Edinburgh Fringe Theatre reviews: F**king Legend | Bi-Curious George: Queer Planet | It’s a Sheet Show | Never Get To Heaven in an Empty Shell | This Town | John Wayne Gacy, the Killer Clown: Born Evil?

A smart but unsettling one-man show exploring a chaotic stag do leads our latest batch of Fringe theatre reviews. Words by Fergus Morgan, Katie Kirkpatrick, Sally Stott, Suzanne O’Brien and Rory Ford

Olly Hawes in F**king Legend | Contributed

THEATRE

F**king Legend ★★★★

Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33) until 25 August

This is a terrifically smart and discomforting hour. Olly Hawes’ solo storytelling show is, on the surface, a simple tale about an annoying bloke who goes on a stag do, gets drunk and high, then cheats on his girlfriend. Underneath, though, it is an insightful and unsettling study of the modern male psyche and the damage it does to society.

Barefoot, dressed in a blood-spattered T-shirt, and constantly fidgeting with his glasses, the floppy-haired Hawes occupies an empty stage, equipped only with a microphone, and narrates his story like a screenplay. A man contemplates his sock drawer and the world’s problems simultaneously. Cut to the same man, getting off an aeroplane on a Mediterranean island. Cut to the same man, having rambling, coke-filled conversations with his mates. Cut to the same man, cheating on his girlfriend with a local waitress.

It is a fairly simple story, but Hawes weaves layers and layers through it, so that it comes to stand for a hell of a lot more than a foolish man and a fumbled stag shag. Throughout, Hawes probes his protagonist’s inner thoughts, exploring the armour of irony he wears to excuse his behaviour, and shield himself from the horrors of the world. He is self-aware. He is woke. He cares about the climate. He can’t be a bad guy, can he?

Hawes performs the whole thing within an uneasy, meta-theatrical frame, too. His on-stage persona is breezily self-effacing, then suddenly aggressive, with a disturbing cackle. He is a good guy, even if the philandering protagonist of his story is not, right? He is doing his bit to make the world a better place by staging this show, isn’t he?

The whole thing explodes in an exhilarating, hallucinatory final sequence, in which his protagonist is catapulted into the future to contemplate the world his facile selfishness has helped to bring about. It is world that we, Hawes suggests, are complicit in creating. Fergus Morgan

THEATRE

Bi-Curious George: Queer Planet ★★★★

Pleasance Dome (Venue 23) until 26 August

Bi-Curious George: Queer Planet is the kind of thing you only really see at the Fringe. Armed with some DIY costumes, a power-point, and a banging soundtrack, award-winning drag king George takes us on a tour of all the queerness to be found in the animal kingdom.

The result is just as unhinged as it sounds. After a story about gay penguins, George dons a huge pink seahorse hat and reenacts their mating ritual with a pool noodle while Slayyyter’s Daddy AF plays. Minutes later, he’s doing a burlesque number as a sexy mushroom. With plenty of audience participation and some great crowd work, our resident nature expert creates a room that’s buzzing with glee.

Bi-Curious George himself is a natural performer: as well as a charming stage presence, the show gives him brief chances to showcase vocal talent and acrobatic skills. He manages to put audiences immediately at ease, diffusing the stress that can often come with an interactive show. The nature documentary format is excellent material for a drag show, giving the performance a framework while still allowing for heaps of creativity and spontaneity.

If Queer Planet were just a series of silly songs and costumes, it would be a great hour of drag. In this smartly conceived show, however, George and technical lead Roshan Conn use audio and video content to tie the performance into issues of trans access to hormones and TV homophobia. It’s somewhat jarring in the midst of the unadulterated gay chaos, but gives the show an unexpected poignancy. There are moments where the message of LGBTQ+ acceptance is expressed a little too much like an educational leaflet, but in the end this unusual drag show is the embodiment of queer joy. Katie Kirkpatrick 

THEATRE

It’s a Sheet Show ★★★

Greenside @ Riddles Court (Venue 16) until 17 August

He wants more, she wants less. At some point their relationship worked, at another it failed to function. Through mixing up the structure of what happened when, this new play creates some interesting and moving juxtapositions between the excitement, awkwardness and angst that absorbs a young couple in bed who seem to click and then, over time, like many others, don’t.

