By Joyce McMillan

Published 6th Aug 2023, 13:36 BST

THEATRE

No Love Songs ****

Traverse Theatre (Venue 15) until 27 August

Heaven ****

Traverse Theatre (Venue 15) until 27 August

The Stronger ****

Assembly Rooms (Venue 20) until 27 August

Funeral ****

Zoo Southside (Venue 82) until 27 August

Much of the power of theatre lies in its ability to take the most intimate detail of personal experience, and transform it into something universal - or at least with a much wider significance, for a whole community, a whole society, or even a whole world. The range of strategies it can use to make this leap, though, is almost infinite; and in No Love Songs at the Traverse - a new gig theatre show by Kyle Falconer, front man of Scottish band The View, with co-writers Laura Wilde and Johnny McKnight - the method used is the time-honoured one of transforming everyday experience through music.

The show, produced by Dundee Rep with the Traverse, tells the story of young Dundee couple Lana and Jesse, who meet during her first term at college, and fall in love. Jesse is a musician, trying to eke out a living in the gig economy; but in no time, the two become parents to a baby boy, and everything begins to change.

The story’s themes are painful and highly personal ones, to a generation raised to regard parenthood as both a right, and a source of meaning in life; for Jesse, a panicky decision to try to earn more money through a long US tour, and for Lana, a long, stubborn decline into life-threatening post-natal depression, as she struggles alone with the baby, unable to admit her despair to anyone.

In the end, the show seems slightly stranded between tragedy and rom-com, as it tries to find a voice for the story it tells; and its musical narrative begins to repeat itself. Yet its combination of raw emotional honesty, a handful of terrific songs, and a stellar performance from Dawn Sievewright as Lana - with strong support from John McLarnon as Jesse - draws a huge response from the audience; and guarantees a soaraway Fringe hit for the Dundee Rep team, and co-directors Andrew Panton and Tashi Gore.

In Irish company Fishamble’s lates show Heaven, by contrast, writer Eugene O’Brien makes his personal story soar through the sheer lyrical strength and whip-smart allusiveness of his language, as he traces a matching pair of midlife crises through the entwined monologues of 50-year old Mairead, a social worker in the Irish midlands, and her similarly middle-aged husband Mal.

Mal and Mairead are best friends, and love each other dearly; but at a weekend family wedding, it soon becomes clear that the mouthy and sometimes riotous Mairead is sorely tempted by the chance of a nostalgic fling with her long-ago teenage lover Breifne, while Mal is ever more haunted by his long-suppressed homosexual yearnings, first triggered during his altar boy days by images of a comely Christ on the cross.

At heart, the theme of the play is erotic passion, and how we accommodate it to the other kinds of love that shape our lives - friendship, parenthood, the comradeship of a long marriage. It's the story, in other words, of almost every adult human life, told with immense affection, candour and brilliance; and in Andrew Bennett as Mal, and a glorious Janet Moran as Mairead, Jim Culleton’s fine production finds two performers who bring it to life to perfection, delivering 90 minutes of beautiful, eloquent and deeply satisfying theatre, full of humanity and truth.

Whether Strindberg’s short 1889 play The Stronger successfully makes the leap from the personal to the universal is a debatable question. Famous for working out his fraught and fear-filled relationship with women through his writing, Strindberg certainly creates two memorably forceful women in this brief but barbed encounter between a wife and her husband’s mistress, who meet by chance in a tea-room on Christmas Eve.

Whatever we make of the play, though, what’s certain is that Keti Dolildze’s beautiful production for the Tumanishvili Actors Theatre of Georgia uses all the magical power of theatre to transform it into an interlude of wit, elegance and tremendous style. Switching between the two roles, and between English and Georgian (with subtitles), the two actresses Tamri Bziava and Irina Giiunashvili deliver a superbly steely and glamorous pair of performances as the women; and with impressive support from Tsotne Metonidze as the almost wordless but hugely expressive waiter, they whip the show towards a conclusion that glances forward, to a time when women can begin to do it for themselves, and to leave behind the patriarchal structures the divide them.

For the bold artists of Belgium’s awrd-winning Ontroerend Goed, though, the task of making the personal universal, in these traumatic times, points straight towards the ancient need for rituals that will bring us together and help to make sene of our experience, and for a reinvention of these rituals that still carries meaning in secular times.

Their latest show Funeral, directed by Alexander Devriendt and playing at Zoo Southside, offers just that; a collective ceremony of mourning and remembrance, in which the company lead an audience of perhaps 60 people through a performance in which we are invited both to remember individual people we have lost, and to consider the transience of all things.

So as we shake the hand of every other audience member on arrival, sit and listen to the inventory of a life, join in the rites of scattering and letting go, and sing a simple song together, we are constantly reminded that even the most solid of material objects is finally more of an event than a permanent thing, a transient gathering of atoms. And together, we perhaps begin to find the courage to face the idea of humankind itself as transient, or potentially so - an astonishing species, with the power to create such beauty, in reflecting on its dilemmas; but never exempt from the great rule of creation, that all things must eventually pass, and dissolve into something new.

Joyce McMillan

Edinburgh Festival Fringe theatre reviews: No Love Songs | Heaven | The Stronger | Funeral