Edinburgh Fringe Theatre reviews: Burnout Paradise | Tiger Daughter: or How I Brought My Immigrant Mother Ultimate Shame | Girls Really Listen To Me | Sisters Three | Arturo Brachetti: SOLO

A brilliantly chaotic show featuring treadmills and the return of an Italian quick-change legend are among the highlights of our latest batch of Fringe theatre reviews. Words by David Kettle, David Pollock and Fiona Shepherd

Cool runnings: treadmill show Burnout Paradise | Darren Gill

THEATRE

Burnout Paradise ★★★★★

Summerhall (Venue 26) until 26 August

This show is a mess. An intentional one, of course, and one that’s full of joy, provocation, frustration, ambition and plenty more besides.

And the central conceit from Australian five-piece collective Pony Cam is a simple but profound one. Four performers (plus a drink- and merch-wielding MC) will attempt some everyday tasks, from cookery to cleaning their teeth, while jogging or sprinting on four on-stage treadmills – and, worse, trying to beat their previous record for distance covered. The end results are sheer bedlam, as all four compete for our attention (and cry out for our help too – expect to get involved) and face their mind- and body-boggling tasks with increasingly desperate determination.

Burnout Paradise is a joy for those who love a bit of audience participation, but it’s relaxed enough for you to sit back and enjoy the show if not. It quickly establishes a community within Summerhall’s Main Hall as boundaries between performers and audience grow increasingly blurred. And it’s a knowing interrogation of human endurance and resilience, too: it’s impossible not to feel for the four exhausted, sweat-drenched humans at its conclusion, nor imagine the mix of euphoria and dread they must be feeling before starting all over again.

Behind all the chaos and frenetic activity, though, is a razor-sharp critique of what’s expected from performers, or from any of us, when keeping dozens of plates spinning is the norm, and when nothing is ever quite good enough. To pull that off with a smile, a wink and an awful lot of post-run on-stage debris – plus a slickly choreographed treadmill dance routine – is quite the achievement.

Burnout Paradise is an hour of magnificently chaotic, breathlessly frenetic fun. But it also asks some serious questions about how far we expect ourselves and other people to go. David Kettle

THEATRE

Tiger Daughter: or How I Brought My Immigrant Mother Ultimate Shame ★★★★

Paradise in the Vault (Venue 29) until 25 August

Just what does Charlene Kaye have against her mum? Or what does her mum have against her? For most of an hour-long show that seems like a piece of tightly-themed stand-up until the end, this American rock musician turned first-time Fringe performer leaves no stone unturned in detailing both her mother’s grave disappointment in her and Kaye’s own disapproval of just about everything her mother says and does.

In fairness, her mum’s complaints seem fairly generic, including why her daughter hasn’t put her education to good use in a respectable, high-flying business career, rather than appearing in a feminist Guns N’ Roses covers band named Guns N’ Hoses with too much of her backside showing in the promo shots (Kaye remains fiercely proud of christening one of their songs Welcome to the Vajungle).

Yet her mum seems like a real lovable eccentric: messaging her daughter (who she named after soap actor Charlene Tilton) to demand she Photoshop her face into images of Asian princesses she’s found online, saucily suggesting Kaye lend her a revealing black leather dress “for a date” and making it a relentless mission to ensure her daughter has the same sharp bob haircut as her, to the extent she pays her to get it. Along the way, Kaye rips into her mother’s distinctive accent and laugh in a manner which would ensure cancellation for a non-Asian actor.

All of this is very funny indeed, until it isn’t. Kaye is a high-energy, confident young performer who knows how to sell a punchline, but her eye-rolling mockery and frustration is something of a smokescreen. Without giving too much away, this show is not an assassination of but a love letter to her mother, who grew up in absolute poverty and hardship in Singapore in the 1960s, and emigrated to the United States to find a better life for her children. The way Kaye spins her story on a dime is a moment of beauty. David Pollock

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THEATRE

Girls Really Listen To Me ★★★

Underbelly, Cowgate (Venue 61) until 25 August

We’ve seen this type portrayed before – the breathtakingly entitled rich bitch teen schemer in the Heathers tradition – but have we ever understood her as anything more than an awful caricature?

