Fringe theatre, musicals & comedy reviews: Margaret Thatcher Queen of Soho | Mary, Queen of Rock! + more

CHILDREN’S SHOWS

Ventriloquist Queen: A True African Queen ★★★

Assembly George Square Studios (Venue 17) until 18 August

THEATRE

Gruoch: Lady Macbeth ★★★

Hill Street Theatre (Venue 41) until 18 August

MUSICALS AND OPERA

Mary, Queen of Rock! ★★★

Assembly Rooms (Venue 20) until 25 August

THEATRE

QUEENS ★★★

Summerhall (Venue 26) until 25 August

COMEDY

Margaret Thatcher Queen of Soho ★★★★

Underbelly, George Square (Venue 300) until 25 August

On stage there’s a real-life Nigerian queen, helping out is a real-life king, and the only person in the audience today is me, whose real life feels but a distant dream.

And because things aren’t fantastical enough, Her Royal Majesty Queen Angelique-Monet Gureje-Thompson is also a ventriloquist. Joined by a doting puppet ‘Milk the Cow’, the former beauty queen, who grew up in America, is here to spread a message of love and light in Ventriloquist Queen: A True African Queen, directed by His Royal Majesty Oba Dokun Thompson Gureje IV, which is set against the backdrop of Eti-Oni, the rural community of which they are crowned. 

An ethereal but down-to-earth presence in an array of gilded gowns, the Queen nobly conjures up an imaginary crowd in a show that has high levels of audience participation. It would be great fun for children, if there were some. In the meantime, Edinburgh-based producer Natalie Allison, the King and I step in.

The Eti-Oni coco ceremony – with its traditions, dancing and cocoa prince or princess – is fascinating, but underexplored in favour of what largely becomes a simpler singalong which, with Milk’s vocal range, is more one-note.

Some poignant insights into how ventriloquism gave the Queen a voice after not speaking until the age of five could be developed more, as could a critique of the digitalisation of the artform and insights into its history of channelling mystical figures and ancient wisdom. 

Gruoch: Lady Macbeth takes us back to the 11th century, where things are equally magical but the sky’s a lot darker, and a hunched figure cowers, spider-like. This is Gruoch, Lady Macbeth before she became Lady Macbeth and Shakespeare’s infamous Scottish queen.

With classically trained polish, Caroline Burns Cooke portrays her as an older woman looking back to a time when, as a child, she witnesses something horrific happen to her father and vows to have revenge. As the Pictish folk battle Norse invaders, the brutalities of war leave their mark on the dirt of the ground and the faces of the disreputable men that stamp across it, but also this increasingly hardening narrator. “Blood will have blood.”

Writer David Calcutt captures Gruoch’s epic story, as she is aided by “the three” to achieve her aims, before marrying Macbeth, a man she also desires dead.

The pace is a little uneven, but as the connections between her tale and the more familiar Shakespearian play becomes clear, so too do events that shaped one of its most infamous figures – a woman desperate to seek amends for the past, but who in doing so continues the violence elsewhere.

Moving on to 1561, there’s the buzz of a stadium tour in Mary Queen of Rock! With previous Fringe musical Six, about Henry VIII’s queens, clearly an influence, it feels like history is repeating itself in more way than one.

Here Mary Stuart, intelligent and popular, is reimagined as a rock legend entertaining us, her crowd. Played with flair by Mhairi McCall, she is as defined by her red tartan mini kilt and thigh-high boots, as much as any crown, but is about to sign her life away to Presbyterian Records aka the Earl of Moray, in what is perhaps not the best advised decision of her career. 

It's a fun and, at times, historically insightful, megamix, with varying standards of singing and an amusing turn from Nicola Alexander as Queen Elizabeth I, a nasally voiced narcissist and early advocate of 80s synth ballads. Elsewhere, Anne Boleyn evokes the spirit of Michelle from ‘Allo ‘Allo.

The relentless girl power energy starts to strain and the pantomime-esque style can feel childish, but the passion behind the production shines through, as well as some powerful commentary on women’s voices being taken away through history, in a way that, however imperfectly, they’re given back here.

In QUEENS, self-proclaimed “sexy German” men play Mary and Elizabeth. With rotting teeth and bandaged heads, they rise like corpses from the dead. Mary has “the face, the attitude and the followers.” Elizabeth is “straight out of the pit”, with opaque eyes, tight lips and no obvious eyelashes.

Performed with aplomb by Shlomi Moto Wagner and Daniel Hellmann, they are a creepy-smouldering odd couple, doused in haute couture and horror, set on creating a new era of “royal democracy” as “queens of the multiverse”.

Less well thought through is everything going on around them, which includes sound designer Valerie Renay, as the Amazonian queen-turned-narrator, Penthesilea, and Annina Machaz as a cat-eyed pantless Valkarie who adds to the oddness if not the narrative.

The Queens’ high-pitched philosophising is more entertaining and develops into weird little scenes and operatic songs covering everything from being born, to being yourself, to drinking oat milk and recycling plastic bags.

What does it mean? Who knows, but Shona McCarthy, Chief Executive of the Fringe, getting a post-show selfie with the two glorious leads, after they’ve had sex all over the stage, is a sufficiently surreal conclusion. 

In Margaret Thatcher Queen of Soho, a more unlikely champion of gay rights and sexual freedom is being born: Britain’s former prime minister.

She’s not so much played by Matt Tedford as embodied by him in Oliver Award winner John Brittain’s dazzlingly camp musical odyssey, in which her opinions of both Section 28 and a book called ‘Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin’ are transformed by a night out in the famous party district.

It’s been ten years since the show was first performed above a pub in London’s tiny Theatre503. Now we’re in the giant Purple Cow and she has, as I predicted back in 2013, got her name in lights.

With a tirade of clever jokes, puns and double-entendres, and some topical updates since our paths last crossed (which, today, includes a waspish critique of a backing dancer with an injured foot on a knee scooter), both the stage and the hair (late 80s-style) have got bigger, while – as often happens in larger venues – the audience appears quieter, more reserved, but there’s still a lot of laughter and a fair few gasps at some new edgier asides.

Glimmering and shimmering, oblivious as to why homophobic men might recoil at her in horror, she claims that she’s “person just like any other”, and in some ways she is, but of course, she’s also a queen and, like all the ones in these majestic shows, she’s fabulous. 

Sally Stott