Edinburgh Fringe Festival theatre reviews: Bellringers | Driver’s Seat: Obsessive Compulsive Disaster

Traverse through a wide range of what the Edinburgh Fringe has to offer with our latest batch of theatre reviews.

Bellringers at Summerhall | Daisy Hall

Bellringers

Roundabout @ Summerhall (Venue 26), until 26 August

★★★★

A storm is coming - they’re becoming more frequent and more severe - and Clement and Aspinall are tasked with ringing the bells of the village church. Somewhere there’s a superstition that church bells might ward off lightning. No one’s convinced, but it’s worth a try.

This is the distinctive world of Daisy Hall’s debut play, a finalist in the Women’s Prize for Playwriting 2023, directed by Jessica Lazar. In the grip of climate change, the clock has turned back to an earlier time: no digital communications, no travel beyond neighbouring villages, only fires, floods, lightning storms and deaths. 

Slowly but steadily, Hall builds an atmosphere of creeping menace. At the mercy of forces they can’t control, people turn to religion and superstition: the face of John the Baptist appears in an apple core. Isolation, storm, unnamed threat: the folk horror overtones are unmistakable.

It’s a confident debut which creates such a richly imagined world, up to and including making nothing happen to an almost Beckettian degree. In the church tower, Clement (Luke Rollason) and Aspinall (Paul Adeyefa) can only wait, exchange news, bicker, reminisce, and consider the situation in which they find themselves.

Hall has a fine ear for dialogue, for capturing shifting moods. Clement is a rationalist who wants to collect data on the weather. Aspinall is more willing to try superstition, perhaps even faith. But there’s little help there as the priest lies dead, the storm preventing his burial.

There’s something impressively brave about writing a play which looks into an imagined future of climate crisis and ponders how people might react. There are big ideas here, but they don’t seem to offer much consolation. In the end, it’s the mundane which triumphs: do your chores, help you neighbours, ring the bells when it’s your turn, because you never know.

Susan Mansfield

OWEaDEBT

Summerhall (Venue 26), until 11 August

 ★★★

Holding out for A Hero, who may or may not be in The Front Row, is Odette, a woman who’s been turned into a swan and needs to find someone who loves her to lift the spell. In this exploration of what she owes herself versus the dream partner she’s trying to attract, through her ‘mating dance’ (“join in!”), we’re invited to consider how much a woman/ swan might be tempted to fit themselves to fit what a man might want. 

In feathery green, she performs en pointe, pirouettes and preens her tutu like a creepy clown-doll-swan-child-dead-ballerina, her squeaky voiced faux femininity broken up by the chain-smoking, noiresque narration of a woman who struggles to get up after an arabesque goes wrong. Lovingly created by Lauren Brady, she is grotesque, gothic and intense – desperate to find ‘Brad’, or whoever it is today.

Unfortunately, it’s not working and even Timothy the Vape is starting to lose interest. A small but precisely painted world that is less a metaphor for real-life gender roles than a broad brushed depiction of them, Odette’s attempts to be desirable while still not getting ‘picked’ is ultimately a tragic story of a woman prostrating herself by using sex to attract love that never comes.  

Sally Stott

Driver’s Seat: Obsessive Compulsive Disaster

theSpace @ Surgeons’ Hall (Venue 53), until 24 August

★★★

There’s a rush of content advisories at the beginning of this show warning that it contains discussions of suicidal ideation and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. That they’re given in a matter-of-fact manner that speaks more to a certain been-there-done-that attitude rather than insensitivity.

In fact, this is American writer-performer Ellie Brelis’ own experience with mental health and intensive treatment than some imagined fiction and it’s refreshingly straightforward. The difference is clear, you never feel the playwright’s thumb on the scales as she documents her journey - even when, as Brelis herself notes, sometimes events don’t dramaturgically make sense. There’s also a clarity and honesty to her performance — she is, after all, playing herself — that never seeks to resort to actorly technique

What perhaps works best, however, is the sense of someone who has been-there-seen-that and bought the T-shirt, describing their feelings and thoughts in critical moments even as they stand outside of them. Suicidal ideation here is described simply as the desire to be weightless which has the unfortunate ring of veracity to it.

Perhaps necessarily a tough watch at times, this never attempts to jolly the audience along in an attempt to make it more palatable. Directed with admirable clarity by Emily Mikolitch (((CORRECT))), it may appear a little stark but it’s bracing with it.

Rory Ford

The Last Laugh

Assembly George Square Studios (Venue 17), until 25 August

★★★

A trio of remarkable performances illuminate this frequently entertaining and affectionate tribute to three of Britain’s light entertainment legends. Set backstage at the theatre where Tommy Cooper (Damian Williams) prepares to take his final bow, he’s joined by the odd couple of Bob Monkhouse (Simon Cartwright) and Eric Morecambe (Bob Golding).

Ultimately, you can sense where this is going so it’s understandable that writer Paul Hendy uses most of the running time for the chance at one last hour in the company of three of Britain’s best-loved comedians — or two of them and a game show host; Monkhouse endearingly submits to being the butt of a few jokes.

Actually, Cartwight’s uncanny evocation of Monkhouse may be the show’s strongest card. The odd man out in this company, Monkhouse was not a ”funny bones” comedians but the fact that he had to work so hard, it renders him the analytical voice in the dressing room. It’s a necessary element as Williams and Golding inhabit their roles so effectively they could render the show a non-stop exhausting barrage of gags.

There are no real surprises dramatically and it flirts briefly with becoming uncomfortably maudlin towards the end but it does neatly sidestep becoming an exercise in pure nostalgia due to three terrific performances.

Rory Ford

Psychobitch

Summerhall – TechCube 0 (Venue 26), until 26 August

★★★

It starts strong and snappy: a skewering send-up of bloodless corporate life and the knuckleheaded tech bros who lavish around it spewing impenetrable business jargon. There’s no room for something as unquantifiable as emotion. If it can’t be stratified across a spreadsheet it means nothing to them. But Amanda Chong’s wit laced feminist takedown of office hierarchies runs out of steam trying to juggle too many ideas.

Anya’s Bitcoin tech bro boyfriend doesn’t dump her per se. He declares that they have “capacity issues” and that they need to take their heated arguments “offline” -  the words will send shivers down the spine of anyone who has worked in an office over the last five years. She launches on a slide-deck-powered monologue to justify herself, over the course of which she realises how toxic the testosterone-fuelled corporate world can be.

Chong’s writing has sparky moments iced with biting one liners, but it meanders in too many directions for the drama to sustain itself. Anya has to balance strained family tensions with the weight of a Christian father’s expectations and navigate the racism woven into Singaporean society. Interesting ideas yes, but they feel more like dramatic ornamentation here that demand unpacking in their own time.

Alexander Cohen 

Forgiving (My Mother)

Greenside @ George Street (Venue 236), until 10 August

★★

No sooner has this two-hander (or is it?) begun than the actors are interrogating the characterisation, intentions and scripting of a piece which is personal to them as first generation Eastern European immigrants balancing their experience of home and family dynamics with that of their parents’. The fissure in the fourth wall emboldens some audience members to join in conversations on beetroot and vodka.

There is also commentary on roles for East European actresses but also some frustration that these very capable players get deliberately bogged down in semantics and technicalities. Everyone deals with generational trauma differently and for Emilia Nurmukhamet, Patrycja Dynowska and director Anna Udras, the answer is not to stick to the script.

Fiona Shepherd