Edinburgh Fringe theatre reviews: Playfight, Crying Shame, Sheol, and more

Josephine Balfour-Oatts recommends some final weekend Fringe theatre highlights, addressing themes from female friendship to living with ADHD.

Playfight, at Summerhall: a lucid portrayal of female friendship. | Mihaela Bodlovic

THEATRE

Playfight **** 

ROUNDABOUT @ Summerhall (Venue 26) until 26 August

Crying Shame ****

Pleasance Dome (Venue 23) until 25 August

Gracie and the Start of The End of the World (Again) ****

Assembly Roxy (Venue 139) until 26 August

Sheol ****

Pleasance at EICC (Venue 150) until 24 August

Character Flaw ****

Underbelly Bristo Square (Venue 302) until 26 August

MUSICALS AND OPERA

Tit Swingers ****

Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33) until 26 August

Julia Grogan’s Playfight is notable for its lyrical script and lucid portrayal of three female friends suspended in the 10-year-sweep from GSCEs to A-levels. Their school uniforms are like a form of bondage - they are anxious to grow up, eager to experience sex for the first time, tied emotionally to one another and to the tree at the centre of the stage. Represented by a ladder atop a bed of wood chips, the tree constitutes the field of their experience. They scale it, share secrets beneath its branches, and grow alongside it. 

The cast expertly perform the sweetness and naivety symptomatic of their adolescence, as they navigate their burgeoning sexual bodies, appetites and orientations. They are intrigued by the anatomy of all things, and the innocence of this is coloured by their formative experiences of sexual violence. Grogan tempers harsher notes with new knowledge, such as around masturbation, described here as a “fuzzy feeling” like “being chased by a goose”, to create a beautiful and sensitive exploration of desire, shame, religion, and guilt.

Crying Shame, delivered through vignettes of drag, dancing and clowning, laughs at loneliness, celebrates it, and externalises it. By admitting it into the space, Sweet Beef takes the sting from its stigma. In this speakeasy, one can speak easily about one’s loneliness. We are invited to sublimate our shame, surrender to our surroundings - to delight in Britney Spears and the semi-darkness. 

The company of four is dynamic, shifting between flamboyant exchanges and moments of introspection - one tap dances to a reflection of themselves that only they can see, another performs a whimsical piece of sock-puppetry. They encourage the crowd to use their personal experiences of isolation as a means of achieving connection. “I am lonely!” We cry, in chorus. “I have everything I need!” 

Crying Shame is an inventive exploration of suffering-as-pornography in the social media era, and the piece effectively satirises the ways in which contemporary society commodifies and consumes sorrow. Ultimately, it challenges us to reflect on the sensation of loneliness, encouraging a climate change in response to portrayals and perceptions of loneliness in the modern world.

Written and performed by Zoë Bullock, Gracie and the Start of the End of the World (Again) takes an immortal jellyfish, Gracie, as its protagonist. Her zany, easy joy makes for delightful viewing, as she is fascinated by humanity (she lives and regenerates by the acronym: WWHD? What Would A Human Do?), and is obsessed with vampire lore.

The production is marked by its creativity, which uses lighting, sound and costume to convey Gracie's underwater world. Bullock is a skilled storyteller, and the show balances meditations on love with themes of resilience and adaptation when confronted with environmental disaster. 

Its approach to climate anxiety is demonstratively polite, and despite the timeliness of this issue, the structure of the story - with its countless absurd and unexpected twists - makes the hour feel longer than it is. However, notions of longing and lust as lonely-making and abyssal sees this play retain its emotional depth and rigour.

Informed by Poland’s strict abortion laws, which require pregnant women to carry dead foetuses to full term and delivery, Sheol (from the Hebrew) is an excoriating and unsettling production. It begins before we go in. A woman in orchestral attire sits in a recording studio that is also a house. Behind her there is a conservatory full of toys, and in the centre, a garden of rubble that cannot grow or go anywhere. 

It is neither rite, nor liturgy, nor seance. Vocals evoke the sound of something unborn, and cello and trumpet agitate each other in a way that is painful, ugly and acute. Our maestro-mother records herself filling the bulb of a wine glass with smoke. She annotates her skin with cigarette ash, clawing spittle from her mouth. The staging, which is stark, simulates the claustrophobia of her loss with a sense of foreboding. When Sheol ends, it isn’t over - just as grief can never be ‘over’, much less forced to conclude. 

Philippa Dawson, creator of Character Flaw, is good at losing things: her phone, her passport, her bag, her patience. She’ll often lose her train of thought while sitting on the bus. She has ADHD - the combined type, which comprises both inattention and hyperactivity - and this is characterised cleverly by the voice of her ego, ‘Jean’. 

Character Flaw offers an engaging exploration of identity and self-perception, navigating subjects of insecurity and self-worth by making anecdotes of serious events (invariably, these involve the destruction of property that doesn’t belong to her). The ADHD is her personal disaster artist and the author of her artistry, and scenes blend humour and vulnerability throughout. 

Dawson highlights the difference between forgetfulness and constant, debilitating abstraction, as well as touching on ‘hyper-focus’ - a ‘superpower’ that comes of its own accord, but that allows her to become absorbed in a task ad infinitum - and describing her abandonment by the education and healthcare systems. She parts with a powerful message, observing the relentless pressure she feels to conform in a neurotypical world. 

Women pirates are enjoying something of a renaissance in the current cultural climate, and Tit Swingers resurrects Ann Bonny, Mary (Mark) Read and their male lover Calico Jack, from their 400-year slumber. The piece depicts queerness as a kind of piracy, flying its pride flag in the face of societal norms. A live band confronts issues of gender and power with an unapologetic punk-sensibility, as the characters of Bonny and Read reclaim control over their bodies and identities in a world of men, resisting tides of definition and exploitation at every turn. 

Crude representations of battleships and ocean waves blare in the back as the band covers sea shanties (‘Drunken Sailor’ is a hair-raising opener), and performs original songs (‘F*** the Navy’ being particularly entertaining). The company alludes to the structures and politics of the Edinburgh Fringe, and the play’s confrontational style forces viewers to reflect on their place in the body politic, and their attitudes to body politics and female autonomy. Tit Swingers may not serve as the most innovative of feminist theatre shows. But then again, why reinvent the wheel when you can plunder one from the patriarchy instead? 

Josephine Balfour-Oatts