The Best and Worst of the Edinburgh Fringe 2016

Image: Giant, Human Zoo Theatre Company

Phoebe Moore takes a look at the highs and lows of this year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival, which at its best yielded a moving and daring production about inter-generational dynamics, and at its worst bored audiences with a poorly executed piece that badly tackled first and third wave feminism.

 

BEST: Giant by Human Zoo Theatre Company

Giant by ‘Human Zoo Theatre Company’, was everything one could want, particularly when seen at the end of a month’s box office stint at the biggest fringe festival in the world, seeing more theatre than I care to mention (not complaining)! It was winsome, intriguing, and thought-provoking, much more than I had expected from what I could recall reading about it. “A show about ‘identity’ and ‘growing up” – two worryingly clichéd themes.

From the word go, Giant was nothing short of impressive. It had by far the best set of any I had seen in the Edinburgh fringe, managing to swap consistently between a family kitchen, an office, a pub and an attic. Creative prop use included puppetry, bundled up sheet-babies (it was a ‘had to be there’ kind of thing…) and many cardboard boxes cleverly used as laptops, briefcases, or just as what they were: boxes inside the aforementioned attic.

What interested me was the play’s simple premise. It followed three generations of a family through very physical storytelling; clowning (every member of the cast had the distinctive white face with round rosy cheeks), and farcically rushed documenting of time (a quick swing dance, a ring, a rippling sheet and a bundled up ‘bundle of joy’; yet managed to brim with social observations and questions. The questions resounded particularly with generation Y. The play centres on Tommy. 22 years old, he plays the accordion (“stick with it Tommy, that comes from the heart”, advises his hipster friends) and wonders what he is going to do with his life. It doesn’t seem quite as simple as it was for his parents and grandparents: get married, get a job, have kids.

The play’s many theatrical devices seemed to take on meanings that resonated far beyond the realms of the stuffy theatre. The clownish faces epitomised imagination, one’s inner clown in a world that values efficiency and achievement. The sped-up storytelling that was used to document Tommy’s grandparents’ generation became an ironic look at how, in fact, life today is more fast paced than ever. The cardboard boxes contained the memories and stories that make up a family, that help to form identity, that make up you… “But it’s so ‘Giant’!” gasps an overwhelmed Tommy toward the end of the play.

 

WORST: Change by Acting Coach Scotland

All I could gather from a badly acted and poorly written production entitled Change was that it had an all-female cast, and was loosely inspired by the suffragette movement. For me, the most problematic element about this show was its lack of clarity. When was it set? What was its purpose? What did it want to achieve?

The play began with a group of young women seated in chairs at various points on the stage. Each girl had a moment to say their due in the spotlight before a black-out. Rather than being striking or exciting, this first scene left me with that familiar sense of dread that this was going to be an hour wasted, an hour that could probably be spent more valuably by catching up on missed sleep. Nonetheless, I persevered.

In Change, the suffragette movement of the 19th century was brought uncomfortably and questionably into the 21st century, a time when feminism is focused on issues far bigger and more varied than women’s votes and ‘the ‘anti-suffrage league’: a female-strong movement that coincided with the suffragettes and focused on crying out against the follies of other women wanting to live a life outside the home. All in all it was a slow-moving show which couldn’t seem to make up its mind whether it was set in the 19th or the 21st century, two extremely different epochs as far as feminism is concerned. A more interesting approach perhaps would be to see where feminist history is echoed in society today; while we no longer have an ‘anti-suffrage league’, there is no doubt that plenty of women are uncomfortable using the label ‘feminist’. Sadly the only element of the play that made it in anyway applicable to contemporary society were the costumes: skinny leg, patterned trousers and black pumps.

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