Edinburgh Fringe Theatre reviews: 1984 | Julia, 1984 | ROADKILL | Kaddish (How To Be a Sanctuary) + more

1984

Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 26)

★★★★☆

Julia, 1984

Summerhall (Venue 26)

★★★★☆

George Orwell’s 1984 has a particular resonance today: a society in which truth is malleable, surveillance is everywhere, the state rewrites history and devices with screens that both transmit and receive has plenty of parallels with the world in which we live. Considered in the light of certain current regimes, the words “War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength” send a fresh set of shivers down the spine.

1984 | Contributed

Theatre company Box Tale Soup, whose work for the Fringe has ranged from Gulliver’s Travels to Northanger Abbey, present Orwell this year in their signature style: mixing live performance, puppetry, movement and music; making all their sets, props and puppets themselves from recycled materials. The adaptation has been written by the three performers, Noel Byrne, Antonia Christophers and Mark Collier, with guest voiceovers from Joanna Lumley as the physical jerks instructor and Simon Russell Beale as Big Brother.

While conjuring the world of 1984 through repetitive annoucements, klaxons and the minor adjustments to facts Winston Smith must action as a small cog at the Ministry of Truth, the company puts the story’s brief moments of humanity at the heart of the production: Smith’s flowering relationship with Julia, their idealism and determination to resist to Big Brother. The decision to use puppet versions of the main characters in their dealings with the regime, and live action when they are speaking candidly, is inspired.

We see them grapple with their memories as accounts of the past are altered, and try to hold on to language even as it is mangled by the regime. The haunting melody of the traditional rhyme ‘Oranges and Lemons’ runs through Dan Melrose’s original score, a symbol of life before Big Brother which lingers on the edge of memory. While remaining faithful to Orwell in most things, Box Tale’s adaptation does retain a vestige of hope in humanity.

Not so the blistering version of 1984 at last year’s Fringe by withintheatre, a collective of migrant artists based in London. Their production had a fierce freshness due in part to the fact that the issues in the story were part of the lived experience of performers from Russia and Belarus.

This year, the company is back with Julia, 1984, a new play by Karina Wiedman which takes up the story where Orwell left it, but puts the focus on Julia, Winston Smith’s lover. Julia is, arguably, wronged in the novel by both Smith and Orwell, who relegates her to a bit part in the story.

Here, played with fizzing energy by Sofia Barysevich, Julia is released after months of torture at the hands of Thought Police Chief O’Brien (a compelling, mercurial performance by Michael Tcherepashenets). She wants to take revenge on her sister Emma (Anastasia Velique), whom she believes betrayed her. While Winston (Faiaz Valiullin) is broken by his experiences at the hands of the regime, Julia goes from strength to strength.

Gulfem Ozdogan’s design moves away from the omnipresent grey of the 1984 adaptation, using neon and flashes of primary colour. Room 101 is a triangle edged with neon on the floor, mirroring a second triangle above in which the eye of Big Brother is a constant presence, sometimes open, sometimes closed.

While the contemporary resonances of the story are evident, it feels like a wrong note when Tcherepashenets starts asking the audience about the economy and immigration, mentioning by name Keir Starmer and J D Vance. It feels more powerful to leave the story in an unspecified place and time.

Unlike Box-Tale Soup, withintheatre don’t hesitate to push the story’s bleakness. What begins as a play which spotlights an unsung heroine turns into something much darker. At its heart, 1984 is a story about power, and the more one has, the harder it is not to be corrupted.

SUSAN MANSFIELD

1984 runs until 25 August; Julia, 1984 runs until 11 August

ROADKILL

theSpace on the Mile (Venue 39)

★★★☆☆

Strutting out of the shadows in a corset and suspenders, telling tales of catastrophic sexual encounters, writer/performer Niamh O’Farrell-Tyler’s chatty, down-to-earth Cosmo is a stark contrast to the outfit they’re wearing. A piece that delights in such contradictions, it explores the erasure and reclamation of Cosmo’s identity, sleeping with women, and then men, increasingly seeking approval through objectifying sex, spiralling towards self-destruction in between dancing to the Rocky Horror Picture Show.

O’Farrell-Tyler’s direct-to-audience storytelling has a lot of warmth and stops the piece from becoming either too bleak or too simplistic. It’s a piece where gender is as fluid as the free-flowing conversation, with a narration that confronts binary assumptions with the sharp punchlines of well-structured jokes. It becomes clear that Cosmo is avoiding talking about a transphobic attack involving a car that the “official looking queers in lanyards” in the lighting box finally force them to reveal through a somewhat sudden conclusion. Cosmo is a character who feels deserving of a more developed story, but O’Farrell-Tyler’s decision to wear a T-shirt saying “Fuck TERFs’ when taking a bow shifts the focus and leaves members of the audience asking, “What’s a TERF?” rather than talking about what is otherwise a thought-provoking character study.

