Edinburgh Fringe theatre reviews: My Mother’s Funeral | Puddles and Amazons | La Bella

Read on for a fresh batch of Edinburgh Fringe theatre reviews, from a clever take on organising a funeral to an exploration of neurodiversity.

My Mother's Funeral The Show at the Edinburgh Fringe | Rebecca Need-Menear

My Mother’s Funeral - The Show

Roundabout @ Summerhall (Venue 26), until 26 August

★★★★

There are many shows about grief on this year’s Fringe, and it would be easy to assume this is another one. But this superb play by Kelly Jones, picked up by Paines Plough through an open call for new work, is a clever, funny, incisive look at money, class and theatre - as well as death.

Abigail (Nicole Sawyerr) has lost her mum and, as a young working-class theatre-maker, doesn’t have the £4,000 for the funeral. The plug has just been pulled on her latest project, but her supercilious director (beautifully played by Samuel Armfield) has an audience which is hungry for stories about “worlds we wouldn’t know about otherwise” and thinks a funeral show might fit the bill. As the deadline approaches by which Abigail’s mother’s body needs to be claimed, she decides that, if she can keep her real-life bereavement a secret, the plan has a chance.

Beautifully directed by Paines Plough’s Charlotte Bennett, this is a production where the pace never faulters. Sawyerr is superb as Abigail, increasingly desperate to keep her mother from a “pauper’s grave”, while watching her story be distorted ever more outrageously in the rehearsal room. Excellent work by the two other actors, Armfield and Debra Baker, helps to build up a three-dimensional picture of Abigail’s family through comparatively brief scenes; Baker is particularly good as Abigail’s mum, whom we meet in flashbacks.

This play is a powerful reminder that death is not the great equaliser (unless you can get your hands easily on £4,000). And it is a critique of a theatre sector hungry for “authentic” working-class voices which then risks appropriating these stories and moulding them to fit its own narrow expectations. We laugh, but uneasily. The audience is not off the hook either.

Susan Mansfield

Puddles and Amazons

Summerhall (Venue 26), until 26 August

★★★

The human body is 60 per cent water, but the figure is five per cent higher in childhood, and from this fact Glasgow-based performer Guy Woods spins a gay coming-of-age story with more than a hint of the surreal.

Simon is 11 when his mother dies and an exothermic reaction involving an ice lolly freezes his core temperature. Stumbling through school, he is blamed for cooling down the swimming pool, but experiences momentary thaws when he has a crush on his PE teacher and a messy first kiss (with a girl). Only when he reaches university and meets James does he have to answer the question about what happens to that extra water.

Directed by Rachel Flynn and part of the Made in Scotland showcase, it’s a tender, if rather disjointed, story with some delicately poignant moments, others which are played for laughs and one which is shockingly violent. Woods puts a lot of time into creating soundscapes using a loop pedal. Unsurprisingly, the main prop is water, which ends just about everywhere. 

Its strength as a story is somewhat undermined by the conclusion, which left this viewer wondering whether the extended water metaphor was mainly there to serve the final punchline.

Susan Mansfield

La Bella

C aurora (Venue 6), until 25 August

★★★

The model for Botticelli’s Birth of Venus was a Florentine beauty called Simonetta Vespucci. This two-hander by Abby Greenhalgh, presented by Durham-based Suffragette Theatre Company, imagines the relationship which develops between the artist (Jacob Cordery) and Simonetta (Honor Calvert), the wife of a young nobleman.

Their first meeting doesn’t bode well. Simonetta is haughty, Botticelli hungover. Over time, however, they warm to one another and their friendship becomes a refuge from the gossip-fuelled society of Florence under the Medicis. Simonetta, married off at 16 to a man who ignores her, finds with Botticelli a place where there is freedom be herself. 

The use of 21st-century language feels anachronistic at times but ultimately serves, along with the modern costumes, as an invitation to engage with the characters as people rather than historical figures. The play is structured as a series of conversations, some of which are quite lengthy and fairly static, but the writing makes up for that, teasing out concepts like beauty and creativity, making this both a tragic love story and the imagined backstory to one of the greatest masterpieces of Renaissance art.

Susan Mansfield

River Time!

Greenside @ Riddles Court (Venue 16), until 24 August

★★★

Delivered with a suitably detached performance-style, River Time! navigates the long-standing relationship between literary women and self-abandonment. Forever reckoning with her compulsion to fulfil the needs of others at the expense of her own wellbeing, Laura Thurlow will often turn to her friend and ‘neurodiversity doula’, Amelia, for support. 

But it is the river that proves her ultimate problem-solver. She describes it beautifully - the amniotic tranquility that comes with diving in, the safety of being submerged, the 4am walks along the Water of Leith, with only silence to accompany her. Shakespeare’s Ophelia is her muse and her menace: the recent suicide of a friend has seen to that. 

Self-deprecation may be her default setting, but she knows that asking for what she wants means allowing herself to be vulnerable. And she is hungry for life and for love - she longs to find the Leonard to her Virginia Woolf, the Virginia to her Vita Sackville-West. 

She’s lonely - her ADHD and chronic low self-esteem means she feels rejection acutely - and she thinks about death constantly. On this topic, the production risks being too muted, but Thurlow’s deeply internal and capable performance turns this play’s subtlety into its greatest source of strength. 

Josephine Balfour-Oatts

Grape Culture,

theSpace @ Surgeons' Hall (Venue 53), until 24 August

★★★

 ‘Grape’ stands for rape, in both internet memes and in Toni Nagy and Sarah Buckner’s angry, confrontational and at times funny, thoughtful and misjudged – sometimes all at once – sketch show on the subject. This is a piece that treats violence violently, often through physical comedy but also thought-provoking analysis that explores the ways men abuse women and both men and women make excuses for them.

 With a large pile of costumes and props, the sketches are more sophisticated than the Benny Hill-style start would suggest. While the fury is raw, the choreography is polished, and it’s through YouTuber Nagy and performance artist Bucker’s clear camaraderie that the piece stays hopeful rather than dissolving into the bleakness it finds elsewhere. Straight-to-camera filmed footage of Buckner crying, seemingly after a real-life assault, is highly uncomfortable to watch for multiple reasons. “To tell or not to tell,” she questions, as well as where and how to do it. Elsewhere empty phrases such as “understanding, empathy and trust” are lampooned but also served up as a solution for “healing” in a way that feels simplistic. The show is less of an answer and more of an ongoing conversation, one that will continue in their new podcast. It is, as they say, “pretty dark, pretty relatable.” 

Michelin Star

theSpace on the Mile (Venue 39), until 24 August

★★

There’s an interesting mix of performances on display in Holly Eve Ray’s new restaurant-set farce. They range from really quite good, actually (practically all the laughs here are due to Emily Redpath’s magnificently haughty Toni) to so charmingly inept it suggests that the actors are doing this for a bet. None of it is in any way believable; two couples go out for dinner, affairs are being had, you know the drill, yadda yadda. Then it gets even more wildly implausible. Basically, it’s an utter shambles but at least it’s rarely dull.

Rory Ford