Táin ★★★★ Scottish Storytelling Centre (Venue 30) until 25 August Welcomed into the compact George Mackay Brown library upstairs at the Scottish Storytelling Centre with a nip of whisky and a piece of shortbread, the audience appears to be receiving a promise that they’ll have a storytelling experience as trad and tourist-friendly as everything that’s going on outside on the Royal Mile. Yet what they receive is a full-blooded and enriching new version of an old folk tale, with an intriguing electric and electronic score. In fact the story being told in Táin is Irish, not Scottish, and we just hope all the tourists in the audience can tell the difference.
The Táin Bó Cúailnge, in fact, is one of Ireland’s great defining mythical stories, a part of the Ulster Cycle in which Queen Medb of Connacht decides to raid Ulster with her army in order to capture the great bull Donn Cúailnge, but finds opposition from the fierce warrior Cú Chulainn. Young Edinburgh Storytellers Mark Borthwick and David Hughes deliver a version of the story which feels fresh and compelling, grounding it both in ordinary language and in a sense of the expansively believable, at least in terms of the characters’ motivations. The pair leave their listeners feeling as though they’d had a glimpse into a wider world of godlike magical warriors, yet the base motivations of lust, greed and offended honour at the heart of the tale are immediate and relatable.
The pair also fail to go gently on the juicier parts of the story - on the sex and violence, essentially - which makes for a storytelling experience which is mature but not sensationalist, a kind of reboot of old myths for a red-blooded post-Game of Thrones generation. Their sparse and otherworldly electric guitar and keyboard playing is also a nice touch, accentuating an experience that’s more post-rock than trad folk. David Pollock Nobody Meets Nobody ★★★ Pleasance EICC (Venue 150) until 24 August Playing in the Grotowski Institute’s pavilion behind the EICC - alongside two brilliant shows from the Wachowicz-Fret studio of the same institute - Nobody Meets Nobody is a compelling piece of abstract theatre, with few words, which aims to tell the the story of a couple whose break-up is put on hold when he suffers a sudden injury.
In fact, though, what emerges is more like a 50 minute meditation on patterns of attraction, pursuit, resistance, fragmentation, and dependence, all beautifully performed by Mertcan Semerci and Aleksandra Kugacz-Semerci. The show involves two supremely able-bodied performers exploring images of disability involving a wheelchair, and later ideas of blindness, in ways that many companies might now find problematic. There’s no doubting the inventive artistry of the performance, though; or the intensity of its investigation of a couple relationship under stress - both from the specific pressures of disability, and from a society where, as the show’s title suggests, meeting people in real life is hard, and growing harder all the time.
Joyce McMillan It’s The Economy, Stupid! ★★★ Pleasance Dome (Venue 23) until 26 August Joe Sellman-Leava has established himself as a star of Fringe theatre, over the last decade, with shows including Labels - about his own complex identity as a mixed-race lad brought up in small-town southern England - and last year’s hit Fanboy. This year, though - with his new show about how the UK economy is failing his millennial generation - he makes two critical misjudgments. The first is to bring on stage, as a speaking character, his long-term sound, tech and design man Dylan Howells; it’s a nice idea, but it diffuses the impact of the show, while adding very little.
And the second is to try to link the story of the manifest failures of the UK’s 2024 economy - notably in housing, and decently-paid employment - to the very different tale of the failure of Joe’s parents’ shop, in the 1990s, which left the family bankrupt. The point of the comparison is that 30 years ago, there was a still a functioning social safety net for the Sellman-Leavas to fall into; council housing, adequate benefits, food on the table. Instead of focussing on one story and using the other to highlight it, though, Sellman-Leava wanders between them in increasingly fraught style, losing track of what starts out as an interesting analysis of our current economic condition, and ending up with an increasingly fragmented lament for a world gone wrong, that offers neither real insight into the causes of our decline, nor any hope of a solution.
Joyce McMillan The Greatest Musical the World Has Ever Seen by Randy Thatcher ★★★ Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33) until 25 August 21-year-old Randy Thatcher struggles with certain things like people and social situations, but he’s convinced he has written the greatest musical in the history of the world. He has entered it in a competition which he believes will reveal his talent. Meanwhile, he performs extracts from ‘Gazandi and the Mighty Cordors’ from his bedroom, acting out the scenes with sock puppets.
Twentysomething New York-based musician and composer Matt Haughey has clocked up 10 million views on social media for songs written in his bedroom. His musical-within-a-play one-man show, directed by Travis Greisler, is assured and awkwardly charming, performed in a beautifully designed college bedroom set. All the right musical moments are there: the falling-in-love song, the dad-is-proud-of-you song, the heartbreak song, though it feels like he has to rush through the second half of the story, perhaps because it has been shortened for the Fringe.
As Thatcher realises his hero, Gazandi, is a lot like him, he treads a fine line between sweet and sentimental, just coming in on the side of sweet. Susan Mansfield Pretty Delusional ★★★ The Space Triplex (Venue 38) until 24 August “It feels like dying,” Gianna Milici says. Love.
Or loving Luke, to be exact - her emotionally unavailable school friend with whom she shares numerous classes. What’s not to like, or lust after? Or sing her heart out about, as the case may be? A sweet, upbeat, coming-of-age musical, Pretty Delusional features all the requisite teenage-embarrassments Milici feels around her adult body and its innate yet unfamiliar functions. There’s the pressure to be skinnier, kinder, more adaptable.
The putting-herself-out-there, the vulnerability, the rejection. The projectile vomiting, nausea, and shame. But Milici is wonderfully ambitious and emotionally intelligent, with little patience for adolescent mind games.
There are things that she wants in this life - world domination, for starters. “Your career can’t cheat on you!” a wise relative reminds her, and she flashes an unabashed smile as the stage lights blush about her. With support from close family and friends, Milici builds her self-confidence.
The soundtrack toughens as she does - in one song, ‘Hotter than Beyoncé’, her pleasure becomes a crowd-pleaser. Wind machines play with her hair, rain falls outside the theatre somewhere, and in its final notes, the story confirms itself as one of hope, rather than one of delusion. Josephine Balfour-Oatts The Devil Went Down To Gorgie ★★ Laughing Horse @ West Port Oracle (Venue 25) until 25 August Absolutely nothing to do with Hearts relegation at the end of the 2013-14 season, this shambling horror-comedy from local genre enthusiasts Pasuz Productions is not a complete waste of time.
Initially framed as a scary story told on a team-building exercise, it quickly devolves into a series of sketch-like scenes about the possession of a young boy. There’s a couple of laughs and one properly good original idea; the priest can only exorcise the demon from the child by beating it at an age-appropriate game. The fact that this is all performed in a room convincingly mocked up as an aircraft cabin only adds to the general air of bedlam.
Rory Ford.
