Edinburgh Fringe reviews: Someone Has to Be Counting | In the Round | Spiked | This Side of the House + more

The Fringe might be almost finished but some shows are just getting started. Sally Stott races the clock to find a few last-minute highlights including Someone Has to Be Counting, In the Round and Korean Painter

In the Round | Contributed

THEATRE

Someone Has to Be Counting ★★★★

theSpace @ Surgeon’sHall (Venue 53) until 24 August

DANCE, PHYSICAL THEATRE AND CIRCUS

In the Round ★★★★

Greenside @ George Street (Venue 236) until 24 August

THEATRE

Spiked ★★★

Greenside @ George Street (Venue 236) until 24 August

THEATRE

This Side of the House ★★★

theSpaceTriplex (Venue 38) until 24 August

DANCE, PHYSICAL THEATRE AND CIRCUS

Korean Painter ★★★★

theSpaceTriplex (Venue 38) until 24 August

THEATRE

Gaudi: God’s Architect ★★★

C Aurora (Venue 6) until 25 August

THEATRE

All This Must Pass ★★★

theSpace @ Venue45 (Venue 45) until 24 August

It might seem like an odd decision to start your Fringe show as the festival ends, but the dozens of performances that are both opening and closing this week clearly don’t think so, and many of them are about the thing that we’re all running out of: time.

In Someone Has to Be Counting, a dispassionate journalist attempts to make sense of the ticking clock by turning it into a mathematical table. Every day, she categorises what she has done, but also what she hasn’t: writing, self-development, spending, pleasure, articles criticised, articles complemented. As the list goes on, the script, by Lithuanian writer Vytautas Bikauskas smoothly performed by Lisa Vetta, becomes hypnotic. A blank version of the chart, ready to be used, is also available in the beautifully designed programme should you want to join in. “We can’t live in this chaos, someone has to be counting,” the woman says. It’s a logic that, in doing away with a beginning, middle and end, denies us a traditional dramatic structure in favour of its own circularity. If the repetition becomes repetitive, then that’s the point – and it’s one that starkly highlights just how homogeneous and unspectacular a lot of what we do actually is.

The circles of life, but also love, continue in In the Round, an equally involving contemporary dance duet, choreographed and performed by Yuxi Jiang and Luca Vaccari. As they move between synchronicity and separateness, their revolving routines repeat, change, deviate, and then start over again. Fluid, structured movements are paired with filmed footage and a narration that draws on a broad range of philosophical influences, from Nietzsche to The Matrix. Also referencing Tibetan spatial practice and Japanese pop, the expansive swirls and leaps are often too large for the size of the room. “We find ourselves in reoccurring patterns of behaviour,” the narration goes, and shows in need of a bigger venue is certainly a familiar one at this year’s Fringe. The significant amount of floorwork also requires the back row of the audience to stand to see it. In addition to the round-and-round concept of reality, the more literal up-and-down practicalities of sightlines feel like they could have been more considered. Despite this, when you can see Jiang and Vaccari, their connection is mesmerising.

In Spiked, writer and performer Saraya Haddad loses track of time, after having her drink spiked before performing in a production of The Tempest. Based on a real-life story, she resurrects her role as Ariel and tries to piece together what happened through a hallucinogenic journey that blurs being unknowingly drugged with Shakespeare’s fantastical play and an ocean of half-remembered, half-imagined ideas and images. She plays the fairy controlled by both a magician and the unseen spiker. It’s an original idea, but one that gets lost in the ambiance of its own poetry. Touching on the theme of AI versus nature, the fragmented scenes need more focus. An unusual and intriguing reimagining of a personal story, it seeks a bigger purpose in reaching out to others who have been a victim of the crime and laudably offers them a space to discuss their experiences.

This Side of the House, also based on real life, is a provocative satire written 37 years’ ago by Lance Anisfeld and Martin Kravis. Discovered in by Anisfeld’s daughter, director Annabel Anisfeld, on a dusty shelf in the family library, it’s finally having its premiere. Punchily performed a new generation of young actors, it follows a group of students’ unscrupulous attempts to determine the next president of the Cambridge Union Debating Society – a role that the senior Ansfield, now a Conservative politician, also once held. With their explicit racism, sexism, homophobia and antisemitism, the caricatured characters, unchanged since the 1980s, are highly uncomfortable. But the script is an effective demonstration of how the well-spoken wit of highly educated men, with their charisma and sense for a smartly structured joke, enables them to get away with saying and doing the most appalling things in a way that is still relevant today. With the female characters damned by both a lack of development and the men who pour scorn on them, we ‘the house’ must choose whether to laugh at the funny lines or ‘abstain’, before a final vote and choice of endings.

There’s a less literary but also powerful purpose behind Korean Painter, in which a piece of live art creates an act of anarchy concealed within the regimented rhythms of traditional drumming. With the swoosh of the ribbons on their sangmos, the three excellent performers, in their matching uniforms bedecked with backpacks of paint, capture the authoritarian energy and the compliancy inducing effects of percussion at its most military, but also the exuberance of a group of friends banging out beats for fun. Once again, the room is far too small for such an explosive performance. As the alternating, authoritarian rhythms rise, fall and grow to crescendos in increasingly complex combinations, it fluctuates between being invigorating and deafening. What they’re doing and why, with their drums turned into palettes and drumsticks made into brushes, only becomes clear at the end, when the full picture is finally revealed: abstract expressionism shaped by everything that has gone before – a controlled and contained piece of freedom open to however you want to interpret it.

Gaudi: God’s Architect is an informative three-hander that captures the turbulent times of late 19th-century Barcelona when influential architect, Antoni Gaudi, began work on his iconic church, the Sagrada Família, which is famously still being built today over 100 years after it was begun. At times feeling more like a dramatised documentary, than a play, the dialogue rarely comes without exposition and the acting, as well as the accents, are mixed. However, the research is compelling and captures Gaudi’s time as a renegade student at architecture school (including some brilliant, lesser-known early designs) and his family and personal relationships, before finally living a monk-like existence in the cathedral, gathering money to fund it and, tragically, being hit by a tram. Original photographs projected are onto the imaginative set which, while it may not reach Gaudi’s epic levels of design, adds a splash of colour to this fun and educational little Fringe production.

Taking us from past to present is All This Must Pass, which follows one woman’s journey through her genealogy to meet her ancestors. Aurelia’s Gage’s monologue, beautifully performed by Aiden Morris, draws in a French king, the Salem witch trials, troubles in Ireland and the horrors of war, before concluding with a more recent loss. It captures fragmented voices echoing from the past – people who were once here but now aren’t, in the same way we are here now but one day won’t be. “I want to piece you all together” the woman says, but it’s a task that she struggles to achieve. Instead, like a collage collapsing through time, the play captures the odd moments that have, at some point, stood out enough in history that someone has recorded them and, as a result, have outlived their immediate circumstances. Maybe a few of the ones written about here and elsewhere during this year’s festival will be lucky enough to do the same.