While the official Edinburgh International Festival has approached the question of independence tangentially through Jacobite history (see page 50), the Fringe has dramatised Scotland’s most urgent concern more directly, with over two-dozen shows that turn in some way on the referendum.
Because the theatrical profession generally attracts more radicals than reactionaries, these performances tend to be rallies for the Yes campaign. David Hayman’s one-man play The Pitiless Storm (Assembly Rooms), written by Chris Dolan, features a veteran Labour trade unionist agonising over defection to the SNP position. Although it ultimately comes down tub-thumpingly on one side, the show – which will tour Scottish towns until the eve of the vote – electrifyingly dramatises the fight going on within the minds of the undecided.
The cheekiest contribution to the debate is Spoiling by John McCann (Traverse Theatre), which assumes a Yes vote on 18 September and imagines the day of the handover of power. Scotland’s foreign minister-elect, Fiona (Gabriel Quigley), is working on the speech that she will deliver alongside her UK opposite number, when a Scottish government official, Mark (Richard Clements), arrives, asking to check over the text. McCann entertainingly creates a scenario in which English dirty tricks are being played even after secession but attributes to Westminster a degree of Machiavellian preparation for post-independence that seems too pessimistic – although the assumption that a Yes vote might somehow be scuppered by London is revealing of the current level of distrust between the countries.
Independence dramas are trying to hit a moving target, resulting in plays that are inherently transitional and disposable. For this reason, the best work at the Traverse this year is Salmond-free, including Mark Thomas’s Cuckooed, the deserved recipient of a Fringe First Award. No doubt for economic reasons, the solo show has become Edinburgh’s default form but Thomas merges the best elements of drama and stand-up to re-enact his shocking betrayal by a fellow campaigner against the arms trade. Emma Callander’s imaginative staging includes video interviews on sliding trays pulled from filing cabinets. This intelligent morality tale starts a tour in Oxford in October, reaching London in December.
One of the few political plays looking south is Kingmaker (Pleasance Courtyard), which anticipates the resignation of David Cameron and a charismatic but shambolic London mayor’s bid to replace him as PM. One of the problems with Robert Khan’s and Tom Salinsky’s Whitehall farce is that the protagonist can’t be Boris Johnson for legal reasons – the plot involves behaviour that might shock even Bojo supporters – but any impact depends on the audience thinking constantly about Johnson.
The actor Alan Cox cleverly projects an essence of charming disaster-proneness without attempting a Boris impression but the play’s consideration of how a politician turns mistakes and scandals into proof of authenticity offers no insights that were not in Michael Cockerell’s devastating profile on BBC2 in 2013.
A strong American presence this year includes Title and Deed (Assembly Hall), a monologue by the US playwright Will Eno. The speaker in Title and Deed seems, from the rucksack with which he arrives onstage and his repeated use of phrases such as “I don’t know if you have that here”, to be some sort of tourist, although his increasing estrangement from reality suggests that he may be an alien in the extraterrestrial as well as the immigration department sense. Captivatingly played by the Irish actor Conor Lovett, this unnerving meditation on the conflicting human instincts of suspicion and sympathy finally feels like ET rewritten by Samuel Beckett.
Drawing large audiences because of the participation of the movie star Anne Archer, The Trial of Jane Fonda (Assembly Rooms) dramatises the occasion in 1988 when Fonda agreed to meet, at a Connecticut church, Vietnam veterans who were campaigning to stop her shooting a movie in their home town because of her visit to Hanoi during the war in apparent support of the enemy. Some exchanges animate the culture wars that exist in the US to this day but the conclusion – that the star and the soldiers showed different sorts of integrity – is dismayingly glib.
The oddest project is Blind Hamlet (Assembly Roxy), a production by the Actors Touring Company of a play by the Iranian writer Nassim Soleimanpour. As the lights go down, a stage manager switches on a voice recorder and places it under a microphone, which amplifies a recorded talk by Soleimanpour involving his thoughts on Shakespeare’s tragedy and tests for an eye condition that may cause blindness. His disembodied voice occasionally summons to the stage members of the audience, who are then instructed to play one of those corporate away-day games involving closing eyes and trusting others. There’s an expression about Hamlet without the prince but this is Hamlet without the Hamlet and the gimmick of an actorless play palls long before the hour is up.
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