Theatre reviews: Internal | Barflies | The Hotel | Luck | Nic Green's Trilogy | Blondes | The School For Scandal

Published on Friday 14 August 2009 17:01

Various venues

I THINK I'm in love. I think she is too. Me and Sofie are having a giggle in a private booth over a shot of vodka. We're reliving the old times, recalling how we lay together in the Fringe of 2007, me blindfolded on a bed, she whispering sweet intimacies into my ear. What larks. And now for the first time we're staring eye to eye, talking about how we were attracted to each other when the curtain rose on Internal, the latest show by the remarkable Belgian company Ontroerend Goed. She liked the sparkle in my eye. I liked her smile. We were meant for each other.

And we're delighted with ourselves. So much so that when we join the rest of the five-strong audience and the other actors for a group discussion, we don't mind telling everyone how well we've clicked. Gosh, even our body language is the same, points out one of the performers. We cuddle closer and enjoy a touch of schadenfreude as it becomes apparent that no other couple in the room has hit it off as famously as us. One man hasn't even revealed his name.

That's when the actor to my right spoils everything. "Mark," he says, "I think you might be a lot older than Sofie."

Well, thanks a lot, pal. That's my dreams shattered. For in that one sentence, he has abruptly reminded me that I'm part of a show – an extraordinary one, but a show none the less – and that pretty women don't usually fall at my feet in the space of a ten-minute speed-dating chat.

At the same time, it doesn't feel like I'm the victim of some performance-art hoax. The conversation Sofie and I have just shared has been genuine, not scripted (she really did whisper in my ear in the company's equally intimate The Smile Off Your Face) and, although she is entirely in control of our relationship, her performance – if, indeed, it is a performance – depends on my willingness to talk and on the things I say. The effect is utterly disorientating. On the one hand, you have an intense personal experience (yes, gentle reader, we kissed); on the other hand, you are part of a carefully constructed event and there's another show coming in half an hour.

That's the reason for all the animated conversations around the Traverse bar as Internal's audience members try to rationalise what has happened to them. Whether they have been touched up, flashed at or rejected, they have undergone a fiercely emotional, individual experience that haunts them for days. You might not recognise Internal as theatre in any conventional way, yet it gets under your skin more excitingly than any other show on the Fringe.

If such a breakdown in the actor-audience relationship is more than your British reserve can deal with, you'll be relieved to know that this is the Fringe when performance art went mainstream. Until now, site-specific theatre has been the preserve of serious-minded companies that create artful atmospheres in offbeat locations such as the Barony Bar, where Edinburgh's Grid Iron is staging an ode to inebriation in Barflies. That show is good looking, well acted and beautifully sung but, having established an air of drunken abandon inspired by Charles Bukowski, it doesn't have very much more to say.

Things are quite different, however, in The Hotel, a hilarious piece of site-specific nonsense created by comedian Mark Watson, running with an idea laid down by Arthur Smith. As with the Ontroerend Goed show, you have to be ready for one-on-one interaction but, in this case, in a make-believe hotel on Queen Street, the actors will be asking you to choose from a set of jokes on the restaurant menu, challenging you to break the record for a 100m sprint in the fitness suite and calling on your help in a job interview in the boardroom. It's a surreal playground governed by the spirit of Basil Fawlty, crammed with gags, brimming with silliness and quite unlike anything else.

There are performance-art touches too in Luck, a delightfully eccentric show in the new Hullabaloo tent in George Square Gardens in which Megan Riordan reflects on her life as the daughter of a professional Las Vegas gambler.

What sets the show a cut above the usual one-woman confessional is it changes every night according to the throw of the dice, the flip of a coin and the spin of a roulette wheel. In the course of turning gamblers' hand signals into choreography, telling underworld tales from the casino floor and delivering a masterclass in Sin City jargon, she gives poignant glimpses into the emptiness and excitement of the high-rolling lifestyle.

It's the kind of quirky gem the Fringe does best, as indeed is Nic Green's Trilogy, a show clearly rooted in the world of dance and performance art, but which, in its big-hearted celebration of womanhood, reaches out to the broadest of audiences. If you've read the reports of naked dancing and the reconstruction of a landmark feminist conference from the 1970s, you could be under the impression the show was out in the experimental wilderness. It's certainly unconventional, but such is the charm, wit, intelligence, daring and choreographic skill of performers Nic Green and Laura Bradshaw, that the big St Stephen's audience buys right into what they're doing. By the end, half of them have stripped off for a naked rendition of Jerusalem as if it were the most normal thing in the world.

With so much inventiveness around, the genuine mainstream can be terribly tepid. Nowhere is this more the case than in Denise Van Outen's Blondes – a show so dull it's even dropped the original witty title of Basildon Blonde. Some critics have complained about Outen's lack of compassion for the icons she purports to admire, but her lack of insight is just as bad. Her comment on Marilyn Monroe – "What a shame she died at just 36, eh?" – is typical of the show's banality, not to mention its painful lack of spontaneity. She sings pleasantly enough, but it's a case of the blonde leading the bland.

Similar-sized crowds are cramming in to see the Comedians' Theatre Company in The School For Scandal, which does little for making sense of Sheridan's 18th-century comedy and much for keeping alive a raucous performance tradition that stops just this side of panto. Unlike the same company's Gagarin Way, which is pitched all wrong for the comedy to flow, this show is about direct audience address, ridiculous body language and shameless ad-libbing, and duly harvests the laughs.

"I don't know why people are laughing, I'm trying to do acting," chides Paul Foot, who's on great foppish form. Starring as Sir Peter Teazle, Lionel Blair gamely throws himself into the silliness in a show that defies you to take it seriously. It won't please anyone who values subtlety, depth and insight, but it captures the festival's capacity for throwaway fun, a moment of knockabout excess that dazzles as quickly as it fades

Internal, Mercure Point Hotel, Traverse Theatre, until 30 August (not 24); Barflies, Barony Bar, Traverse Theatre, until 31 August (not 21, 22, 28, 29); The Hotel, Assembly Rooms, until 31 August (not 17); Luck, Underbelly's Hullabaloo, until 31 August (not 17); Trilogy, the Arches at St Stephen's, until 31 August (not 18, 25); Blondes, Underbelly's Pasture, until 31 August (not 18, 25); The School For Scandal, Pleasance, until 31 August (not 19).

www.edinburgh-festivals.com