Edinburgh Fringe theatre reviews: Instructions | Keep Watching It | Jake Roche: Neporrhoids

The latest batch of Edinburgh Fringe Festival theatre reviews touches on the important questions, like what individual identity means – and what a Jaffa cake actually is.

Instructions at the Edinburgh Festival | Eve Allin

Instructions

Summerhall (Venue 26), until 26 August

★★★★

Every script is a series of instructions. The difference here is that this one doesn’t try and hide it. Each day, a new actor follows its directions accompanied by captions on a monitor that only they can see, and a film screen behind them, on which their image, instructions, and dialogue from unseen others is projected.

The variations between which text appears where, and when, create an amusing and electrifying dynamic between the actor, who today is called Martha, the writer (Nathan Ellis) and us, the audience, as we each snap into our respective roles. 

The structure of a Hollywood romcom, with its comforting conventions sharpened by an undercurrent of authoritarian horror, offer a framework for an exploration of what individual identity means when it can be stolen by content creators, as bedazzled by the idea of owning another human being as they are by the AI technology that might now enable this. In a web of commands, be they scripted in drama or computer code, this is a live exploration of the spaces where it still may (or may now not) be possible to give consent. 

It's a haunting, darker expansion of Ellis’s similarly self-analytical and experimental show at last year’s festival, work.txt, and its provocative exploration of labour. If “all the world’s a stage,” then his distinctive, exhilarating and unique writing is the bridge between the theatre and what’s going on in the homes, offices and streets outside.

Soon, there will be a new actor. The instructions will be changed. Bits that didn’t work will get removed. Tomorrow, it will be better; tomorrow it will be perfect. And it’s this desire to achieve perfection that the show leaves us with, along with the thought that maybe it isn’t possible, and that imperfection is our in-built defence against control. 

Sally Stott

Keep Watching It

theSpace on the Mile - Space 1 (39), until 17 August

★★★

If Stanley Milgram had ever decided to put on a Fringe show, he would have probably devised something similar to Keep Watching It. Framed as a live experiment in which a mad scientist and her balaclava-clad henchmen manipulate the emotions of a helpless, chained Faye - wings and all - we as the audience are invited to confront our own inaction as the abuse escalates. 

Keep Watching It is a show of two halves. On one hand, Charlie Mitchell is magnetic as the Faye; her vulnerability and naivety is disarming as she grapples with the abuse she has endured, and her feelings of shame arising from it are palpable. In these visceral moments, the show almost feels like performance art; we are uncomfortably aware of how complicit we are in her captivity.

Unfortunately, the momentum of the show is derailed whenever it shifts its attention back to the Faye’s captors. It is the writing, not the acting, which feels contrived here; the cartoonishly evil and exposition-heavy nature of the mad scientist’s ravings, combined with an unceremonious and abrupt ending, distract us from the otherwise-moving plight of the experimental subject.

Overall, Mitchell’s performance is powerful enough to keep us watching - we’re just left wanting more. 

Ariane Branigan

Jake Roche: Neporrhoids

 Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33), until 25 August

 ★★★

 Within seconds of taking the stage, Jake Roche’s trousers are round his ankles. He’s not letting it all hang out as such - his solo show is more about comedy exposure. He exposes his desperate desire for fame and if he picks up some useful contacts and opportunities through his run, that’s a bonus.

Roche is the son of actor Shane Richie and singer/presenter Colleen Nolan. Some people say he looks like his dad. He looks like his dad. He was engaged to a member of a world famous girl band he can’t mention (Jesy from Little Mix, I looked it up) and once stayed in Ed Sheeran’s house for a year. He is a Sylvia Young Theatre School-educated former boy band frontman with famous parents and pals. He wants fame so bad it hurts (for him) and is funny (for us).

Neporrhoids is both whimsical and wry, self-involved and self-deprecating, hectic and energetic, and more entertaining than a show that is all about him, him, look-at-him should be. Roche adopts many competing voices = some in his head, some characters, some expository – which are interlaced with the pace and precision of a sung-through musical while he throws himself around the stage like a man with nothing to lose but his mind.

Fiona Shepherd

A Jaffa Cake Musical

Pleasance Courtyard (33), until 26 August

★★★

Is it a cake or a biscuit? Musical comedy company Gigglemug ask the real questions in this fun-filled follow-up to their previous Fringe shows Scouts! The Musical and RuneSical.

Based on a true story, A Jaffa Cake Musical follows young lawyer Kevin (writer Sam Cochrane) as he takes on his first big trial: determining whether the popular snacks are cakes or biscuits in a case against HMRC. 

Sharp, snappy writing allows the company to fit all the beats of a full-length musical into an hour, in a piece that’s well-structured and deceptively simple.While the lyrics can be predictable, the songs are consistently catchy and well-written: it’s clear that Cochrane and MD Rob Gathercole have a strong understanding of musical theatre as a form. 

Behind all the silliness lie several impressive performances: the cast of five each participate in extensive multiroling, pulling off some very speedy quick changes. The stand-out is Sabrina Messer as rival lawyer Katherine, who showcases a huge vocal range as well as her gymnastic talents. 

It may not be riotously laugh-out-loud, but A Jaffa Cake Musical strikes a good balance of kid-friendly humour and nods to taxes and ‘swinging both ways’, making it a feel-good treat for children and adults alike. 

Katie Kirkpatrick

A Jaffa Cake Musical | A Jaffa Cake Musical

Addict

theSpace on the Mile (Venue 39), until 17 August 

★★★

There’s a nice irony at the close of this show about the pitfalls of social media as the actor Craig Barclay asks the audience to follow the play on X/Twitter (or whatever the kids are calling it these days). It’s like ending a sobering temperance lecture with an invitation to meet up at the bar afterwards.

Barclay impressively plays John, a London paramedic who’s life spirals out of control after a tweet of his goes viral. It’s a perfectly innocuous — even virtuous — sentiment aimed at a right-wing commentator on a topical panel show but the likes its receives creates a tsunami of dopamine hits in John’s brain that cause him to search the interactions and obsess over the trolls it attracts.

There’s a carefully constructed inevitability to Tony Voller’s nightmarish script. John compares himself to Frankenstein creating the monster of a fake profile to snare his most-hated troll but he’s actually more like Dr Jekyll giving in to his basest instincts.

It’s cyber noir in which all of John’s mounting problems are caused by his own flaws; his own ego and need for validation. Only a rather conveniently fatalistic ending stretches credulity but Barclay’s subtly virtuosic performance lends this a pacy veneer of realism.

Rory Ford