Theatre reviews: Barflies | The Event | Precious Little Talent

Published on Sunday 9 August 2009 19:39

BARFLIES **** TRAVERSE @ THE BARONY (VENUE 311) THE EVENT **** ASSEMBLY @ GEORGE STREET (VENUE 3) PRECIOUS LITTLE TALENT **** BEDLAM THEATRE (VENUE 49)

THE 2009 Fringe is barely a weekend old, yet already there seems to be an overwhelming unspoken agreement among some of its biggest players about the theme that's really troubling them this year. First they contemplate the inevitability of death – our own deaths, the deaths of those we love, the possible death of our whole civilisation – and then they wrestle with their response to it, through hope, despair, anger, or a wild search for oblivion.

And because America, for most of the last century, was the land that represented an ideal of hope, progress and modernity for millions across the world, it's perhaps not surprising that it is out of America that some of the most extreme and energetic responses emerge, in this dialogue of hope and despair.

It's no secret, for example, that it was the oblivion option that attracted Charles Bukowski, whose wild and fantastical stories about life on the booze in Los Angeles are celebrated in Barflies, the latest show from Scotland's leading magicians of site-specific theatre, Edinburgh-based Grid Iron.

Staged in the company's much-loved local bar, The Barony, Ben Harrison's 75-minute version of Bukowski's world deals with death all right: its pivotal event is the tragic suicide of Cass, the wild woman who is the lover, obsession, and drinking companion of our hero, Bukowski's alter ego Henry Chinaski. But Henry responds not with moping and despair, but with an ever more urgent rage to grab life as it comes – even when it includes women like shrieking Vicky, with a voice like a hatchet, or Sarah the witch, who shrinks him into a six-inch dildo.

Harrison's version of the story has a slightly sentimental narrative shape – good women were not really put on Earth just to redeem men like Henry – and I don't know whether his decision to give Bukowksi a Broughton Street accent really works; this is an American tale to the core. But Keith Fleming and Gail Watson, as Henry and all his women, give this tale of booze and sex such hell that it's difficult to argue with sheer life-force of the show, which floats along on a boozy tide of delicious music from barman/pianist David Paul Jones, in a gleaming Barony which has never looked more beautiful, or more mythical.

Up at the Assembly Rooms, meanwhile, New York and Edinburgh Fringe star John Clancy responds to troubled times with an extraordinary tour-de-force in the shape of The Event, a one-hour solo show about theatre, performed by Clancy's old friend and collaborator David Calvitto, that transcends and transforms this most irritating of genres in at least two ways. First, its observations on theatre itself are so lethally accurate and funny that it's difficult to resist them – Clancy sees his chosen art form steadily, and sees it whole, as it flickers away in a curious corner of our vast electronic entertainment culture.

But secondly, within ten minutes of the show's start, Clancy has begun the task of transforming his lone actor in the spotlight into a haunting everyman hero for our times; a man unsure of his own authenticity, haunted by the ageing muscular memory of a time when phones had to be dialled and typewriter keys struck with force, and bewildered and "unmoored" by the collapse of the grand narratives of hope and progress that once used to sustain his performance.

The brilliant Calvitto, never better than in this hugely demanding show, gazes out at the audience, asking if we, too, despite everything, sometimes catch a sense of shape or meaning or coherence beneath all the apparent chaos. But we remain silent, because – as Clancy and Calvitto point out – that is what the convention of the event demands.

It's over at Bedlam Theatre, though, that we can see the transatlantic dialogue between hope and nihilism played out most explicitly, and with a terrific poignant freshness, in Ella Hickson's Precious Little Talent, an impressive follow-up to her award-winning 2008 show, Eight.

Sam is an all-American boy living in New York, and working as a carer to an ageing British academic, George, who is slowly dying from some form of dementia; Joey is a British girl – posh, a bit bruised by life, essentially sweet – who arrives in the city looking for her lost dad. At one level, Hickson's play – beautifully performed by Simon Ginty and Emma Hiddleston as the young lovers – is just a sweet and wishful romantic comedy about two young people from different cultures coming together (it certainly plays amusingly with the language gap between Britain and America, and with different cultural attitudes to sex).

But as they nurse George towards his end, and the US turns towards a new president in a moment of political hope, Sam and Joey too seem like iconic figures for our time; caught between light and dark, life and death, cynicism and faith, and full of a life-force from which even reserved Joey does not turn away.

• Barflies until 31 August, today 3pm; The Event until 31 August, today 1:10pm; Precious Little Talent until 29 August, today 2:30pm.