Edinburgh Fringe theatre reviews: make the Bed | Death Becomes Us | The Ghost of White Hart Lane + more

make the Bed ★★★★★

ZOO Playground (Venue 186) until 25 August 

Created and performed by Ariela S. Nazar-Rosen, make the bed explores an hour in the life of a young woman suffering from severe anxiety and hallucinations.

Informed by Nazar-Rosen’s own mental health challenges, the piece gives a theatrical vocabulary to an unspeakably tortuous experience. 

We are permitted entry to her mind through the details of her bedroom. She laughs at herself in the mirror; her duvet and hair are unkempt after a night of no sleep, but otherwise, her reflection is harmless. Yesterday's clothes have been flung over the back of the chair in the corner. The flowers in the vase are thistles, the vase is simply a vase. 

But her anxiety is an architect. Through its eyes, Nazar-Rosen sees the room anew, and it isn’t long before she begins to grow restless, scouring the floor, the sheets, and her skin for the swarm of bedbugs she knows - and that we eventually come to feel - are there.

Grounding techniques do little to stave off the outpouring, the downpour, this sense of doom that develops without warning, sudden as sideways-rain. 

There are few scripted elements throughout, save the conversations she has with herself, the outgoing call to her therapist, the voicemails from her mother, and the pre-recorded meditation practitioners, who’s honeyed podcasts - while rarely relevant to her situation - provide glimmers of hope so great she becomes almost rabid with relief.

The torrent of Nazar-Rosen’s thoughts seem audible, so obvious is her distress. When she stuffs her screaming head inside the bedside cabinet, her room appears to have no room for anything besides fear and its fictions anymore.

But her disembodied support system and the body of the audience provides solace - we take her anxiety in hand, just as a vase will hold its flowers, and together, we forge a way forward. 

Josephine Balfour-Oatts

Death Becomes Us ★★★★

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

It starts with a montage: stage and screen icons, cartoon creations, members of her family in holiday snaps. The thing that they all have in common is that they’re dead – and Hannah Whittingham is here to help us, and perhaps also herself, to face the inevitable dark that comes for us all.

Based around Hannah’s experience of her mother and grandparents’ deaths over the course of two intensive years, including lockdown, it’s also structured around philosopher Stephen Cave’s The Four Stories We Tell Ourselves About Death and, since Whittingham spends time working in the West End, some perfectly pitched, simply sung songs that, along with her wit and well-read wisdom, stop things from ever getting too despondent. 

It's part of a popular Fringe genre: one where we’re given the opportunity to listen to someone talking about death without any of the awkwardness or avoidance that, in 21st century Western culture, gets in the way.

Embracing death changes the way we live, philosophises our grounded host. In an amusing but also thoughtful extension of Cave’s four ‘stories’ – ways that humans try to cope with mortality – Whittingham intersperses her own experiences and emotions in a way that clearly comes from lot of thought going into the matter. 

She’s a sharp and funny writer, with a quietly authoritative on-stage presence. Creatively breathing life into the subject matter, she lightly references to the clearly significant amounts of research and reading, as well as personal emotion, that’s clearly gone into the show.

In other countries, they “make friends with the grim reaper before he comes,” she tells (and shows) us – including through an anecdote where she ends up on holiday in an AirBnB with a dead body in the living room. Perhaps she is his proxy. If so, she’s a joy to spend an hour with. 

Sally Stott

The Ghost of White Hart Lane ★★★

Underbelly Bristo Square (Venue 302) until 26 August

Rob White is doing his father John proud. Only six months old when 27-year-old John was killed as lightning hit the tree he was sheltering under on a London golf course in 1964, Rob has since commemorated John with a co-written book telling the story of his life.

Now that book has been adapted as a one-man Fringe play by writer and director Martin Murphy, as performed by Cal Newman, and its run here is supported by North London footballing giants Tottenham Hotspur FC, who John was playing for at the time.

A European Cup Winners’ Cup-winner with Spurs in 1963, the Scot’s claim to footballing greatness is restated here.

In the parallel narratives of the play, Newman is both father and son, telling the story of John’s footballing rise from the streets of Musselburgh (he also played for Alloa Athletic and Falkirk before moving to London) and Rob’s struggle to connect with the legacy of a father who was more familiar to a wider community who had never met the man than his bereaved infant child.

Newman’s performance is built on a direct clarity and energetic physicality, a good combination for an involving sporting tale which brings John White - capped 22 times by Scotland - and his story home.

David Pollock

Layers  ★★★

Assembly Roxy (Venue 139) until 25 August

Using the tropes of dementia as a dramatic device is not new, but playwright, director and performer Yuuya Ishizone explores the subject in a new way in this intricate, sometimes puzzling piece of theatre. 

First we meet an old man whose sporadic words and phrases convey his confused state. “Max!” he calls, in a heartbreakingly featureless voice, “Max?”. We later learn that Max is the family dog, who has recently died.

Then the clock rewinds and the ten-minute scene runs again, four more times, each one adding another character, another piece of the puzzle. The gauze which separates us from the stage becomes a screen on to which the other characters (all played by Ishizone) are projected.

Given the complexity of the layering, and the fact that the Ishizone’s English is sometimes indistinct, much of the show is spent trying to understand what one is seeing.

By the fifth repetition, we have a picture, not of dementia (we had that in scene one), but of a family struggling to care for two ageing parents, and the losses, large and small, which happen along the way.

Susan Mansfield

Cringe ★★★

theSpace @ Niddry Street (Venue 9) until 20 August

In the world of Cringe, a play with the mysterious subtitle # No Beta We Die Like Men, Fantastical Adventures Reaching Through Time (or FARTT, to its most devoted fans) is a science fiction television show of the 1960s in which its lead characters, the Captain and Mr Professor, adventure through space and meet strange new species and civilisations.

Although their entanglements (sometimes literal) are often profoundly homoerotic, the show attracts a huge number of devoted female fans.

One such group of followers are seen here, a quartet of suburban American housewives who have viewing parties whose ritual involves cheerleader-like chants for the show. Refracted through the generations, we also meet a couple of younger female fans in the 2010s, who are discovering fandom for themselves through the internet.

In each of these stories there is a theme of lesbian awakening between the characters, albeit seen through the different attitudes of each era.

Written by the Three Sardines, the playwriting wing of young New York company of artists, clowns and theatremakers Fishmarket Theatre Co, Cringe manages to nicely balance a study of female fandom and sexual feeling, both viewed so differently in the half-century since FARTT’s real-life inspiration Star Trek first aired, with some very funny character work and interaction, particularly in the Captain and Mr Professor’s innocent but innuendo-riddled dialogue.

David Pollock