Edinburgh Fringe theatre reviews: Failure Project | Party Girl | Lost Girl + more

Failure Project | Yolanda Mercy

Failure Project ★★★★

Summerhall (Venue 26) Until 26 August

What does it mean to fail? Particularly when you work hard, and the reason you fail is not your fault? Particularly when, as a woman and a person of colour, the system is failing you? These issues are at the heart of the new play by Yolanda Mercy (Quarter Life Crisis).

Mercy plays Ade Adeyami, a British-Nigerian playwright and actor who has had a Fringe hit, much like herself. Ade’s second play, Day Girl, about a working-class scholarship kid at a private school, has been commissioned, but things go awry when an influencer with no acting experience is cast in the lead instead of Ade. And, at the same time as her theatre dream is collapsing, her personal life is imploding.

A compelling performer who has a fine facility with voices, Mercy is great on the day-to-day drudgery of writing, reworking and pitching, and insightful on the particular difficulties faced by a black woman in theatre: watching “another traumatising play about slavery” which makes white people cry; pitching a drama about black women space scientists to an executive who would rather she wrote about black women’s trauma.

Then there is the question of how much to compromise your ideals in order to get a break in an overcrowded sector, and when to keep silent so as not to rock the boat. Ade spends a lot of time biting her tongue, finding herself silenced by people in positions of authority and seeing her presence erased from her story.

Mercy, however, isn’t silenced, she has written this play, and its content is necessary and - one hopes - empowering. But, if Ade’s story is anything to go by, there is a lot of work to do before this becomes a reality in theatre at large.

Susan Mansfield

Party Girl ★★★

Summerhall (Venue 26) until 26 August

With an electric guitar, trainers, vest top, hastily applied make-up and a hangover, this straight-talking Aussie isn’t what a parent might be expecting when they hire ‘Fairy Sparkles’ for their kid’s third birthday.

Her varying methods for dealing with brattish children, condescending mums and one ‘hot Dad’ are entertaining and at times bleak, but whenever she’s having fun - and often she isn’t - her defiant narration is very much her own.  

Written and performed by Lucy Heffernan, it’s a show that’s contrasts the irony of a woman who sings grunge compositions with lyrics such as “I’m not a little girl” with the fact she’s standing in front of us wearing lopsided wings, a tutu and, depending on the agency’s requests, a unicorn horn. She enjoys the real magic of ‘being a fairy’ when the children believe in it, but this is juxtaposed against the reality of caring for a bipolar mother. 

A deeper exploration of the job inequalities and perceptions of that might lead to a bizarre micro-industry of for-hire fairies with its silly, subdued girliness and commodified version of ‘magic’ for sale gets buried somewhere in the glitter, but there’s a strong voice shouting through the sparkles with its own shimmering authenticity. 

Sally Stott

Lost Girl ★★★

Underbelly George Square (Venue 300) Until 26 August

Playwright and performer Amy Lever, who brought her debut play, Life Before The Line, to the Fringe in 2022, returns this year with another coming-of-age tale.

Birdy is 19 and a little bit lost. She has flunked her A-levels, quit her job and her best friend Bex has gone travelling without her, having discovered some Portugese Jewish ancestors and got herself a European passport. Desperate to find some similar relatives of her own, Birdy unearths a photograph connected to her grandfather’s childhood in Egypt and sets out to uncover a family secret.

Lever is a hugely likeable performer, shifting between the voices of Birdy, her parents, grandfather, and best friend. Her lively writing draws in the audience, but she needs to control her material carefully to insure that certain powerful elements - a violent passage from the Torah which seems to arrive out of nowhere, a teacher falsely accused of paedophilia - don’t derail the narrative.

If the central revelation doesn’t get quite enough air time to convince us of its transformational effect, Lever captures with what feels like devastating accuracy a young woman on the cusp of adulthood who fears her life might be over before it has begun.

Susan Mansfield

Joyfully Grimm: Reimagining a Queer Adolescence ★★★

Scottish Storytelling Centre (Venue 30) Until 24 August

James Stedman’s solo show is part autobiography, part history lesson and part queering of traditional folk tales - or, as he suggests, taking them back to their darker, edgier, more queer original versions, before the Victorians started to bowdlerise them.

Edinburgh-based Stedman grew up in the shadow of Section 28 which prohibited the “promotion of homosexuality”, one of a generation of queer people coming of age in a period of poisonous public debate and silence where there should have been support and information. It’s illuminating to read again the wording of the infamous clause and to remember a time when gay rights protesters abseiled into the House of Lords and hijacked the BBC Newsroom.

In the show, directed by Molly Naylor, Stedman paints a vivid picture of the impact on him of that time, seguewaying periodically into fairy tales which are well presented and fun.

His argument about the rise of anti-LGBTQ rhetoric today, now directed not at gay but at trans people, feels rushed and sounds overly preachy. But he has a strong stage presence and clear aptitude as a spoken-word artist, and the lessons he draws from the past are well worth the reminder.

Susan Mansfield

Mistakes Were Made: Haunted Hospital ★★

theSpace @ Surgeons’ Hall (Venue 53) until 17 August

Role-playing games meet improv meet audience participation in this slightly shambolic but likeable hour from Bottoms Up Theatre.

Our intrepid Cleric, Barbarian and Wizard are on a quest to vanquish a sinister surgeon who seems more intent on raising the dead than healing the living.

With a semi-improvised scenario and interruptions for audience suggestions, there’s probably a bit too much going on for the six-strong cast’s attention: with greater focus and clarity, gags and knowing RPG references might hit their marks more surely. As it stands, it’s a bit rough around the edges, but fun all the same.

David Kettle