Edinburgh - Johann Hari on the theatrical indulgences of the US victim complex
In Goner at the Assembly Rooms, for one short hour - if you can suspend your disbelief - Mark Thomas's dream comes true. A president uncannily like Dubbya ends up with "a bullet stuck in his brain like a bad Elton John song". As he is rushed into ER, a nurse cries: "The president has been shot!" "Is he insured?" a doctor asks. When she nods, he cries: "Then we must do something! Quick!"
In truth, this ain't exactly sophisticated satire. It's a quick-fire, gag-every-20-seconds comedy obviously inspired by movies such as Airplane - and it has some great lines. The Bushalike says he supports capital punishment because "it was good enough for Jesus". The doctors are less concerned with saving the president than with marketing their new invention: Chemotherapy Barbie ("Pull her string and she begs for morphine").
Goner is important because it shows that Americans are ready (at least when they are in the company of sassy metropolitan foreigners) to ridicule their president and their country once again. In the wake of the cancellation of the comedian Bill Maher's programme Politically Incorrect from American TV because of his comments about 11 September, this is no small matter. Goner is happy to pick apart all of the conservative strands running through the US. Christianity proves to be a choice target. When one man, under interrogation by the FBI, cries: "I'm innocent!", a federal agent snaps: "Nobody's innocent. Eve took care of that."
The Edinburgh fringe is home this year to an intense internal debate between Americans about the nature of US society. There is a dissident, questioning, cosmopolitan America which has had to come to Scotland to find a platform. The best exponent of this - and the best stand-up in town - is Scott Capurro (also playing at the Assembly Rooms). Capurro has an intelligent left-wing viewpoint clearly influenced by Gore Vidal - he even borrows his line about being from "the United States of Amnesia". As a San Franciscan, Capurro feels almost entirely alienated from the rest of the US. He describes a recent trip to Utah, where pointing west he told a native that "San Francisco is about 50 years that way". After describing the place, he asks despairingly: "We're bombing Afghanistan for this?"
This acerbic America is also expressed in a glorious revival of Stephen Sondheim's extraordinary, subversive musical Assassins at Venue 45. (A production was due to open last September off-Broadway, but it was cancelled on the 11th, not least because one musical number has a character fantasise about flying a plane into the White House). The show gathers together in one bar all the men and women who have ever assassinated a US president. They sing that "there's another national anthem/And it's louder than you think". It is the national anthem of the assassins, the losers, the men and women screaming: "Where's my prize?" This production is staged by recent Bristol University graduates, yet it is almost of West End standard. If its directors, Esther Biddle and Leigh Thompson, aren't there in ten years' time (along with most of their cast), I'll be amazed.
Yet up against Americans brilliantly dissecting their own society there is another America here on the Fringe, and it is singing the authentic national anthem - and without an ironic smirk. I was sitting in the Gilded Balloon bar chatting to a Yale student who was starring in one of the plays concentrating on 11 September. He told me that "nobody can understand how it feels to be a New Yorker now". I agreed. To feel so safe and then discover . . . He interrupted: "It's not just that. Nobody has suffered like we suffered that day. Nobody had experienced that kind of carnage." Nobody? "Well, not since the Holocaust." Not in the Rwandan genocide? Not in the killing fields of Cambodia? Not in Vietnam? "Ah," he said. "Vietnam was awful for the soldiers there. My dad was one of them."
Several of the 11 September shows on the Fringe worry me. I don't want to single out any particular one because they are so palpably staged by people in real psychological distress. But it seems that the US-centric view espoused by the actor I met has infected several of the shows. The Fringe seems to be in danger of privileging certain pockets of American grief as more "real" or "legitimate" than others. In asserting the uniqueness of 11 September so aggressively, they seem worryingly close to downplaying the many other tragedies that have wrecked human lives. Americans remain by far the most privileged people on the planet, and many people have suffered as badly as the Americans did on 9/11 (many of them at US hands). This reality is a necessary corrective to a victim complex infecting these shows - a complex increasingly being used to justify military actions. But who can deny that this is a fascinating debate, one the Fringe is bringing to life more vividly than any other medium, in any other place? Now remind me again - who said the Fringe is worthless?
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