Sixteen-year-old Madeleine lives in Upper East Side New York, a milieu of old money privilege and keeping up appearances where the rules of the game, romantic or otherwise, are never more acutely enforced than in the bearpit that is high school.

Arguably, she is not the most reliable witness to relate the unfolding tale of the campus rape of an unwitting friend (from Brooklyn, she says dismissively), especially as her own role in the set-up is so murky. But boy can she set the scene in the most bloodless manner, all the while fielding calls and posting content on TikTok.

Eleanor Greene delivers a perfectly pitched performance as Maddy, capturing her shallow self-involvement and dead-eyed lack of empathy as she sees opportunity for advancement at every turn. Subtly, it becomes possible to appreciate why she has learned to conduct herself with such sangfroid. She may come from financial stability but her parents are emotionally remote. It is better to derive self-worth outside the home even if, as she discovers, popularity and influence among her peers can be a fragile construct. Fiona Shepherd

THEATRE

Sisters Three ★★★

Summerhall (Venue 26) until 26 August

Not so much an adaptation of Chekhov’s 1900 play Three Sisters as it is a metafictional commentary on it, writer/director Emma Howlett and her company TheatreGoose (producer of last year’s well-received Her Green Hell) use the story as a jumping-off point to examine trios of female characters as a recurring motif in fiction.

Sisters Three by TheatreGoose | Giulia Ferrando

Using a simple floor-to-ceiling sheet for a backdrop, which nevertheless has a transformative effect upon the environment, there’s a dream-like feeling as three young female actors perform Chekhov’s Masha, Olga and Irina, who seem to have an awareness that they are not just characters in a story, but that their fates have been predestined by the pen of a male writer who’s composing their lives as the 19th century draws to a close. What other lives might be available to them in other times, they wonder?

They roam through other roles, real and fictional; the witches from Macbeth, the brides of Dracula, characters from Little Women, the Bronte Sisters. In one telling section, Howlett’s text dissects the familiar myth of Medusa via a feminist lens, interrogating why the story makes the Gorgon’s gaze a weapon against men which later becomes a man’s weapon when her head is severed.

More oddly, at one point they become the Sugababes. The thematic links are slight between each section, and a certain amount of literary knowledge is required going in, but the play is well-staged and beautifully written and performed. David Pollock

THEATRE

Arturo Brachetti: SOLO ★★★

Pleasance at EICC (Venue 150) until 25 August

It’s hard to believe that legendary Italian quick-change performer Arturo Brachetti is 67, as he explains before posing for selfies at the end of his typically kaleidoscopic, larger-than-life show. His nimbleness, skill and imagination remain undiminished – and in many ways, SOLO is a show about nostalgia, as Brachetti looks back to his childhood with affectionate homages to TV shows, superheroes, musical acts and plenty more. His quick-change setpieces remain breathtakingly impressive – to be more specific would spoil the surprises of what elaborate costumes Brachetti will reveal next. But familiarity breeds – well, you know – and his outfit swaps begin to pall slightly, perhaps inevitably, as the show progresses.

More frustratingly, what Brachetti does when he’s in a new get-up is often quite a bit less interesting than the attire-change itself. That said, SOLO is an elaborately staged show: its weaving together of video, live action and a seeming innocuous corrugated cardboard set, complete with brilliant lighting and laser effects, is immaculately conceived and constantly surprising. The quiet focus of quite a lengthy segment using live sand painting might just be the show’s standout.

But SOLO is a show of warmth, gentle humour and joyful visual flamboyance, and it’s sure to keep everyone from toddlers to their grandparents (or great-grandparents) enchanted and entertained. David Kettle