Fringe theatre reviews: Alice Diamond and the Forty Elephants, and more

A ripping yarn: Alice Diamond and the 40 Elephants

THEATRE

Alice Diamond and the Forty Elephants ****

Pleasance Dome (Venue 23) until 11 August

Young Pleasance turn the clock back to the London of the Peaky Blinders era with this ripping yarn based on real events. Tommy Diamond (John Warfield) is the king of the Elephant and Castle underworld until World War I breaks out and he and his Mob head for the trenches, leaving his sister Alice (Esme Pitman) to take care of things while he’s gone.

Alice turns out to have a flair for organised crime and soon her female gang, the Forty Elephants, are running their own scams and making more money than the lads ever did. When the war is over and (most of) the boys come back, she has no intention of surrendering her position.

This epic tale written by Emily Brook, who co-directs the show with Rebecca Wilson, could do with another hour to allow it some room to breathe. The company has to hurtle through big events - the war comes to an abrupt end, as if it really had been over by Christmas - but they have energy and talent in spades and they are up to the challenge.

Perhaps surprisingly, in a company of 23, there is room to get to know many individual characters, and the leads manage to conjure a good deal of nuance. Alice, though the heroine, lets power go to her head and makes a mistake which will cost her her closest ally. Tommy is changed by the war, and Alice’s right-hand woman, Marie (Maya Bowles), faces a crisis of loyalties as she has to choose between the gang and the man she loves.

While this show is far from faultless - some of the fight sequences, in particular, need to be more effective - this is a romp which grabs hold of the audience and doesn’t let us go until it’s done.

Susan Mansfield

THEATRE

The Santa Ana 3 stars

C ARTS / C Venues / C Alto (Venue 140) until 11 August

Written by Laurie Bayley-Higgins, The Santa Ana takes its inspiration from Joan Didion’s 1968 essay collection, Slouching towards Bethlehem - specifically, her writing on the Santa Ana winds. Didion’s exacting, uncompromising genius has few rivals, and Crossed Wires Theatre uses her voice to their advantage. Excerpts of Didion’s essay are read aloud, creating a frame to contain a string of characters at varying stages of crisis.

Elements of multimedia ground the weather of the play. As the wind builds, recorded footage jostles a live camera feed. Seemingly innocuous images grow edges: the helix of a telephone cord is lethal, a birthday cake is a forest fire, a hairdryer is human error. Maybe it is a murder weapon. An eerie soundscape emerges in real time. Meanwhile, gusts gather, bringing signs of sickness and disorder from somewhere northeast.

Moments of humour have the quality of dry heat, and Bayley-Higgins contrasts comedy with psychological depth and intrigue. But while the action is fevered in places, the fever never seems to break, and when Didion’s passages begin reflecting on the Santa Ana Fog (a phenomena that follows a wind episode), it is this haze that the play seems to take after tonally, in the end.

Josephine Balfour-Oatts

THEATRE

The Things I Did While Waiting For You To Fall Back In Love With Me ***

Greenside @ Riddles Court (16) until 10 August

“Twenty percent of people are lonely,” Sarah Hogewood informs us from the off. But is it a confession or a warning?

The Things I Did While Waiting For You To Fall Back In Love With Me could spiral into a morose cycle of self-pity, but Hogewood’s ray of sunshine performance breaks through any gathering storm clouds of her one woman show.

There’s a unique kind of isolation induced by city life: Hogewood is surrounded by people, but they’re all either hollow or, like her, five seconds away from a meltdown. The memory of a now ex-girlfriend haunts her home city of New York. The metallic screech of passing subway trains echoes around her, more corrosive each time they pass.

How to break free? How to shunt off the rom-com fantasy of catching her ex’s glance on the other side of the train door? She slinks from one millennial friendly coping mechanism to another: Draconian exercise regimes, boozing, and sleazy dating apps.

Whilst the script occasionally meanders, and somehow she finds herself in a drug induced fever-dream that sends her over the existential edge, Hogewood’s cartoonish optimism keeps the audience hooked along for the ride. She bounces off the walls with caffeinated glee and finds intimate warmth in the coldest corners.

Alexander Cohen

THEATRE

Slow Burn **

Greenside @ Riddles Court (16) Until 10 August

Hopeless and hapless, Yasmin and her friends are frustrated romantics. Fuelled by Merlot, they gaggle and gossip over crushes. But at night Yasmin escapes to a fantasy realm penning fan fiction where she casts her friends as heroic protagonists in a Tolkienesque world of dragons and damsels-in-distress.

There’s an interesting question here: is fan fiction an empowering escape to a magical land where imagination reigns supreme, or an escape from reality’s harshness? It’s a shame the script is more interested in tongue-in-cheek sitcom silliness. There’s just enough sparky charm to see it through, and the teenage cast have fun playing up the goofiness, but they seem to have more fun than the audience.

Alexander Cohen

THEATRE

Rogues So Banished ***

Scottish Storytelling Centre (Venue 30) until 11 August

There’s a worrying air of authenticity to this historical horror story from writer-performer Paul Case. Set in a penal colony in New South Wales in 1790, it opens with a public hanging and just gets bleaker and more graphic from then on. Starvation has taken its grip on the colony, prompting young and (mostly) innocent protagonist Billy to join two other convicts in an escape. No story about an escape from an Australian penal colony has ever ended happily, and so it proves here, but Case really goes the extra mile with some very visceral imagery — which, to be fair, is probably no worse than what faced most prisoners of the time. Case may be still a little unsure of his own material but his hint of a cockney accent is effective and as a writer he has a command of 18th Century English slang that’s hard to beat. While the threatening bush evokes the classic 1978 Australian movie Long Weekend, Billy is confronted by a monstrous marsupial who may — or may not — be a metaphor that recalls Dan Simmons historical horror novel The Terror. Case’s simple tale, however, has an oppressive sense of enveloping darkness all its own.

Rory Ford