Edinburgh Fringe reviews: A Room of One’s Own | plewds | An Evening with Mere Mortals + more

In our critics’ latest dispatch from the Fringe, Virginia Woolf’s classic essay on female creativity gets a timely stage adaptation while a delightfully quirky queer fantasia reveals itself to be an exploration of more disturbing themes

Katherine Payne in 'plewds' | Pic: (c) Alex Brenner

A Room of One’s Own 

The Fringe at Prestonfield (Venue 105)

★★★★☆

Dyad Productions have enjoyed success on the Fringe with adaptations of Virginia Woolf novels Orlando and Mrs Dalloway performed by actress Rebecca Vaughan. When lockdown hit, the company began to adapt Woolf’s essay about female creativity, A Room of One’s Own, as a work which could be performed in non-theatre spaces.

A Room of One’s Own began life as two lectures given by Woolf to women’s colleges in Cambridge in 1928. This show is a performance of a lecture, with text adapted from the essay. Vaughan is a wonderful performer, applying herself to every nuance of the text. While she adheres to the lecture context, she also takes us beyond that: by simple gestures and movement, we see Woolf walking among the Cambridge colleges, taking lunch in a cafe, visiting the British Library. 

After a splendid lunch as a guest at an all-male college, followed by a much more spartan dinner at all-female one, she arrives at the nub of her argument. In her society, women have only recently been granted the right in law to own property. Few are able to earn independently; some (but not all) can vote. Whatever inner resources are required for the making of art, there is a serious practical, financial consideration, hence “a woman must have money and a room of her own”.

Woolf’s text is thoughtfully expanded by Vaughan while staying true to her tone. It’s not so much that she is playing a reincarnation of Woolf, as summoning her spirit for a modern audience, and it’s a joy to see this writer – who is, so often, a tragic figure in the popular perception – being vibrant, provocative, opinionated and charming. In these times when financial support for the arts hangs on a shaky peg, her words ring true as strongly as ever.

Susan Mansfield

Until 25 August

plewds

Summerhall (Venue 26)

★★★☆☆

Created by Katherine Payne, plewds is a delightfully quirky, queer fantasia, montaging pop culture, clowning, drag and trauma-theatre. Its name nods to an artistic technique, used by cartoonists, to create the stylised beads of sweat that decorate strip-characters in scenes of distress. 

Payne has a real flair for comedy, demonstrating excellent improvisational skills. Under their cartoonish exterior, however, is a serious story of domestic abuse and harassment. Here, Payne’s character adopts a series of (dis)guises – a detective, a director, and a dating show host – to perform an investigation of their own romantic history.

We turn and return to a therapist's office. The narrative is fragmentary, and Payne’s relationship with their ex-partner is revealed through slews of texts, which are read aloud by the audience. We help Payne piece together events – a neat signifier of the ways in which traumatic events can affect one’s body and brain, in particular, one’s memory.

For all its raucousness and pride, plewds also features quieter, more internal moments. Their impact is impoverished by Payne’s otherwise fast-paced, in-yer-face approach. Though the pacing adds to its more surreal qualities, the story throws itself together as it hurtles towards the close, and its conclusion fails to satisfy. 

Josephine Balfour-Oatts 

Until 26 August 

An Evening with Mere Mortals

ZOO Playground (Venue 186)

★★★☆☆

Two tongue-in-cheek thrillers appear cheek by jowl in An Evening With Mere Mortals, delivered at pace by Jack Murphy, Dylan Tonge Jones and Dan Monaghan. Stjälkar charts the embroilment of an extraordinarily ordinary civil servant in a bizarre global conspiracy, and in Inbound, three heroes embark on a mission to prevent an extinction-level event. 

The company’s absurdist physical approach gives the piece a rugged, unruly quality. Performers multi-role throughout – they are practised at the arts of illusion and foley sound, and are very versatile. Fight scenes are highly entertaining (in Stjälkar, sequences of hand-to-hand combat are regularly performed by one person), as they borrow from plot points featured in popular action franchises (think Mission: Impossible, the Bourne universe, and the Matrix), and include uncanny effects (see The Twilight Zone).

A disembodied narrator bookends and binds the two stories together. Both are keenly self-aware and scored with refrains – images that erupt into view, strobing like the lights that accompany onstage shootouts. The company hems an impressive amount of material into a 55-minute wingspan. And while the final product is rough-hewn and niche, catering mainly to a demographic of action-flick fanatics and gamers, its wild execution promises a wider appeal. 

Josephine Balfour-Oatts

Until 25 August 

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To Be A Prince

Paradise in The Vault (Venue 29) until 25 August 

★★☆☆☆

In a culture that only seems to have eyes for Disney princesses, the Prince - or ‘Prince’ for short - can’t get a look-in. When he encounters a corrupt genie (embodied here by a vintage stage lamp), his fortunes look set to change. However, he soon finds that the gap between wanting and wishing isn’t as slight as it seems. The piece does stand to benefit from developing its self-conscious brand of tongue-in-cheek misogyny, but Tom Rolph’s vocal skills are excellent and this reliably light-hearted affair provides a short respite from the changeable Edinburgh weather and its similarly unpredictable streets. 

Josephine Balfour-Oatts 

Until 25 August 

Moscow Love Story 

Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33)

★★★☆☆

In 2001, Paul Jenkins went to live in Moscow for a year. There, he met Angela, a “crazy, dangerous, pretty” Mancunian and, despite the fact that she was 19 and he 31 and had no plans to get into a relationship, they fell recklessly, hedonistically in love.

The Moscow of the time was a wild, hedonistic city: packs of dogs roamed the streets, dead bodies were found in the snow, bars sold vodka for 20 roubles a shot. Putin had just come to power, and the New Russians with Western connections and wealth lived cheek by jowl with the older Soviet generation. Paul and Angie careered around drinking prodigiously, having food fights, getting arrested, and once, memorably, cooking sausages in the World War II memorial’s eternal flame.

Jenkins was inspired to make the show, which is directed by Julia Thomas, after rediscovering the tapes he made on his old Walkman recording his experiences. Despite efforts to introduce movement and make it feel more theatrical, it is still a fairly static piece of verbal storytelling. While the relationship element fades towards the end, what remains is the powerful spell cast by a time in life which blazed bright, fleeting and dangerous. 

Susan Mansfield

Until 26 August