soundtrack about chancing your luck. Liam Gerrard plays Alex who bakes pies when he’s anxious and who sniffs his dream girl’s hair on the bus. Alex pathetically rages against the unkind urban spirit who is selective about whose love life he’ll support. Suck it, pie creep! London doesn’t owe you anything.
Striking me as the most genuine in this triad of self-narrating characters are Jack Brown’s mucky pup philanderer, and Katie Elin-Salt, as a woman who knows what she wants. The rise and fall of an urban love story in Nick Payne’s My Thoughts On Leaving You is a funny account of heart break, full of delightful stranger than fiction contrasts – real people meeting in a puddle of wee and trying to create something meaningful out of it.
The show ends on a beautiful chanson note about the City and for a moment the three plays come together under a wicked sound blanket, thickly woven like an urban structure with ideas of fate, predetermination and luck sticking out like passionately moving limbs. Although the unruly punchiness of the piece was highlighted by a crackling soundtrack, surely curtsey of a repeatedly dropped amplifier, the venue hindered the chance to be entirely engrossed in the music festival style art form mix. The raked seating in Assembly’s Bosco Tent is far removed from eyes-closed, swaying in the crowd with an East End microbrewery beer can in hand. Or maybe it had nothing to do with the venue, maybe on that day Symphony was just a love song from the wrong city.
Originally written for Exeunt as part of the Edinburgh Fringe 2014 coverage.
Some Fringe clichés exist for a reason. One of the more tragic ones tells of the talented performer who enters the stage to face a nearly empty auditorium. Only one or two punters have showed up and the performer has the choice between quitting or to committing to an hour long figurative lap dance, vying for the attention of the stranger in the darkness. In the case of Paperback Time Machine, it was not hard to stay engaged.
When writer-performer Trevor O’Connell faces the solitary reviewer for his one man show at the upstairs room in The Mash House, he seems completely unfazed. He takes out a bound diary, starts flipping through the pages and tells the story of how in 1946 he, the young, Irish sailor Casey, landed in New York. His story serves to explore expat Irishness throughout the past 60 years and this is captured through symbols, music and loving descriptions of landmark buildings – some gone and forgotten now, some gone but forever etched into the collective cultural memory.
O’Connell captures momentous events in small anecdotes. When he plays Dylan on the guitar, meets the tragic poet Dylan, or reenact his escapades with the lovable crook Fitz, he threads before our eyes the complex geography of a city stitched together over centuries by the hard work of immigrants. The sailor’s relationship to New York is epitomised in his infatuation with a woman as complex as the city itself.
Although the performance is still being developed, O’Connell’s coming-of-age story is certainly accomplished and its rich, descriptive language and quirky characters could be straight out of a Don DeLillo novel. Presented by TMT Productions and directed by Genevieve and Anna Hulme-Beaman, this play is a warm and melancholic piece of storytelling – one of those shows that should not ever struggle with empty auditoriums again. Smash the fringe cliché or miss the next Conor McPherson at your own peril.
Originally written Broadway Baby’s Edinburgh Fringe 2014 coverage.