SALLY STOTT

Until 9 August

Kaddish (How To Be a Sanctuary)

theSpace Triplex (Venue 38)

★★★☆☆

Sam Sherman’s thoughtful one man show is a conversation across the generations between this young activist worrying his parents sick with his plans for a humanitarian trip to the West Bank and his World War II veteran grandfather Saul who died before Sam was born, leaving journal accounts of his service in the 19th corps.

Sherman Sr. was a vivid writer and Sam’s love and relish for his grandfather’s words shines through in his rendition of a flawed man he never knew. Meanwhile, he presents his own lyrical picture of his native Washington D.C. and its shifting social landscape across the decades with plenty of insights into his upbringing in a liberal Jewish family.

But the heart of the piece is the parallels drawn between the persecution of the Jews under the Nazis and the systematic oppression of Palestinians by Jewish settlers, a grim symmetry which spurs Sherman Jr on a mercy mission to do what he can to oppose the aggression and intimidation. “I simply want to show up” he tells his anxious parents, inspired by the example of the ordinary heroes in his own family. No crusading here, just simple, vital humanity.

FIONA SHEPHERD

Until 9 August

READ MORE: The Palestinians bringing theatre and comedy to the Edinburgh Fringe: 'Art is a way for people to survive'

Roadkill Bambi

theSpace @ Surgeons Hall (Venue 53)

★★★☆☆

Girlfriends Portia and Alison debate Groundhog Day – the film and the eccentric US tradition of predicting the onset of spring – but get stuck in their own Groundhog Day time loop when they hit a deer and crash their car “in the buttcrack of New Hampshire” in this new black comedy by Mal MacKenzie. The increasingly desperate Portia is fated to relive her death, debating cause and effect, while Alison motors on oblivious and confused by the cross purposes of their conversation. Something’s got to give for both to escape the repetitive patterns which have set in to their relationship.

Mackenzie and Lauren McKee keep the dialogue nimble and witty from inside their cartoony car prop but the quickfire scenes are about to be stolen by Em Presley who features as the laidback, philosophical, chain-smoking roadkill talking trash and physics to the audience like some late night talk show host. This is no typical deer in the headlights but a catalyst for figuring out what lies just around the next corner.

FIONA SHEPHERD

Until 9 August

Blip

Greenside @ Riddles Court (Venue 16)

★★★☆☆

Is 2025 the year of the Fringe clown? There’s enough of them about. As the world feels like it’s getting madder, it’s natural to turn to comic mayhem for solace and maybe even some answers. Blip, however, is a more considered and tender meditation on inter-generational tensions, using a mix of mime, voiceover, improvised sound effects and physical theatre to tell a small story with resonant ripples.

Tom Bass plays Tom, a somewhat lost soul in a post-uni fug, and Tom’s father, a typical tough love trad dad, emotionally oblivious to his son’s interior struggles. Bass dramatises their awkward conversational encounters with gentle credibility – son nervously addressing feelings his father is doing his best to evade and past derelictions in his parental duties he would prefer to ignore. At times it feels like they are speaking two different languages, bonding only over shared memories of watching TV shows with no need for any of that pesky talking to each other business required.

Bass is an engaging performer, such that the audience stay with him over successive variations on the same theme. When the shift in dynamic finally comes, it is not with some wham-bam dramatic revelation or intervention but with a quiet realisation and resolution,

FIONA SHEPHERD

Until 9 August

Bond-Age

Braw Venues @ Hill St (Venue 41)

★★★☆☆

Starring Wenjun Zhu and Stephan Fraser, Bond-Age is for the open-minded, not the faint of heart. Together, the pair explore a stigmatised and often misunderstood subject matter that is the range of erotic practices defined by BDSM. Their delicacy and playfulness, and the degree of trust utilised to guide one another safely to the point between pleasure and pain, offsets more stereotypically violent associations with, and perceptions of, bondage.

While the piece lacks a discernible narrative, it is nevertheless honest and thought-provoking as it provides insights into the language of BDSM – a notable example includes the verbal cues of “green light” and “red light” – as well as how bondage is experienced and enacted on a personal level. A birthing scene in which Fraser mothers Zhu is the hinge on which their dynamic turns, and the pair uses this to switch between dominant and submissive roles.

Bond-Age appears somewhat out of step with its space, and the company works hard to retain the atmosphere that they create. Tools such as a smoke machine or darker lighting states could help increase the effectiveness of the action, particularly in empty moments during costume changes, filled only with the sounds that are mixed live on stage.

JOSEPHINE BALFOUR-OATTS

Until 8 August

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