It’s a refreshingly pragmatic view of a lesser-staged type of no-mance. Writers Florence Carr-Jones and Leo Shaw tap into the voices of the 20-somethings who also makes up the majority of the audience, but struggle to fully tackle the challenge of creating sufficient drama out of domestic chat while simultaneously being true to what the play’s about: the non-earthshattering reality of “trying people on” when they don’t quite fit. 

Performers Greta Abbey and Shaw keep the conversation going, even though takes a while for the non-linear structure to take shape. As the bed’s deflated, so are the characters’ romantic aspirations, but never mind: there’s always another date. Sally Stott

THEATRE

Never Get To Heaven in an Empty Shell ★★★

Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33) until 25 August

Written and performed by Claudia Fielding, this one-woman play is stranger than it initially seems. Fielding emerges from a pile of dirty laundry and, at first, narrates a fairly run-of-the-mill, first-person story about a chaotic 20-something living in London. Crap job? Tick. Car-crash love life? Tick. Failure to confront buried trauma? Tick.

Slowly, though, her monologue gets odder. She meets a ghost on the platform of Angel tube station, who claims that the charity shop jumper she is wearing was once hers. She increasingly spends time in immersive art exhibitions. She struggles to cope with preparing for her brother’s wedding and with the anniversary of her father’s death.

These strands proceed in discrete, interleaving chunks, teetering on the edge of peculiar. Is she alive? Is she dead? Is she in purgatory? Is she imagining things? Fielding’s writing slides from amusingly observant to compellingly slippery. Her performance, likewise, alternates between manic irony and paralysing grief.

Director Anna Rastelli’s staging is straightforward, making good use of the mound of sweatshirts and T-shirts from which Fielding’s protagonist clambers at the start. Never Get To Heaven in an Empty Shell emerges as an underdeveloped but compellingly unusual study of how we learn to live and love again after suffering loss. Fergus Morgan

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THEATRE

This Town ★★★

Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33) until 26 August

Rory Aaron's captivating show is a powerful blend of rhythmical spoken word, storytelling and theatre, filled with vulnerability and raw emotion. Set in a small Midlands town, this self-autobiographical piece explores dark topics such as PTSD, violence and death.

Punchy drama: Rory Aaron in This Town | Contributed

It begins at the local pub, where Joe and Dean's divergent lives inspire the narrator to explore Joe’s journey navigating friendships, his father’s death and his brother Liam’s return after years away. Aaron’s portrayal of Liam, who suffers from PTSD, is authentic and moving, particularly during moments of intense torment which Aaron depicts with painful realism as he crawls and rolls around the floor.

Male relationships and small-town mentality are examined through Aaron's writing. His delivery is particularly clever, effortlessly transitioning from casual pub banter to captivating poetic rhymes and rhythms. There is an urgency in the way the story is told which makes it feel as though the narrator is on a quest for understanding. Or perhaps it is a call out for support.

The staging is kept simple, with three different standing lights that define the space but also serve symbolic purposes. While some characterisations would benefit from stronger direction and clearer changes in voice and tone, Aaron’s performance remains compelling. Suzanne O’Brien

THEATRE

John Wayne Gacy, the Killer Clown: Born Evil? ★★

theSpace @ Surgeons Hall (Venue 53) until 14 August

It’s uncertain as to whether this new piece, written and performed by Andrew Hogarth is all that interested in answering the question posed by the title. It is a spurious defence — of sorts — given by Gacy from his cell before his execution for the rape, murder and torture of at least 33 boys and young men. Hogarth manages a consistent American accent but requires recourse to his detail-heavy script which inhibits engagement, perhaps thankfully. The interesting thing about serial killers is what they can tell us about ourselves or society; this just tells us about John Wayne Gacy. The world is not a brighter place for its existence. Rory Ford