EDINBURGH.- As I made my way to Scotland for this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the three-week arts showcase that finished on Monday, I felt a little apprehensive. A conspicuous number of shows were themed around psychological maladies. These included plays about grief, anxiety, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder and gambling addiction. I had thought I was going to a festival, but this sounded more like a wellness convention.
Theater geared toward raising awareness can often be underwhelming, because the message gets in the way of a good time. But “300 Paintings,” by the Australian performer Sam Kissajukian, was a pleasing exception. Kissajukian, who has bipolar disorder, quit comedy a couple of years ago, when he was in his mid-30s, to become an artist — a frying-pan-to-fire trajectory if ever there was one.
In this one-man show, he recounts, with the help of a slide show, a six-month manic streak during which he fast-tracked his way onto the art circuit through prolific productivity and business chutzpah: the delusional confidence of the unwell. Then he crashed, sought psychiatric help and got diagnosed. Kissajukian’s monologue is a whimsical delight, and the paintings aren’t bad either.
Grief narratives have been much in vogue onstage since the success of “Fleabag,” which was performed at the Fringe in 2013. “So Young,” a sentimental comedy written by the Scottish playwright Douglas Maxwell, was one of several shows about bereavement at this year’s festival.
Set in Glasgow, it centers on the conflict between two grieving people: a middle-aged widower who has just found a new, much younger girlfriend; and his dead wife’s best friend, who is affronted at how quickly he has moved on. The play foregrounds an often overlooked truth: that grief, though primarily personal, has an inherently social dimension.
The most interesting Fringe offerings tended to be more thematically ambiguous. A standout was “L’Addition,” a work of absurdist theater directed by Tim Etchells and performed by Forced Entertainment, a British experimental troupe. (The title means “The Check” in French.)
In this superb hourlong show, two performers (Bertrand Lesca and Nasi Voutsas) play a waiter and a restaurant customer. They enact a simple skit with an empty bottle: One pours a glass of wine until it overfills and spills, then apologizes and changes the tablecloth. The actors then swap roles and reenact the scene — over and over again.
Each time, the routine is subverted in some small, maddening way. The spiraling repetitions in action and dialogue recall Samuel Beckett, particularly his 1953 novel, “Watt.” At one point the waiter freezes while pouring the wine; the customer protests, and the waiter sympathizes — “It’s going everywhere, and it’s a massive problem” — but doesn’t move a muscle. The ordinary syntax of human relations is garbled, and the admixture of urgency and nonchalance produces an exquisite tension. It’s very weird, and extremely funny.
There were more Beckettian echoes in “Bellringers,” by British playwright Daisy Hall. Set in the English countryside in the distant past, its protagonists, Clement (Luke Rollason) and Aspinall (Paul Adeyefa), are sheltering in a church bell tower while a thunderstorm rages. The torrential rain has them unnerved, and, fearing an imminent apocalypse, they converse about nature, death and religion. Deftly paced, and performed with understated aplomb, “Bellringers” could be read as a climate change fable — “Godot” for the end times — but it’s more capacious and elliptical than mere allegory.
Alongside plays and musicals, the Fringe hosts other, less conventional forms of theater. I loved the self-explanatorily titled “Sex Lives of Puppets,” by the Blind Summit company. The show is structured as a series of candid, documentary-style interviews; the puppets, cartoonish yet charmingly lifelike, are skillfully animated onstage by a team of four who manipulate their bodies and do the voices.
The synergy of the hand movements with the rhythms of speech is enchanting, and unappealing real-life mannerisms become strangely adorable when performed by the puppets, like a man who idly strokes his belly while talking about sex, or another who slaps his thigh as he guffaws at his own joke.
Mark Down and Ben Keaton’s taut script couples ribaldry with moments of tenderness as the puppets show glimpses of vulnerability. One interview, in which an uptight widower describes how a new lover brought him out of himself after his wife’s death, drew a sympathetic “aw” from the audience. In another, an older gay man tells us he struggles to say “I love you” because of the repressive climate in which he grew up. “I learned not to say it, and now I can’t say it,” he says.
This is the good stuff — and wellness be damned! Themes fall in and out of fashion, but the ingredients of compelling theater don’t change all that much: technique, strong writing and a bit of heart and soul.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
