Edinburgh Fringe Theatre reviews: I'm Ready to Talk Now | Mushroomification (Legs, Legs, Legs) + more

I'm Ready to Talk Now

Traverse Theatre (Venue 15)

★★★★☆

There was a time when you could go and see dozens of one-to-one shows at the festival; to be a single audience member alone with a single performer. Now they have almost disappeared, probably because of a cost model that makes them extremely challenging to produce. It’s what Oliver Ayres and I talk about at the start of what is accurately billed as a “radical act of connection”, but perhaps not of the kind that you might be expecting from such a statement – one that opens up a space, both literally, through transforming the former Traverse Press Office into a hospital room, and figuratively, through questioning what ‘a show’ even is.

Oliver Ayres in I'm Ready To Talk Now | Dijana Risteska

On one level, there’s a three-part structure, at the centre of which is an immersive reenactment of Oliver’s time in hospital after being diagnosed with a chronic medical condition during his first year of taking testosterone. On another, it’s a sophisticated piece of architecture that morphs into a surreal, transporting experience that explores the liminal space between life and death – whether it’s of physical bodies or past identities. To say too much would be to spoil a piece that’s masterful in saying just enough. But the thoughtfulness that has gone into looking after the audience, with accessibility woven into the experience as one of its many building blocks, creates the feeling of having a bespoke gem of a play personally designed for you as you literally lie in bed: rare, luxurious and clearly expensive. Why it should have to be is a question that the piece both asks and, through its existence, defies.

With similarly precise sound and set design (by STOZ) and lighting and audio visual design (by Isabella ‘Iz’ Zettl,) it’s a very spatial piece that delights in duality, before building towards a profound moment of reflection. In doing so, it quietly destroys the roles that we might move between – critic, performer, patient, carer, male, female – and also calls for more compassion between us all while exemplifying what this can look like in practice.

Sally Stott

until 24 August

Mushroomification (Legs, Legs, Legs)

Just the Tonic @ the Mash House (Venue 288)

★★★☆☆

If a pop-up storybook decided to cast itself from a bookshelf and into a stage play, the result would surely be Mushroomification (Legs, Legs, Legs), which explores the tensions between individualism and authoritarianism through the character of a talking, soon-to-be-walking, mushroom. The mushroom’s life mission? To escape the clutches of The Mycelium, a proxy for true-to-life dictatorships, under whom he is required to “spread the spores” and fulfil his duty as a “soldier of procreation”.

Created by Heads on Crooked, the play uses a lo-fi yet innovative approach to staging, as a tree, which is also the home of our mushroom-protagonist, becomes a laboratory belonging to scientists and brothers, Irvin and Karius, who, through questionable methods, are determined to create a human hive mind using an invention they call The Conjoiner.

While the relationship between the brothers demands greater variation and texture, their comic timing gives the piece a winning charm, and the company’s clever use of sound and physicality will endear even the most sceptical of audiences. Further playfulness can be found in their use of props, and in a bizarre yet oddly beautiful parting image, the characters learn their cruellest lesson: “there is no ‘I’ in Hive Mind”.

Josephine Balfour-Oatts

Until 5 August

READ MORE: Henry Naylor on the dark 1980s inspirations behind his new play Monstering the Rocketman

I Am the Greatest!

C aurora (Venue 6)

★★★☆☆

Jake ‘Mental’ Hughes is a man so immersed in his own identity as a mental health patient that he proudly introduces himself by that nickname. Labels are significant here; as a child a teacher told him Hughes isn’t his name, only his “slave name”, so the next day he refused to answer to anything other than the title Muhammad Ali.

Now, after 25 years of incarceration in a mental health institution, Jake believes he really is Ali, a boxer who of course chose his own name as a sign of racial and religious defiance. As he talks, the dangling straps of his pure white straitjacket wrap around his fists like boxer’s tape, and he recounts ‘his’ exploits at the Rumble in the Jungle in Zaire. Yet his voice, quiet or raised, isn’t so much Ali’s proud holler as a steady, anaesthetised Lancastrian.

Writer, director and performer Rodreguez King Dorset’s intense, impassioned solo performance is the stand-out element of a play which is circumspect for much of its running time about revealing whether Jake’s tales of institutional neglect, abuse and overdiagnosis are accurate, or a manifestation of his own paranoia and illness. Yet it doesn’t spoil much to say that Dorset’s play ends up being about the mistreatment of black and minority ethnic mental health patients by the system, because the way his performance leads us there is the real joy of the piece.

David Pollock

until 24 August

Paratroopers

Just the Tonic @ the Caves (Venue 88)

★★★☆☆

From the moment we step into the room we’re greeted with a disarming, overbearing personal charm offensive by the prospective MPs for the northern English constituency of Cackby North. Mackenzie Steele (Alasdair Coulter) is a gregarious, flesh-pressing bear of a man, while Connor Banks (Dan Patten, the play’s co-writer with Sol Alberman) is more timid, desperately trying to imitate bland political corporatespeak while clinging onto his vague socialist roots.

Both want your vote for the nomination as Labour candidate in the 2024 General Election. The play’s title is unexplained, but we might guess it’s a reference to this pair being parachuted-in candidates whose personal political battle has as much to do with internal Labour politicking as it does the needs of the nation. They’re old friends, both Cackby-raised but Oxford-educated, now sharing an odd couple Airbnb in the town while pretending there’s much of anything to differentiate them.

It's a funny play, particularly in the skilful energy of the performances and the escalating madcap air, as Steele claims he’s communing with the spirit of the constituency’s dead former MP. Yet it’s not entirely profound, except to those who need it restating that self-regarding and out of their depth politicians exist, while a brief flashback to 1,000 years ago with the pair as crusading knights of old Albion is clever but doesn’t add much.

David Pollock

until 24 August

The Mothman Cometh

Just the Tonic Legends (Venue 27)

★★★☆☆

The Mothman lives in darkness, with only the Void for company – for the purposes of illustrating this onstage, ‘the Void’ is a purple up-light which illuminates and occasionally speaks to our antihero. The Mothman himself, meanwhile, is about as impressively inventive an effect as you can get on a microscopic budget; a pair of red, light-up goggles worn by lone actor and creator Richie Schiraldi, who’s otherwise dressed entirely in black with no stage lights upon him at any point in the show.

It’s a compelling piece of stage design, with almost the entirety of our attention consumed by these floating, disembodied eyes, the Mothman’s voice and some clever audio effects. The performance plays out every bit as idiosyncratically as it looks, an hour of goth stand-up character comedy which doubles as a group therapy session involving plenty of unthreatening audience interaction.

Spectators are invited/compelled to join Mothman for a mosh in the ‘mothpit’ or experience his possessed version of Bohemian Rhapsody, while a gameshow skit sees him asking people what might be lurking in the dark or how they might console him if he feels alone. All of this endearing weirdness is much more fun than it sounds, and in moments of ritual – especially when audience members are invited to hold hands and meet each other’s gaze for ninety seconds – there are nuggets of transcendence.

David Pollock

until 24 August

Sins of the Mother

Bedlam Theatre (Venue 49)

★★☆☆☆

The banality of evil is at the core of Freya McCall’s new play in which the Devil visits three members of the same family. The characters may be related but the events still feel a little unconnected, as if this were three one-act plays looking for a structure. All the Devil’s clients have increasingly unlikely motivations and, for a self-styled black comedy this Edinburgh University Theatre Company production is devoid of laughs. Performances range from extremely arch to competent but credit to McCall for stepping up to take one of the roles herself at short notice.

Rory Ford

until 10 August

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