Coffee-Table Notes

Zoo Southside Four stars    Don’t be fooled by the naked roller-skating that opens Sh!t Theatre’s latest rad-fem riot of a show. Beyond the untethered Starlight Express tribute of this freewheeling prologue, the harmonious duo of Rebecca Biscuit and Louise Mothersole who make up what is more a way of life than a theatre company serve up what is likely to be one of the most incisive political histories to grace the Edinburgh stage this month. Given the duo's own recent back story which they lay bare, the show also becomes a more personal look at what it takes for women like them to make history.   In just 75 minutes, Biscuit and Mothersole channel comedy, showtunes and obsessive fan-girl research as they go down the rabbit hole to unearth one of the lesser known, but briefly most powerful women in the world. No, not Eva Peron, the ever so slightly reimagined heroine of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s best musical, but the next Mrs Peron, Isabella.    As Sh!t T...

Pleasance Courtyard Four stars    Life’s a riot for Kelly, the messed up human dynamo at the heart of Kimberly Hart-Simpson’s emotional rollercoaster of a play which she performs herself over a breathless hour. Kelly is a nurse in a dementia home in not so sunny Rhyl, North Wales’ end of the pier holiday Mecca. The town may stink of fried onions and cheap cocktails, but for Kelly it remains a personal pleasure palace she devours like a stick of rock.    With a Tom Jones impersonator mum - her absent dad was also one, proving it’s not unusual to have such a job in Rhyl - and a selection of eccentric residents to tend to, Kelly’s life runs louder, faster and harder by the minute. When her gay best friend Amrit moves in with his new beau now he and Kelly are back from Ibiza, the duo’s disco dance diva partnership appears to be over as Kelly’s good times take a sour turn. Only life changing news of her own suggests she too might be ready to grow up and settle d...

Pleasance Courtyard Four stars    There’s a ghost in Dylan Howell’s house in this excavation of psychic history and the tricks memory can play on us to avoid the damage the past might have done. With the audience’s help, Howells is going to exorcise the bad spirits forever. On a mini building site of a set, the performer and designer proceeds to do just that in a charming and extremely clever mix of memoir, magic and a bag of shock-horror tricks more used to being applied to large scale hammy horror yarns than something so intimate.    It begins when Dylan was ten, and he was about to move into a run down cottage in an isolated village with his dad. His Dad renovates the cottage as they go, with the bathroom being in a particularly dilapidated state. Befriended by a weird kid from next door called Connor, Dylan first notices the bumps in the night when preparing for bed as all hell breaks loose beyond the paintwork, behind the shower curtain and in the mirror. When i...

Assembly Rooms Four stars   God probably isn't the answer for at least one prisoner in this electrifying new play by American writer Lev Steinberg, who at just seventeen makes a ferocious debut. Exactly what the question is remains a mystery to the four strangers thrown together in a cage after being kidnapped. None of them know why they were taken away seemingly without cause or who each other is, but with their lives on the line, conflict between them is inevitable.    Given America’s current state of play one might think Steinberg’s set-up relates to the fallout of some of the country’s more brutal invasions of civil liberties. As it is, things take a less obvious turn, as the four captives are told by those watching them that they have just 44 minutes to decide which of them is to be sacrificed for some higher cause.    As an LED clock counts down the seconds, just what that cause is exactly isn’t clear to any of them, alas, as they try to make sense of...

Summerhall Three stars   When Oscar and Ela go on a drunken bender with their pals Syd and Quinn, what starts out as a mixture of sparring and flirting in Emmeline Hartley and Jack Mullings’ new play ends up as a full on night of… well, what exactly was it? The awkward morning after the night before doesn’t provide any easy answers. Only when Oscar and Ela get trapped in a lift together do they try and work out not only what did or didn’t happen, but what should, and more significantly what very much shouldn’t have.    Hartley and Mullings navigate the post MeToo age with an incisive cut and thrust between Oscar and Ella. This has clearly been born from a lot of late night discussions that have been fed into Hartley and Mullings’ collaboration.    Carrie-Anne Ingrouille’s busy production starts out resembling some hedonistic shagfest before developing to highlight an infinitely more serious study of responsibility and accountability in one night sexual encounter...

Assembly Roxy  Three stars   Death can do funny things to people in terms of how loved ones left behind react to the grieving process. For the young woman at the heart of Emery Schaffer’s new play, her response to the demise of her seemingly loving husband Jake is to buy a tatty old bear suit which she inhabits like a second skin. As she becomes BearGirl, the woman rewinds on her and Jake’s life together, from her inglorious career as his student to them ending up together and the fallout from his loss.   For all the suit’s discomfort, it becomes a kind of unwashed security blanket to cling to, as one might wear a former lover’s left behind sweater or jacket. As BearGirl embarks on her new life alone, her recent past with Jake is brought home by a series of flashbacks, as well as various present day encounters, including one with a Dolly Parton themed fortune-teller.    BearGirl’s assorted foils are all played by Jimmy Kavanagh in Kate Stamoulis’ production for ...

Assembly Roxy Four stars   Old Krapp looks like he’s been waiting some time to have a rummage through the acquired detritus that passes as his archive in this new look at Samuel Beckett’s 1958 solo play. Originally written for Irish actor Patrick Magee, the play has survived into the twenty-first century despite technological advances that make Krapp’s endless spools look like something left over from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.    Performed here in actress Stockard Channing’s production by David Westhead, it begins with a silence worthy of John Cage before Westhead begins the elaborate business of unlocking his desk and unpeeling a banana. This becomes a mini performance by itself in a routine perfected long before Andy Warhol started unzipping the abstract.    As Krapp finally turns to the meticulously catalogued recorded accounts of his past, the interplay between recorded and live voices, the noises off and the sound of silence see the old boy rewind on wh...