Edinburgh Festival Fringe theatre reviews: So Young | Oran | Catafalque | The Sound Inside

Amy Conway in Catafalque | Andy Catlin

So Young ★★★★

Traverse Theatre (Venue 15) until 25 August

Oran ★★★★

Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33) until 25 August

Catafalque ★★★★

Summerhall (Venue 26) until 11 August

The Sound Inside ★★★★

Traverse Theatre (Venue 15) until 25 August

In western societies increasingly convinced that they can buy or legislate their way out of most forms of human pain, death remains the final challenge or tragedy that all of us must face; and this year, the preoccupation with the subject among Fringe companies seems pervasive almost  to the point of obsession. 

Nowhere, though, will you see it handled with more blazing theatrical energy, and razor-sharp wit, than in Douglas Maxwell’s latest play So Young, which received its world premier at the Traverse over the weekend. 

Set in Maxwell’s home territory of Glasgow’s south side, So Young chronicles the events of a single traumatic evening, when middle-class couple Liane and Davie go round to visit their recently widowed friend Milo, only to find that ‘poor Milo’ wants to introduce them to his new partner Greta, a poised but glowing 20 year old he has found on an internet hook-up site. 

With Milo’s wife Helen barely three months dead, and Liane still heartbroken over the loss of her beloved friend, Milo’s announcement sets off an explosion of pure rage in Liane, that threatens not only to wreck the evening and end a lifelong friendship, but to destabilise her relationship with her own husband.

The play therefore demands a completely enthralling central performance from Liane, whose journey through shock, rage, spitting revenge, inconsolable grief and a faint possibility of  reconciliation drives the whole drama; and in Gareth Nicholls’s perfectly-paced and utterly gripping production, it receives a performance of exactly that quality, and more, from a dazzling Lucianne McEvoy, whose brilliantly articulate rage on behalf of older women draws choruses of recognition, and occasional rounds of applause, from the women in the Traverse audience.

In Maxwell’s perfectly-constructed one-act drama, the dialogue is fast, cheeky, frank, brilliantly observant, and often lethally funny.  And on Kenny Miller’s strikingly bland set, all oatmeal sofas and cushions, Nicholl’s brilliant cast of four - featuring a superb Andy Clark as Davie, with Nicholas Karimi and Yana Harris as the lovers - somehow unleash all the ferocity of humankind’s most ancient passions; from love, rage, desire and the timeless battle of the sexes, to ferocious envy of the young, and the fear of death that stalks us all.

The creators of ancient myth and legend had a famously bold way with the subject of death; and nowhere bolder than in the legend of the musician Orpheus, who travels to the underworld in search of his lost wife Eurydice.  Owen Sutcliffe’s new monologue Oran - presented by Wonder Fools at the Pleasance Courtyard, and performed with terrific intensity by Robbie Gordon - is a modern reworking of the tale that involves two young friends, one of whom, Ewan, disappears after suffering fierce homophobic bullying at school and on line.

The play is therefore a 60-minute account - written in powerful rhyming verse - of his friend Oran’s strange journey into an underworld of hellish macho cruelty, to try to bring Ewan back; and with added touches of audience participation to drive the story along, Robbie Gordon often simply overwhelms the audience with the passionate ferocity of his storytelling, backed by fierce electronic music and sound by Vanives, and framed - in Jack Nurse’s production - in a glaring portal of ever-changing light.

The show’s main problem is the sheer sensory overload it creates, in the small metallic box of the Baby Grand; the sound, the light, the story and the performanceare all just too big, and can’t find enough elbow-room to vary the pace and tone.  If the attention sometimes shuts down in self-defence though, the quality of Sutcliffe’s poetry always shines through, dazzling and challenging; and Wonder Fools’s production strives mightily to give this modern  epic its full weight, even if it almost crushes itself in the process.

Writer-performer Amy Conway’s Catafalque, at Summerhall, could hardly be more different in style; a controlled and delicately-paced one-hour monologue that saves its most shocking moments for the end, and leaves plenty of room for understanding and reflection. 

With a closed coffin centre stage, Conway plays a civil celebrant who specialises in funerals; but whose composure in the face of death is already beginning to fray when she encounters a family unlike any she has met before, unwilling to talk about their son, who has died in his early ‘50s.

As she begins to unravel the mystery, though, the celebrant soon finds herself overwhelmed by long-buried memories of her own, and by a rage she can barely control. Conway’s point, in this play, is to suggest that there is more than one kind of death, and that people’s lives can be brutally taken from them decades before their hearts stop beating; and she plays out that truth with an unforgettable and shocking vividness, in the play’s heartbreaking final moment.

It’s unlikely that any play on the Fringe, though, will look more unblinkingly at death itself than New York writer Adam Rapp’s The Sound Inside, playing at the Traverse. First seen in the United States five years ago, the play tells the story of a strange encounter between a female university professor - single, fiftysomething, dedicated to her work - and a brilliant an eccentric young male student.  

There is a powerful rapport between the two characters, as  Madeleine Potter’s brilliant and often very funny Professor Baird tells us her story, and Eric Sirakian’s pitch-perfect Christopher, the student, appears in illustrative dialogue scenes.  Yet there is no affair, no plagiarising of the student’s work, no familiar campus scandal; just a brutal diagnosis for the solitary professor, and a request for the ultimate favour, from her new young friend.

The play’s ending is as unexpected as everything else about it, raising profound questions about “the right to die” and all that might entail, for ourselves and others. And from start to finish, Rapp’s play is not only perfectly performed but beautifully and enthrallingly written, as a blazing New Haven autumn shades into November, and then into deepest winter.           

Joyce McMillan