Edinburgh Fringe theatre reviews: HYPER | BI-TOPIA | Anu Vaidyanathan: Menagerie | In The Lady Garden + more

HYPER ★★★★

Summerhall, Former Women's Locker Room (Venue 26), until 26 August

The defining featuring of the hyperpop genre is its balls-to-the-wall maximalism. Think the nervous system hijacking kineticism of Charli XCX or Lady Gaga.

For trans female musician Saoirse that vortex of sound is a smokescreen. Through voice modulation, the stage is the only place she can feel recognised as a woman. The clenched tension between appearance and reality are the warring factions in HYPER, and Saoirse’s body is the battlefield.  

Tucked between backstage rooms at gigs and sweat-lined dive bars we watch her and best friend/bandmate Chris mull over their fracturing friendship. Tension and uncertainty are gently tearing them apart. She doesn’t feel stable in her skin, the pain of that uncertainty spilling into Chris. Does he recognise the new version of his old friend?

Just before it risks spiralling into melodrama, Jaxbanded Theatre deliver a sit-up-in-your-seat twist. The real Saoirse has been veiled behind a translucent screen, engulfed in wires manipulating the sound design the whole time. She steps into their own story breaking the theatrical logic and ingeniously shattering the mechanics of the performance.

It could parade in pretentious post-modern naval gazing. But its unapologetic running with the notion of gender as performance to its logical conclusion is perfectly calibrated for emotional resonance.

It takes real skill to successfully meddle with the DNA of the performance and keep your audience attuned. To do so with unflinching sincerity and compassion is simply gorgeous.

The tight knit cosiness of the Former Women’s Locker Room at Summerhall advantageously adds to its dense intimacy. But you can’t help but wonder what would happen if the production had more breathing room. In any case you’ll leave in awe of this young Irish company. Watch out for them. You heard them here first.

Alexander Cohen 

BI-TOPIA ★★★

Underbelly Cowgate (Venue 61) until 25 August

Manchester-based writer/performer Sam Danson bursts onto the debris-filled stage in a hail of gunfire, lobbing grenades and strafing the unsuspecting audience. It seems like a strange way to launch what ends up as quite a tender show about fluid sexuality – and it’s a recurring military metaphor that never quite gels, in fact.

At first Danson seems to be at war with the idea of being gay, then later with the idea of being straight. It’s only in the show’s closing minutes that specific objections to the idea of being bisexual are even aired, only to be quickly dismissed.

Perhaps it’s a question of titling: BI-TOPIA seems less like an exploration of bisexuality, more a warts-and-all diary of Danson’s own romantic history. And as such, it’s a wild and entertaining ride, through flamboyant gelateria colleagues to drug-fuelled party fumbles, musical obsessions to parental concerns.

He’s an energetic presence throughout, with a nice line in naturalistic dialogue and withering banter, and there’s a compelling urgency to the show’s restless storytelling. Whether it sheds any new light on bisexual experience, or challenges any received wisdom, however, are different questions entirely.

David Kettle

Anu Vaidyanathan: Menagerie ★★★

Gilded Balloon Patter Hoose (Venue 24) until 17 August

Anu Vaidyanathan has been an engineer and an athlete and is now a successful comedian. Her first foray into theatre has some overlap with her comic material, but also goes to darker places, in particular her experience of a violent attack at a family celebration in India which left her suffering from PTSD.

First, she sketches out her life story: studying engineering (one of five women in a class of 150); working in India, New Zealand, USA (where, on one project, she was paid half the wage of her male colleagues); meeting her husband, moving to Luxembourg, becoming the mother of two young kids.

The story comes thick and fast, peppered with the kind of clever, quick-fire observations which work well in stand-up.

In theatre, though, it pays to slow down and select very carefully the content which will best support the story. This material needs more shaping and fewer scattergun details in order to focus on the story Vaidyanathan is telling about a shocking act of violence, fuelled in part by the misogyny which is still rife in some parts of Indian society.

Susan Mansfield

In The Lady Garden ★★★ 

Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33) until 26 August

Alice never expected to wake up in a police cell, especially not at the age of 69. But embracing feminism in later life leads to all manner of adventures in this enormously likable comedy made by three women creatives in their sixties.

Alice has lived her life conforming to the rules: Catholic school, marriage, kids. But she could see that the rules were different for women: when, as a small child, her brother ran naked through the house, it was funny and endearing; when she followed, it was shameful. When her husband left her for another woman, people said the fault was hers for letting herself go.

If all this sounds serious, know that Babs Horton’s play is consistently laugh-out-loud funny, even if the humour relies slightly too much on the shock of hearing an older woman say the c-word in Lidl or talk about using a vibrator to whip up Yorkshire puddings.

Directed by Deborah Edgington and beautifully performed by Julia Faulkner, it’s a life-affirming story of self-discovery, even if it stretches credibility a little as it moves towards its conclusion.

Women over 50 are under-represented in the stories told on the Fringe, and this show helps redress that imbalance by showing us they can be frank, feisty and fabulous.

Susan Mansfield

Cruel Britannia: After Frankenstein ★★

theSpace on the Mile (Venue 39) until 17 August

Kristen Smyth’s reanimation of Mary Shelley’s creature in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain is a Derek Jarmanesque phantasmagoria with a transgender twist.

Smyth, who’s transgender herself, reimagines “Frank” as a cocaine-addled wide boy and cuts an imposing figure with impressively Karloffian cheekbones and a magnificent cranium. However, her performance evokes a soft-spoken Steven Berkoff (if you can imagine such a thing) that leans so heavily on a studied *sniff* - sometimes prolonged for dramatic emphasis - that you yearn to offer her a handkerchief.

This does, at least, convincingly recreate the era: during the Thatcher years the Fringe was full of state-of-the-nation productions that threw widely disparate elements against the wall to see what stuck - only without quite so much sniffing.

Rory Ford

Sell Me: I Am From North Korea ★★

Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33) until 25 August

In this one-woman play based on true testimonials given by North Korean refugees, 15 year-old Jisun sells herself to a Chinese broker to pay for her mother’s medication. What follows is a harrowing, at times difficult to watch solo performance about the violence of borders, as Jisun struggles to survive in an increasingly hostile new home.

There is an underlying didacticism at play in Sell Me’s insistence to tell rather than show, and its surface level depiction of North Korea’s politics. The resultant narrative feels both muddled and one-note, although the impressionistic portrait of escape is compellingly emotive. 

Anahit Behrooz