Theatre Review Round-Up

The show is Running On Air by Laura Mugridge and, big seller or not, it is a delight. It will sell fewer tickets in the whole run than a single night of Five Guys Named Moe but, as one of my fellow travellers says, it is exactly for shows like this that he - and others like him - come to Edinburgh.

Mugridge, a stand-up comedian, has decided she wants the buzz of performing as well as the pleasure of being at home, so she's welcoming us into her camper van for a charmingly rambling road trip in which we - it feels more like we're old friends than an audience - help her out with cassette tapes, sound effects and props. Being the man in charge of music, I look back from the passenger seat as she relives a disastrous journey from Edinburgh to north west England, counting out her tears in glasses of water and approximating the plummeting temperature with a slide whistle, before joining me in the front to describe an idyllic honeymoon trip to Cornwall.

The unassuming presentation is deceptive. Behind the DIY aesthetic and Mugridge's chattiness lies a tightly structured show. Rich in quirky surprises, Running On Air is cleverly designed to celebrate the joy of storytelling, the allure of the open road and the nourishment of home. It's just lovely.

But let's keep that to ourselves, shall we? And let's not mention House Cabaret by Edinburgh's Puppet Lab, a show that takes place by appointment in your own flat, with improvised comedy in the living room, Indian dance in the dining room, catwalk fashions in the hall and a speech from Julius Caesar in the bath. Like the fascinating moment in Tim Crouch's The Author when music starts playing and the audience just talk among themselves, Running On Air and House Cabaret remind us that theatre can be as much about people coming together to share an experience as it is about the experience itself.

So what of the shows where large numbers of people are gathering? Five Guys Named Moe is covered elsewhere, but it's a good benchmark for the other fast-selling musicals in town. It demonstrates, for example, that a narrative can be simple and effective without having to be brainless, a lesson that could be learnt by Reel-to-Real: The Movies Musical.

This big-budget show, developed in China by America's Broadway Asia Company, sells itself on the novel combination of classic Hollywood film clips and live song-and-dance routines. Thanks to some digital trickery, we get Gene Kelly hoofing it across the stage in Singin' In The Rain while a real-life Jeremy Benton matches him step for step. To shoehorn the movie favourites into the same script, however, the writers have developed a facile storyline about a brother and sister competing in a round-the-world race in the hope of inheriting their father's film studio. It gives them an excuse to do Shoeless Joe on a baseball pitch in Missouri, Puttin' On The Ritz before a glamorous party in London and La Vie En Rose on the streets of Paris. But an excuse is all it is. As the race goes on, the connections grow more tenuous and, by the time they get to China, they appear to have run out of movies, locations and plot ideas.

Benton and his co-star Ellen Zolezzi make genial leads and the audience get what they pay their money for in the big-screen appearances of Marilyn Monroe and Humphrey Bogart. But the fatuous plot and the pre-recorded score mean there's nothing here to set the pulse racing and, although they play some nice technical games, they could have pushed the concept further.

A live band is something you also miss in Lovelace: A Rock Musical. Curious to note what a mums-and-dads type of audience is turning up for to this late-night tribute to Linda Lovelace, the infamous 70s porn star, but actually, it is a show with a mainstream sensibility. Indeed, it reminds me of an S&M theme restaurant I once visited in New York (it's a long story) where the waiters dripped molten wax on to each other before giving you wholesome all-American have-a-nice-day service. Here, the music has the authentic rock'n'roll bite you'd expect from co-writers Charlotte Caffey of the Go-Gos and Anna Waronker, a noted LA musician, but the large cast can't quite shake off their stage-school niceness.

Full marks for producing an original through-composed score, but in the end, Lovelace: A Rock Musical gets tied up in its own have-your-cake-and-eat-it concept. It wants to make a right-on feminist cry against the sexual exploitation of women, but it offers something very close to a celebration, albeit an unsavoury one, of the porn industry.

Lovelace is one of countless shows this year that feature distressing images of women being sexually assaulted. These shows are invariably well intentioned (they want us to know, if we didn't already, that rape is wrong), but the effect is to reinforce the image of women as victims. Of course, it is factually true that women are more likely to be subjected to painful surgery (While You Lie), exploitation (Lovelace), sexual abuse (Speechless), but there's a real danger of such plays leaving an audience deflated and demoralised instead of galvanised into political action.

Thanks to the name of Emma Thompson as producer, Fair Trade is attracting sell-out houses for another story of female exploitation, this time of sex trafficking. The production, by Shatterbox, makes lively use of music and tongue-in-cheek scenes to counterpoint the true-life tales of two women brought into the UK on the understanding they would find legitimate work, only to be forced into prostitution. The play has an important social message, not least as the sex trade proliferates around the site of the next Olympic Games, but it says nothing you won't have read on the same subject in a Sunday supplement.

More effective is Roadkill, if only because it takes the audience into just the kind of everyday flat where trafficked women are forced to sell their bodies, lending the production a grim authenticity. Cora Bissett's production, enhanced by chilling commentaries taken from websites in which men rate the women they have had sex with, explores the way one woman can end up exploiting another for her own survival and how the men, in a number of roles played by John Kazek, exert their cruel control. It is not edifying, but it is certainly unsettling.

But we're drifting away from the mainstream, so let's get back on course with Simon Callow in Shakespeare, the Man from Stratford, a show that's as reliable as Marks & Spencer with a watertight combination of authoritative stage actor, favourite speeches and biographical drama. Jonathan Bate's play runs through what is known of Shakespeare's life, structuring it on the theme of the seven ages of man from childhood to old age, stopping off at passages from The Tempest, Julius Caesar and Romeo And Juliet, with digressions into Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe. In this, it is a little like one of those Rory Bremner routines where he jumps - dazzlingly - from character to character. It is also an easily digestible primer for the social, political and cultural landscape from which our greatest playwright flourished.

The strength of Beautiful Burnout is not so much in Bryony Lavery's script, although it has some nice poetical flourishes, as in the production by the National Theatre of Scotland and Frantic Assembly, which does a fine job at capturing the choreographic grace, poise and rhythm of boxing. The story beyond the ring is too lightly written, but the physical action from gym to big fight has a mighty macho power. After seeing so many men behaving badly it is a special joy to come to Daniel Kitson whose It's Always Right Now, Until It's Later is justifiably packing them in despite the 10am start. A dizzyingly gorgeous piece of storytelling, it is about the small moments that sum up what he calls the "glory and the tedium of being alive". Kitson, with his anthropologist's eye for the comedy of being human, once again makes us cry with a vision that is lyrical, nourishing and humane.Running on Air, Pleasance Courtyard, various times, until 29 August; House Cabaret, your home, selected days until 27 August; Reel-to-Real: The Movies Musical, Pleasance Courtyard, 6pm, until 30 August; Lovelace: A Rock Musical, Udderbelly's Pasture, 10.35pm, until 30 August; Emma Thompson Presents Fair Trade, Pleasance Dome, 3.30pm, until 30 August; Roadkill, Traverse, midnight, until 29 August; Simon Callow in Shakespeare, the Man From Stratford, Assembly Hall, 2.30pm, until 30 August; Beautiful Burnout, Pleasance Courtyard, 7.30pm, until 29 August; It's Always Right Now, Until It's Later, Traverse, 10am, until 29 August

Running On Air/House Cabaret/Reel-to-Real: The Movies Musical/ Lovelace: A Rock Musical/Fair Trade/Roadkill/Shakespeare, the Man From Stratford/Beautiful Burnout/It's Always Right Now, Until It's Later

This article was first published in Scotland on Sunday, August 15, 2010