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Gaiety at this year’s Edinburgh Festival was in short supply, but there was gold amid the gloom
Festival: noun, a day or period of celebration; gaiety, revelry, merrymaking. adj, typical of or appropriate to a festival.
Well, that's the theory. But gaiety was in shorter supply than usual at this year's Edinburgh Festival. It was as if pessimism at the end of the new Labour boom, stasis in Iraq and the rise of those old monsters, Russia and the Tory party, had filtered existential panic back on to the stage. Stand-up provided more cheer, as the likeable Irishman David O'Doherty scooped the if.comedy prize (previously known as the Perrier Award). But even his victory played out to the sound of gunfire, his homespun show at the Stand, a dissident comedy venue, a slap in the face to the new and unloved Edinburgh Comedy Festival brand - of which this show was conspicuously not part.
But there was gold to be found amid the gloom. Even more of the Fringe's hits than usual came at the flagship venue, the Traverse. A companion piece to last year's Walworth Farce, Enda Walsh's New Electric Ballroom again explored how words imprison us, how we can be trapped within the stories we tell about ourselves. Walsh extends the idea deep into Beckett territory, introducing us to three grown-up sisters, doomed for ever to re-enact the tale of the elder two's rejection in teenage love by the Roller Royle, a local rock'n'roll hero - which humiliation has engendered a Miss Havisham-style retreat from the world.
Walsh's play confronts the little sister, Ada (Catherine Walsh), with the chance to escape in the arms of the "lumped, ugly, lonely" fishmonger Patsy. It leads to a striking climax in which Patsy has those epithets rinsed from him like brine from a fish, and is given the chance to start anew. But the patterns we establish in life are cradles as well as cocoons, says Walsh. Mikel Murfi's desperate portrait of the loser Patsy, dredging himself for the hero inside, makes for astonishing theatre, and the play is a lament for his, Ada's and our unlived lives.
In Terminus (at the Traverse), Mark O'Rowe's interlocking and rhyming monologues told the magical-realist stories of a mother and her estranged daughter, and a psychopath and his estranged soul, at loose in vicious Dublin. The play is such a masterpiece of storytelling and acting, you barely notice what little connection it has with anything outside of itself. Fall by Zinnie Harris (directed by the new Traverse supremo Dominic Hill) is about truth and reconciliation in a state recovering from civil war. Its story, in which the wife of a war criminal is invited by the government to decide whether such evildoers should be executed or spared, demands leaps of faith, but Harris's brooding inquiry into justice accumulates the power of Greek tragedy.
The show of the festival was at the Traverse studio, and rejoiced in the title Once and for all we're gonna tell you who we are so shut up and listen. This unforgettable event from the Belgian company Ontroerend Goed pitched teenage on to the stage, in all its playful, awkward, gorgeous complexity. Less a play and more a happening, it showed repeated scenes of teen love, drunkenness and too-cool-for-school petulance, picking at the scab of our own adolescence, daring us to deny that this fleeting moment is the most deeply felt of our lives.
Teens were also the stars of the National Theatre of Scotland's premiere, David Harrower's 365. Devised with the director Vicky Featherstone and choreographer Steven Hoggett, it is about young people in care, and the processes by which the state shepherds them towards independence. The drama explores an underexposed nook of society and retrieves some sorry tales of young lives abandoned and abused. In Edinburgh, however, it found itself in a vast theatre, the Playhouse, that denied us the intimacy the play demands, and its case studies were yet to complete the journey from sociology to drama.
You were more likely to experience revelry further from the centres of power. The Forest Fringe was set up to provide a cheap (for artists) and free (for audiences) refuge from the commercialisation of the Fringe. In its lovably boho theatre space, Paper Cinema screened The Night Flyer, a Maurice Sendak-style tale of a bicycling boy and his abducted sister, brought to life using monochrome paper cut-outs, a live video feed and our willing imaginations. Something similar was happening at the Fruitmarket Gallery, where visitors could wander among Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller's immersive artworks (rooms full of junk, a house made of books, mesmeric sound collages and a fiendish robo-torture machine) and enjoy the dark, dramatic scenarios they vividly suggest.
Or, for full-blown merrymaking, there were always stand-ups to turn to. David O'Doherty emptied the kooky contents of his head on to the stage, applying cheerful whimsy to the art of the text-message romance and to the experience of (almost) finding a shark in his toilet. His lo-fi, DIY musical stand-up pinched the if.comedy award from under the nose of the Welshman Rhod Gilbert, whose classic tale of an exasperated odyssey at Knutsford services elevated mouse-that-roared comedy to a sublime plane.
Elsewhere, the Americans were in the ascendant, with a chortlesome set from Sinatra's erstwhile support act John Pinette, about a fat man's love of food; a lovely comic play from the Pajama Men, two actors who populate their weird world with dozens of expertly drawn characters; and with a wonderful (but too short) offering from the Flight of the Conchords star Kristen Schaal and sidekick Kurt Braunohler, an inappropriately sexualised double act, dispensing juvenile-delinquent sketches about Pocahontas and lovers with harelips. These acts, along with the disturbo-charged Dutch maverick Hans Teeuwen, supplied the gaiety to offset all that theatrical gloom, and ensure that three weeks in Edinburgh might be considered a period of celebration after all.
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