Fringe theatre reviews: A History of Paper | Batshit | In Two Minds | My English Persian Kitchen

The final play by the late Oliver Emanuel is a sparkling highlight of this year’s Traverse programme, writes Joyce McMillan

Christopher Jordan-Marshall, Gavin Whitworth and Emma Mullen in A History of Paper at the Traverse.

THEATRE

A History Of Paper *****

Batshit ****

In Two Minds ****

My English Persian Kitchen ***

Traverse Theatre (Venue 15) until 25 August

The 2024 festival programme at the Traverse Theatre begins with a rare and sparkling event, given a huge additional weight by the death last year of the playwright, Oliver Emanuel, who co-wrote the piece with his long-time friend and collaborator, the composer Gareth Williams.

First conceived as a radio play back in 2017, A History Of Paper is now a stage play, with songs, of deceptive simplicity and absolute beauty, which transforms a classic narrative of love, bereavement and loss - a pervasive theme on this year’s Fringe - into something magical and strange by viewing it through the lens of the thousands of pieces of paper through which, even in our now supposedly “paperless” world, we record and document our lives.

It’s therefore through an old box full of tickets and receipts, postcards and letters, and other odd and beautiful paper mementos, that we begin to hear the story of our two lovers, who meet in Glasgow in 1999 - they live in neighbouring tenement flats - and fall absolutely, dizzyingly in love, almost unable to believe their luck in finding one another. Within a year, they are married; but only months after that, disaster strikes, and “he/him”, beautifully played and sung by Christopher Jordan-Marshall, has to find ways of living on, without Emma Mullen’s radiant and equally exquisite “she/her”.

In Andrew Panton’s beautifully paced and crafted production, this familiar story is lifted from any trace of ordinariness by the quiet grace of Emanuel’s writing, with never a word wasted, and by Gareth Wiliamson’s lovely and resonant songs, accompanied by musical director Gavin Whitworth on live piano.

And the strength of the words and music rests, in turn, both on the fierce global resonance of the event that shatters the characters' lives, and on the story of paper that so profoundly links the historic, the civilisational, and the personal. A History Of Paper, on stage, marks a memorable farewell from one of Scotland’s finest and best-loved theatre writers; and one filled, as he would have wanted, with love and laughter as well as sadness, and a strange kind of hope, at the end of the world.

The kind of love so powerfully conjured up in A History Of Paper seems a million miles away, though, in Australian theatre-maker Leah Shelton’s brief but brilliantly vivid solo show Batshit, now given its UK premier at the Traverse. In a powerful 50 minutes, Shelton conjures up the life of her grandmother Gwen, who - like so many women before and since - was written off as mad after finding herself unable to conform to the social norms imposed on housewives in 1960s Australia, and consigned to a mental hospital where she suffered all the horrors of restraint, drug treatment and electric shock therapy.

Shelton evokes all of this through the detail of Gwen’s medical records, through unintentionally hilarious mid-20th century television footage of Australians talking about women’s lives, and through stunning sequences of physical theatre where, in a 1960s turquoise cocktail dress and bouffant blonde wig, she evokes both Gwen’s “madness”, and the agony of her time in hospital. It’s short, it’s often funny, and some of it is utterly shocking; and it tells a deeply political truth about the pathologising of female pain with unflinching courage and intelligence, in a show that’s both intensely theatrical, and, in the end, deeply moving.

Joanne Ryan’s In Two Minds - presented at the Traverse by the superb Irish company Fishamble - is also a play about women’s mental health; but here the mood is less polemical and more reflective, as Ryan patiently records the chaos wrought on the life of a young woman in her 30s when she is compelled, for a while, to share her tiny studio flat with her vibrantly unpredictable mother, who suffers from bipolar disorder.

The play ends with a plea for families, in particular, not to brush mental health issues under the carpet, but to name and talk about them more openly; and it certainly portrays a mental health system much changed for the better, in the decades since Leah Shelton’s grandmother was condemned to its care. If the play lacks campaigning energy, though, its portrayal of the stresses and strains and occasional joys of living with a bipolar sufferer is vivid, heartfelt, and sometimes beautiful; and illuminated by a stunning performance from Pam Boyd as the gorgeous, vibrant and desperately destructive mother, and a quietly heartbreaking one from Karen McCartney as her daughter, dealing with a mother whose desperate swings between love and contempt, for her only child, fairly break her heart, and wound her soul.

It’s a return to a searing critique of patriarchy and its impact on women’s wellbeing, though, in My English Persian Kitchen, by far the most fragrant of this year’s Traverse shows. Adapted by Hannah Khalil from a powerful short story by Atoosa Sepehr, the play promises not only a delicious Iranian noodle soup with mountains of crushed herbs, cooked and served live on stage, but also the traumatic tale of a young Iranian businesswoman desperate to leave her hyper-controlling and increasingly violent husband, and forced to flee the country for London, after he threatens to make her life in Iran impossible, and - with the backing of the authorities - to have her passport cancelled.

It’s a tremendous story, accompanied by the huge sensory richness and ritual of a Persian kitchen in action; but as theatre, My English Persian Kitchen finally delivers a little less than it promises; partly because of some awkward conceits in the adaptation - the husband’s authoritarian voice emerging from the kitchen light-bulb, the narrative oddly episodic and repetitive - and partly because of a gorgeously youthful and light-touch performance from Isabella Nefar, full of charm and energy, but short of the maturity, gravitas and profound sadness and anger that the story finally demands. The soup, though, is superb; don’t leave without tasting it, if you want to sense the depths in Sepehr’s story which the play itself often just fails to capture.

Joyce McMillan