Edinburgh Fringe theatre reviews: The Mosinee Project | Fix Your Mind | The Grim

From historical pieces to explorations of incel culture, this latest round of Edinburgh Fringe theatre reviews covers a lot of ground.

Megan Prescott in Really Good Exposure at the Edinburgh Fringe | Steve Ullathorne

The Mosinee Project

Underbelly Cowgate (Venue 61), until 25 August

★★★★

In 1950, an extraordinary experiment took place in the little town of Mosinee, Wisconsin. In the early days of the Cold War and McCarthyism, one man, a lawyer called John Decker, decided to try to understand the Red Terror by staging an awareness-raising Day Under Communism in Mosinee.

Soon, two consultants, both former Communists, are vying to out-manoeuvre one another to control the event. On 1 May, 1950, the people of Mosinee wake up to Communist troops on the streets, hammer and sickle flags flying and their mayor under arrest. The plot thickens when said mayor dies of a heart attack a week later.

This odd piece of all-but-forgotten piece of history has inspired the debut project for theatre company Counterfactual, who have gud up every piece of evidence about it they can find and devised and imagined to fill the gaps. Artistic director Nikhil Vyas and dramaturg Aaron Kilercioglu created the show, with devising by the three performers, Martha Watson Allpress, Jonathan Oldfield and Millicent Wong.

What happened in Mosinee was essentially theatrical, and it makes a compelling piece of theatre which is inventively staged with sound by Patch Middleton, lighting by Catja Hamilton and video by Dan Light. There is some shifts of tone between the ‘imagined’ sources and the verbatim ones, and at times the focus is uncertain: is it the rivalry of the consultants, the reaction of the townspeople, the project’s place in the wider history?

The show begins with the suggestion that one can understand a big situation, for example, Trump’s America, by examining it in microcosm. It’s unclear how useful this is, however, either in contemporary times or in 1950, but that doesn’t diminish the fact that this is a fascinating piece of history skilfully explored.

Susan Mansfield

Fix Your Mind

Gilded Balloon Patter House (24), until 21 August

★★★

In this dark, knotty new play from Holly Sewell, the internet underworld of incel culture is pulled up to the surface. Fix Your Mind follows siblings Sasha and James, unpicking how the ‘manosphere’ drives a wedge between the pair and those around them. 

Sewell’s writing is deft and perceptive, with moments of sparkling clarity. Her approach to the subject matter is refreshingly original – especially fascinating is the dynamic between burgeoning incel James, and Kit, Sasha’s non-binary partner.

The production also uses projections and video intelligently, drawing audiences in to James’ online world through Reddit posts and YouTube uploads. Straddling the line between comedic and horrifying, it would have been interesting to see even more of these. 

At the centre of this play are two strong, considered performances from Bonnie McGhee as Sasha and Max Jordan as James: the pair don’t shy away from the complex emotions of their characters, and deal well with some really tricky content. 

While the concept and plot of Fix Your Mind are engrossing, the production is let down slightly by pacing issues and awkward cuts between scenes. Frequent blackouts as transitions take us out of the intensity of the script, and occasionally the blocking becomes a little too heavy-handed.

Regardless, Fix Your Mind is an ambitious, important play with a lot to say about depression, family, queerness, and the internet – with a distinctly Gen Z sensibility, it looks incel culture dead in the eyes and doesn’t blink. 

Katie Kirkpatrick 

The Grim

Underbelly Bristo Square (Venue 302), until 25 August

★★★

Writer-actor Edmund Morris returns to the rather morbid territory mined by his first Fringe play, 2022’s You’re Dead, Mate, with a follow-up that is superior and more assured in practically every respect. Morris plays Shaun, a confectionary-fixated undertaker who runs the family funeral parlour in the East End of 1960s London with an air of amused boredom.

His colleague Robert (Louis Davidson) is a more nervous sort, ill at ease with their grisly labour and obsessed with tales from Irish folklore about a grim, a black dog found in churchyards that prefigures unfortunate events. Robert’s mood is hardly improved by the arrival of the corpse of Jackie “The Guillotine” Gallagher (Harry Carter), a local villain suspected of murder recently shot down by the police.

With all the elements in place, there’s a certain inevitability as to where this is heading but there’s certainly a couple of surprises along the way — the first is genuinely startling while the second might give you tonal whiplash. Morris and Davidson make for endearingly unlikely workmates and director Ben Woodhall keeps this moving at a rapid clip while an effective sound design helps maintain a fittingly…uh, grim atmosphere that doesn’t get in the way of the laughs.

Rory Ford

Really Good Exposure

 Underbelly, Cowgate (Venue 61), until 25 August

 ★★★

Former Skins’ actress Megan Prescott writes and performs this close-to-the-bone tale of corruption and control, contrasting the exploitation of pliable young performer Molly Thomas by successive older industry professionals as she gets her big break in hit TV show Meat with the agency she finally feels when the audition opportunities dry up and she turns to lap dancing, finding it a safer and more lucrative way to support herself and her alcoholic mum.

Prescott teases out her themes in a variety of ways whether explicitly with an audition striptease or neutralised in dear diary-like storybook style, but what emerges from her experience and that of her contemporaries is that grubby meetings in hotel rooms, manipulative on-set behaviour, body negativity and consistently poor duty of care were/are par for the course as a young woman in the cutthroat chasing fame game.

As for her poised performance, Prescott may be exposing herself but she is doing so on her terms, with moments of playfulness and humour used to leaven the sordid details. For better or worse, when it comes to the vagaries of selling sex – on screen, in a club, on the street - it is always all a question of who has the power.

Fiona Shepherd

Di(n)e

theSpace on the Mile (Venue 39), until 24 August

★★

There’s some curiously convincing American accents on display in this one-act afterlife drama from Edinburgh Napier University’s Invisible Strings company. Noah, young man wakes up in his own apartment after a suicide attempt only to be joined by his late girlfriend, then deceased family members — all of whom bring food.

It’s a curious detail that resists easy interpretation but it does at least give them something to talk about because even at only 45 minutes this feels baggy. It’s an overly familiar Twilight Zone like premise and the script can’t quite find a consistent tone as it sways between life-affirming chat and lightly comedic familial squabbling.

Rory Ford

Look After Your Knees

Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33), until 26 August

 ★★

This is the kind of show that isn’t afraid to sit in its own silence, waiting for the audience to crack and say something sufficiently mundane to suit its understated atmosphere. Natalie Bellingham's musings on the sea, nature and getting older have their own unabashed inward-looking poetry but could do with more shape.

It’s deliberately slow, subtle to the point of being static, mediative to the point where you might feel like closing your eyes. The free-form narration has some standout moments – circus people in Bristol is one – and it’s clearly intended to be absurd, but the emotive music bubbling away in the background asks for emotion unearned elsewhere.

Sally Stott