By Kelly Apter, Fiona Shepherd, David Pollock

Published 11th Aug 2023, 15:25 BST

Updated 11th Aug 2023, 15:30 BST

Her Green Hell ****

Summerhall (Venue 26) until 27 August

Were it not for the fact Her Green Hell is based on a true story, you would walk away from this solo show thinking it was well performed but too fantastical to truly connect with. And yet it did happen – 17-year-old Juliane Koepcke really did survive a plane crash in the Peruvian rainforest, wander alone with an injured body and without food for 11 days, before being rescued by some miraculous chance.

Whether this was a work of fiction or not, Sophie Kean would hold you in the palm of her hand. So compelling is her performance – and so fascinating is the story – that we’re gripped from start to finish. But knowing that in 1971, this young German girl endured everything we hear Kean describe, including the survivor guilt that comes afterwards, makes this even more absorbing.

Kudos to writer and director, Emma Howlett of London-based company TheatreGoose for imbuing this show with meaningful words and energetic movement. Despite the subject matter, Howlett never reaches for the sensational or overtly theatrical option. There are no disaster movie vibes here, even when insects start to see Koepcke’s wounds as a potential home, and her malnourished body starts to fail.

Instead, Kean delivers a level-headed yet engaging performance and the show’s simple set is put to innovative use. A row of three airline seats, armrests on the front, tray tables on the back, takes on a variety of functions.

First, the obvious one – Kean is belted into the seat next to her mother, excited to return home to see her father on Christmas Day. Then, as she describes her journey through the rainforest, Kean plucks items from within the seats, climbs over them and wheels them round to cleverly illuminate her storytelling.

Her Green Hell (Photo Copyright Giulia Ferrando)

Chriskirkpatrickmas: A Boy Band Christmas Musical ***

Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33) until 28 August

Chris Kirkpatrick, for the uninitiated, was the founding member of NSYNC, the US boy band which provided a springboard for the supernova solo career of Justin Timberlake.

In this affectionate musical parody – of A Christmas Carol and It’s A Wonderful Life as much as boy band culture - all Kirkpatrick wants for Christmas is an NSYNC reunion. The ghost of Marky Mark (yes, the writers know Mark Wahlberg is still alive) grants him one Christmas wish after time-travelling by magical boombox to Timberlake’s mansion and their former manager Lou Pearlman’s lair.

The all-female cast of six are as slickly rehearsed as their subjects and arguably better singers, more than capable of breaking out the boy band melisma on demand.

Writers Valen Shore and Alison Zatta relish their roles as Kirkpatrick and Marky Mark respectively, portraying them as tragicomic innocents, both victims of the teen pop sausage machine, while Nicole Wyland is a sweet-voiced, sexy-backed Timberlake, but the entire ensemble are having a ball, radiating a goofy spirit which should win them an audience well beyond the boy band cognoscenti.

Fiona Shepherd

Kingdom ***

theSpace on the Mile (Venue 39) until 26 August

In the future, Scotland is divided. Not by debate over independence from the Union, that happened a long time ago – there’s even a national day of celebration in honour of Nicola Sturgeon because of it (although apparently many think she got out before the job was complete). No, now the division is between the men, who have taken control of Fife – which is now literally a ‘Kingdom’ – and the women, who rule the rest of the country from Edinburgh.

Created by students of Edinburgh Napier University, Kingdom takes place on the occasion of an historic Edinburgh meeting between the relatively enlightened King Duncan (Robbie Hail) and the Queen (Jorgie Buchan), a distant descendant of Mary Stuart who has been discovered by DNA testing.

In the background Duncan is advised by mistrustful Willie (Jordan Monks) and Craig (Lewis Robertson), who is interested in this new world of peace, while the Queen’s handler Mhairi (Alex Paton) is quietly ruthless.

With shades of a contemporary, Scots-language Macbeth, albeit one where frustrated men have sex with sausage rolls instead of women, writer-director Ian Dunn’s play is raw around the edges and a little preachy towards the end, but it’s also composed, intriguing and often very funny; a very commendable piece of student work.

David Pollock

Burned Out ***

theSpace @ Surgeons Hall (Venue 53) until 19 August

Bradford-based Bloomin’ Buds theatre company promise “an hour of sticking it to the man!” on the flyer for this show, but thank god that isn’t what we end up getting.

Protest and polemic are generally only exciting when you’re saying something people don’t know, and which hasn’t been said many times before. Fortunately, nuance makes a good point far more succinctly here – that we’re all connected in many ways, and we need to pull together to survive.

Local businessman and “pound shop Alan Sugar” Lee isn’t the main character, but his financial dealings affect everyone. He sneers at people who use food banks, accusing them of laziness, and is angered when he sees Michael, an employee of the failing café he’s just bought, giving a customer food on tick. He stops the café’s donations to the local food bank, which impacts nurse Becky, who teams with her new friend Michael to get their own back.

Yet Michael’s revenge plan is a harsh one, even as Lee finds out his wife has breast cancer and softens his attitude. Above it all Ibrahim, a Syrian refugee who was a professor back home and now drives a cab, observes with a modest wisdom. Dealing with raw, urgent questions in people’s lives, this smart piece of work doesn’t take an easy, moralising route out.

David Pollock

Making History by Stephen Fry ***

St Ninian’s Hall (Venue 230) until 19 August

Before he narrowed his polymathic output down to autobiography, history-writing and hosting a range of intellectual television programmes, Stephen Fry was a successful novelist. Here, local amateur group Edinburgh Theatre Arts have taken a trip back to 1996 to revisit his third novel, Making History, which took on an old chestnut of speculative fiction; if you were able to travel back in time, would you kill Hitler and prevent the greatest horrors of the 20th century?

As adapted and directed by Colin McPherson (who also contributes a beautiful backdrop, a wall of historical figures’ portraits filled with hidden compartments and scene changes), Fry’s story suggests answering in the affirmative might not bring about utopia. Cambridge University student Michael Young (Ed DeRuiter), whose relationship with Jane (Kerry Trewern) is on the rocks, meets physicist Professor Zuckermann (Danny Farrimond) and uses his technology to sterilise Hitler’s father.

The world changes, and Michael wakes up in America, a younger man, to find that alternative Nazi leadership conquered Europe and is still at war with the paranoid, repressive US. There are some nice Fryisms in the script (“history,” says Michael, “is my field of least incompetence”), but largely DeRuiter’s more than capable acting leads the ten-strong cast through a fun romp, the more grown-up version of a script Fry could have written for Doctor Who.

David Pollock

Edinburgh Festival Fringe Theatre, Musicals and Opera Reviews: Her Green Hell | Chriskirkpatrickmas: A Boy Band Christmas Musical | Kingdom | Burned Out | Making History by Stephen Fry